New guys and the sprint continues

New Focus

Waaaaaaaaaaaay back at the start of this project we promised a kind of game that was Longbow 2 with trees. Between then and now that goal mutated to the point where it almost forgotten. Word of advice, nail your mission statements to the wall. If you ever loose focus it's there in front of you.

I'm still trying to figure out how to make a gunnery range fun and failing. I can create a set-piece, and ultimately that's all it feels like it is. Other than learning how to operate sensors and weapon systems, as a game it's not thrilling me yet. It's educational to a point but on the whole Farming Simulators have more grab value. We can do interesting things, it's just finding that right approach using what resources we have. A comment was made about how LB2 had real "pucker factor" as you never knew what was on the other-side of a hill. And that pretty much nails where we need to go with Gunnery. As if I'd forgotten. Well....I had. To this end we will add point to point exercises to our existing range map then later we will offer our Herat map populated with static enemy armor and SAMs.

New Guys

The team has expanded thanks to the contributions of Sérgio and Mack. Sérgio takes on the role of webméister and social media guru due to his experience and infectious enthusiasm (not to mention blunt honesty which is welcome reality-check).

Mack is better known for being one of the more awesome contributors in the classic Leadwerks dev scene. He's been reviewing some of my code and offering a shoulder to cry on every-time I hit another engine related brick-wall. Welcome aboard chaps.

Together with Fred, Dave and myself we've got a good crew with drive, honesty and commitment to help get us where we want to be. And even beyond that.

New Stuff Wanted

I've identified a couple of additional model assets we need:

• SA-10 launch vehicle and clam shell antenna.
• Hospital Tent

Range script amendments are in progress. More fixes this week.

I've partially re-built the range map using GROME just so I can bake experimental color maps for the Leadwerks terrain base layer. This is an attempt to add variation and color tone. Dave pretty much did an awesome job with the tools at hand and seriously hard to improve upon. Roads have been a major PITA since Leadwerks road objects are a very simple implementation that only work on tiny maps. They rebuild at run-time during a Leadwerks Update() using a script which results in a 90% drop in performance until they are complete. Ideally we want to save these out as meshes instead of re-building them, this is how we currently implement roads, as exported meshes. Very fast and performance friendly. It's a trade-off between speed and aesthetics. The goal is to keep the FPS between 30 and 60 on a middle of the range gaming PC.

Fred is lending his flight dynamics skills to re-factor the flight model code. Hellfires are getting a wep page make-over.

Not so new Screen-Shots

Gratuitous screen-shots shown on Google+ earlier follow:

The CH-47D is back as a prop

Apache spawning points on the base

Hey it's virtual Google Glass. ReadyTime not yet used.

I DoF my hat to you sir!

In need of some re-design work

Fire in the hold! Literally

I got a mug just like that. Maybe you can too in the near future ;)

Till next week....(additional updates may appear here)