Gamenavigator (ru) press

Thanks to "GrViper", bit of Russian press coverage courtesy of "Game Navigator". I think I like the intro about raining  fire and brimestone? I had to have a Russian friend in Siberia read it out to me over Teamspeak after which he asked, "so you're interested in flight simulation then?" 

Work update

Last night I added the waypoint/navigation system which is rudimentary but has the needed functions for other bits of code to insert them into an aircrafts avionics. It's a linked list with some methods for management and selection.  Once the HMD and MFD gets the steering cues for the current waypoint it should make it easier to navigate around our game theater.

Also I worked on the flight path vector which is a little confusing since it's 'virtualised' in the helmet sight (adopts real world position regardless of your head rotation), but the artifical horizon is not.

How *I* currently made it work (which is slightly different from how it will finish) is a magnitude of vertical speed and horizontal displacement (sideslip) which is how I think it works in a 2D format for MPDs (the little square screens in the cockpit). For the HMD virtualised mode it's a matter of using angular velocities (HeloBodyOmega) to estimate where the nose is going to be in 3D space and add the pilots view position and rotation. 

Fred put it more simply, offset from nose = angular velocity * coefficient etc. Well the devil is in the detail :) working out what the etc. is and doing it in the right order.

Flight path vector - circled

Nav symbology will be done today. I'd like to thank Toshiba for the Qosmio X300, the most ugly laptop ever made but certainly a powerful machine.

Little update on work - flight model mk2

Spending time working on my laptop here, which now has some reliable memory from Kingston has proved to be a fantastic little work platform for developing with Leadwerks.

The FFD or Free flight dynamics physics engine is still a little rough around the edges for putting into Combat-Helo proper so I'm working on a small test platform which hooks into the Leadwerks entity update callback and calls the FFD update.

I'm not sure if this is a good method of doing it, FFD is just a flight model and doesn't handle ground collisions. Originally intended for Microsoft Flight Simulator it releases control when the object is on the ground. Which serves me well, switching over to Newton physics at that point.

I've been going through correcting some type assignments and now the FFD engine seems to be working except for some unexplained force in one direction so I'll have to go through it with Fred and see if we can't find out what's up with that.

Thanks for all the offers and suggestions with regard to my dead motherboard (it truly was gone).

Not a good sign - drive IO failiure

Another disaster strikes, PC wont boot at all. Strange thing happens on the BIOS screen, the moment any attempt to detect any drives (and I tried a few different drives that I know were fine), a bright underscore character appears under the circled comma (picture above).

So apart from my laptop I'm now without a working PC and no means to fix it atm :/


*update*

HDD controller on the board seems to be kaput. So until I can afford a new one don't expect any updates from me in a while :/

Out of the blue a nice fella from Foxconn has offered some help sorting out my hardware needs. I'd like to extend a big thank you to him and Foxconn.

So with any luck we'll be un and running again soon.

HMD flight symbology

More flight symbology added today. Raining almost non-stop and my cars wiper motor has failed, so wasn't going anywhere.

We added a couple of items that make it possible to do some precise flying.

• Velocity Vector
• Acceleration Cue

The Velocity Vector is the blob on the stick that originates from the cross in the centre of the HMD. This is a representation of the direction and speed of your aircraft. Think of these as "top down" views with your aircraft in the middle, forwards movement is up, sideslip left and right. It's scaled so that the top of the HMD (below the heading tape) represents 60 knots. This scale changes depending on the mode but for now I'll stick to the TRANS (transition) which is the most used.


Floating around the end of the "stick" is a circle, that's the Acceleration Cue which shows your helicopters acceleration. Generally the blob on the stick will steer towards the Acceleration Cue as you manoeuvre the aircraft.

Using these cues it's possible to perform some precision flying and arrest unintended movement before it becomes a problem. Learning how to read these will improve slow speed manoeuvres approaches and landings.

I also changed the rate of climb indicator to a solid pointer, slip ball is currently being added. And basic waypoints and steering cues will probably be done this weekend. Especially if the weather is still lousy.

HMD virtual symbology

HMD = Helmet Mounted Display

Remember when Virtual Reality was going to be the next big thing? Seems odd having to re-create something virtual in a game that is virtual, the modern Apache has evolved a bit since the late 1990s. Being able to display in the pilots 3D monocle (yes that's a joke) a lot of data to the crew about targets hidden behind objects, terrain contours. These 'virtual' items are matched 1:1 with the crews head movement unlike a lot of the symbology that is static.

