Another art-dev diary update

Updates to the green-zones, incremental improvements to the billboards, painting 'shadow' under vegetation.
Dev-diary update at SimHQ

It's looking great considering how much detail we can't use. Currently we can't use the 2.32 engine due to lack of LOD distance control, and loading the levels with all the vegetation takes three times as long in the new version due to the extra processing required for veg culling. The detail in our production level map shows little performance difference between versions. Upgrading to a new version of the engine is becoming less attractive from a performance viewpoint. Which seems a bit silly but there you go.

In the background we have started preliminary design work on an all new rendering system, not for Combat-Helo but for a later project (again simulator related). This will incorporating object streaming and allow for very large terrains. This work isn't interfering with Combat-Helo, there will be no unnecessary delays in production.

I'm currently working on aircraft data import, the part that takes a data-file (profile) of an aircraft (helicopter, fixed wing, hot-air balloon etc) and builds an instance of a class that tells it how it flies. Our FFD (Free Flight Dynamics, or Freds Fantastic DLL) class is pretty flexible, a specialist physics engine of it's own.

One of the more interesting features are the virtual helicopter controls. Your control inputs are sent to "virtual controls" which then have any necessary trim by AI/AFCS or other input shaping applied. The virtual cyclic can be set to match throw of your actual joystick, you set the ratio of your joystick to that of a full size 70cm cyclic. So if you're using a 20 cm tall stick, setting the joystick length to a value of 20 will correct the input as if you have a 70cm floor standing cyclic. It uses a non-linear function to still give you 100% cyclic throw (shaped after 20% so you can still apply fine control inputs).

We'll be discussing the Auto Trim feature at a later date. It's so simple most pilots will never know it's there.

Flight modelling, a modular approach

I can't talk about the details much as it's proprietary code. Helicopters have been (inaccurately) described as thousands of moving parts flying in lose formation. Mathematically a helicopter is thousands of interactions flying in loose formation. For Combat-Helo and future simulations we're assembling a modular version of what we call FFD (FreeFlight Dynamics), a library based on definitive engineering texts on how helicopters fly through air. Texts such as Bramwell's Helicopter Dynamics and Wayne's Helicopter Theory are the staple of many an engineer.

FFD is the physics part of HTR, a freely available module for Flight Simulator X. HTR stands for Helicopter Total Realism, conceived and developed over a period of two years by Fred Naar and fine tuned by input from real helicopter pilots.

At the core of FFD library is an ingenious and elegant approach that is easy to expand and simplify. Potentially capable of handling different types of power-plant, flight control systems and rotor configurations without straying from the principles of rotor-dynamics. It has a big future as middle-ware, not being tied to any particular 3D engine and totally independent makes it portable, I can compile this on the Mac. Future versions will handle fixed wing dynamics and possibly other vehicle types.

I'm still on the conversion stage but progress on FFD for Combat-Helo is going smoothly.

In other news, just ordered another 1TB of NAS. every backup is close to 0.3Gb. And a Corsair CPU Watercooler is on it's way to protect my CPU from heat-exhaustion.

Did another job search today, bit pathetic that nobody seems interested in hiring, even for fairly trivial IT support work I don't seem able to get a bite. Can't complain though, the weather is good.