Bi-annual update, I'm almost joking. (title was: Hell hath no Fury...)

"Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet."

Just to be clear, currently my personal priorities are family, work, house and combat-helo (in that order). I do apologize for that but that's the way it has to be until such time I'm freed from another urgent project (which has a firm drop-dead date in October).

The good news is, after all this time I'm still stoked when I execute Combat-Helo, it's always a treat when I get time to sit down and tinker with it. So what's been happening?

Recently I completed running auditions for the gunnery range crew and range officer voices; this turned out better than expected. The samples I've put in into the game already greatly contribute to the experience, I thank those who downloaded the script samples I put up on Google+ and sent in samples. Once I've got the cockpit audio triggers added I'll put up a new video with some of the neat new camera footage (more on that in a sec). I hate posting blog updates without anything interesting to show or talk about.

In this blog update I wanted to surprise everyone with fully working Hellfire code and a video to go with it. The plan was to finish this feature for a recent flight-sim show. A family health emergency meant all of that had to be cancelled, hotel rooms and everything. But here's a tantalizing screen-shot of some of it...(with DOF and totally unrealistic rocket motor plume) I don't normally turn on all the fancy post-effects for screen-shots but I reckon you chaps deserve it.

Adding seasonal effects

 

Get ready for a white-out

The Hellfire cam is a nice addition (added totally for the purpose of making cool video). It's dynamic in that does the whole wobble and tries to frame two entities in context (borrowing code from the flypast and internal MFD framing view).

As for the Apache's primary weapon system, the Hellfire missile, this can hit targets beyond the game-engine's current visual range (oh for a dedicated and scale-able terrain engine) which only highlights the problem we've always had with terrain scale. I can fix it but it means a huge delay on top of something that's already delayed. Not going to do that.

The Apache needs three new MFD functions to implement PFZs and some control changes for the Hellfires. Nothing challenging, just man-hours. One page was to be a laser-code page, however on closer inspection of the video footage this turned out to be a "shot-list" (which isn't useful except to add to flavour to the aircraft).

I've had time to tweak some of the visuals and add Afghan grasses from Pure3D which blend well with the desert textures. The game menus are awaiting a nice makeover. The design of the flight-line interface will really pop and should be a great blend of the thematic modern 3D gui and old-school multi-menu using existing base assets.

When will it be ready? When it's polished enough to release (fixed glaring controller bugs, training missions and speech added, not to mention the stupid Leadwerks/Newton joint stiffness problem which I can't fix - I don't know how but it's vital).

As usual, all hate mail, suggestions and offers of large sums of money to pay for dental work can be submitted in the comments below.

Update - This weekend I implemented some environment updates. Dynamic vegetation and snow effects. Thanks to Shadmar's mesh shader modification it's possible to apply gradual snow coverage to a material. Since the environment class also supplies atmospheric pressure and temperature values to the flight model, this should translate into variable handling characteristics depending on weather conditions as well as some visual variation for gameplay. Should be fairly easy to modify the FLIR shader to compensate for the snow coverage too.