The first one we're going to look at is the "head-tracker". This is a broken diamond that represent the nose of your aircraft. As you look left you should see the diamond maintain a relative position to the nose of the helicopter. For give my "Novalogic" terrain map.

I had a bugger of a time getting the function to match up to the outside world until I worked out I was missing the aspect ratio of the window (the HUD has a scale factor too in case it's too big or small for your resolution). We're ready to add the waypoint indicators and LOAL/LOBL missile constraint boxes. The flight path indicator is another one, that represents the position of the aircraft in (I think) one second? Have to check my notes on that.

You might see some alerts on the UFD that shouldn't be there, as always it's not final and I know about them.

The cockpit seems slightly offset from the absolute outside world position, now the crew does seem to sit off axis but I'm checking this out. The camera positions are absolute and bang on the X axis zero line of the aircraft and not directly centred on the crew seats. It looks a bit odd otherwise. Looking into that anyway.

*update*

I've corrected the head tracker so it now sits 4.5 degrees below the nose (4.5 is the angle our Apache sits on its current undercart). On flat and level ground, if you line up your head so your LOS reticule (the cross) is in the middle of the head tracker (the broken diamond) you should be looking level with the horizon and along the nose of the aircraft. And you can see this in the above screenshot. Compare that to yesterdays screenshots (above) where the head tracker is at zero degrees elevation and above the horizon.

Mobile Innovators of Tomorrow

It's a sentence I pulled out of context from the recent Unity newsletter. It relates to a Mobile Generation Education Project, a project with a $250k giveaway to help students become the mobile innovators of tomorrow.

Now, when I was a student, we didn't have mobile phones, or the world wide web. And if we did, we'd have moved onto something else by now. Teachers point out that 60% of the jobs their students end up doing haven't been invented yet. I helped develop Risk Assessment software used by Walmart among others, five years later it's old technology. Everything moves so fast in this information age and it's accelerating.

I wonder how much of this social web technology that is perceived to have permanence will be around in ten years or even five. I'm starting to see an effect that could be best described as Dawinism applied to digital data, a process of selection that results in the useful data being retained (at least higher up the search tree) and copied. And this process snowballing with an ever increasing amount of new data.

With amazing concepts of collective information gathering such as Seadragon and Photosynth on the horizon, any guesses as to what the future holds in information mining are just that. If you don't know what Photosynth is then check the link and prepare to have your mind blown by possibilities of this and other forms of data.

It doesn't take academics to come up with these kinds of ways of looking at data, it takes a creative (and ever so clever) mind. Picasso said everyone is born an artist until it's taught out of them.

Right, that killed 10 minutes. I wonder if anyone will be referencing this blog entry when I'm gone from this world. I expect the URLs will have long since died :)

ENG rebuilt

Been pretty ill this last week, progress has been sporadic. I took time out to rebuild the engine code so it's now the same for all Apaches, AI and player alike.

Pilot feedback from screen-shots and videos also allowed me to rebuild the whole engine start-up and ENG display page. Automatically switches to in-flight mode. Things blink, change colour, are boxed appropriately. Couple of bits left to do, the biggest headache was dealing with all the fiddly scale changes and adding new code to simulate power transfer which needs some attention. Here's the page with some values thrown in to show some extremes. The whole thing is worthy of a tutorial video sometime.

ENG page showing near max ranges

Still have some parts to add to the engine simulation, oil, temp. Rotor speed and torque needs values from the new flight model to work properly but essentially it's just polling values from the helicopters state. Oh another thing I didn't put back in, the actual transient timers, these are counters that show how long you're flying outside of normal parameters which can shorten component life or lead to failure.

The new alert system which I also had to overhaul is ready to drop the betty samples in en-mass.

Will tidy this up tomorrow, look at where we are with the new flight model and see about the Leadwerks 2.40 engine upgrade. The PHY situation is not bad as I thought since we're not using LE for vehicle physics.

Insert usual disclaimer about debug bits and bobs on any images.

*update*

The new MPD functions seem to scale reasonably well across resolutions (the point of switching to vectors for everything).

MPDs at 320x320 low res

MPDs at 1024x1024, smoother edges,
everything in place