Meanwhile in Comknat-Helo...colouring update for Mossie...
In other news
Caught this video a few days ago but made it to the BBC today courtesy of Military.com
A demonstration of the dangers of thin mountain air in Afghanistan. Someone should check oxygen levels and how it can effect judgement at those altitudes. Performing a "return-to-target" turn in low density air.
Struggling to find some progress to demo, the past week has been picking up threads and licking Combat-Helo back into shape with a HTR flight model update and repairs from my aggressive (frantic?) debugging sessions from a while back (mostly sorted now). Almost done with the HTR update, some small things came out while doing it which I might as well share.
During a recent visit into the attic to dig out research material I came upon some of the more interesting clippings from World Air Power and assorted journals. Including one glossy sales leaflet from Boeing which I've scanned in and posted below (showing rear page). Bypassing the somewhat aggressive tone, if you examine the "Baseline Performance Specification" table it does illustrate the effect of temperature on performance. It's worth noting that published data like this varied greatly especially after upgrades to engines and rotor system. This leaflet from an air-show is a little old.
One of the cool aspects Helicopter Total Realism (HTR) for FSX is it enables pilots to tweak and test how their helicopter flies in a simple manner. For example
The dynamics of each helicopter are edited easily enough with HTR by changing values in the .CFG file that lives in each helicopters "dynamics" directory. As this file is likely to updated at our end and therefore updated during any pushed game update it was prudent to add a check for a "aircraft_user.cfg" file so any edits should be saved into this file which should remain untouched. Good news if you want to plug in WHA-64 specs.
It should be possible to hot-swap between the two in game via the chat/command console to make comparisons.
A quick shout out to "Pixel Perfect" who has been working on his own flavour of lip-sync in Leadwerks (Facial animation test) which I think would be a really nice touch for our crewmen and seems pretty simple enough once you have the datafile containing all the phonemes and timing data. It does require some extra bones in the heads (Leadwerks does bone animation not vertex). That hard part I think is sorting out the model conversion but the concept seems to work. And it has to be slightly better than flapping heads. Although I'll have to run the details past Dave since it's his dept. see if we can't shoehorn that into the roadmap somewhere.
And now, from Fort Rucker a sweet introduction film (and rare in that it's been encoded in HD)
United States Army Presents: Sikorsky H-19 Helicopter Flight Training (30mins)
Parting Shot
Thanks for the feedback on last weeks video, the mini-tutorial on using the KBU Keyboard Unit (I keep wanting to type Unity which is another 3D engine I use from time to time). I've since found FOUR functions for it, the altitude bugs low and high, manual range input and .... barometric pressure. Which is right next to the bug settings. See the default pressure of 29.92 which represent inches of mercury inHg at sea level. You shouldn't need to set this at all as boarding the aircraft sets the value to the ambient pressure outside (we use the standard atmospheric model in Combat-Helo).
Also in the video I set the high bug to 3,000 feet. I realised a couple of days later that this setting is for the RADAR altimeter....and at what altitude does the radar alt disappear? (AH64 trivia question there for you Janes junkies) Answer, about half that. So 3,000 didn't make a lot of sense however if you want to enter silly values you can. I decided to leave it unless I find data that says otherwise.
Just a short post since I'm busy being pulled in a dozen different directions; I got roped into helping someone create a short health and safety film, drafting a project proposal, raising finances and even managed to fix a long standing bug in Combat-Helo. Now the sensors, line of sight and all that guff is now WORKING again, Hooray. A quick background on that, an engine update needed to fix some occlusion issues slightly changed the Model hierarchy in a subtle way that changed how actual filenames of models were retrieved, long story short, they no longer matched the ones in the vehicle database as they had "lod1" suffixed to everything . But hey it was a quick fix once traced, I digress as usual.
Talented Paolo, creator of many a fine mascot has been working on some fictional nose-art and patches for the squad mascot in Combat-Helo. We knew we wanted it to feature a mosquito, the mosquito is the nickname allegedly given to the AH-64D by Taliban forces. Incidentally it was also the aircraft my father was attached to during World War II so I felt it had a double meaning.
The character will be visible on squad patches and eventually be available as nose-art.
"Mossie" copyright 2012 Paolo Pomes
Below is an earlier draft of "Mossie" to help decide on nose style, the nose later became the Apache's signature Bushmaster cannon.
Please post your thoughts and comments on "mossie", suggestions for what he can hold in his left hand are invited.
*edit*
Finished adding additional features of the KBU, namely auto pop-up and closure of the unit when you click on an MPD function that requires entry; setting hi and lo bug. And manual range entry. Now comes complete with blinky cursor and key highlight when you move the mouse over the keys. All command entries are pushed back into the TAvionics message handler, there's an optional message history buffer (currently inactive).
