Collapsing Structures

Since this recording was made, rubble models have been restored so the ground level debris is looking as it should.

Just a few more FX states to add (fire and flammables where indicated) and then pretty much 98% of game entities (other than trees which we can't do anything about) should be destroyable to some degree.

With visual settings turned up a notch

Night fishing

I'm in deconstruction - Structure Removal

Structures database is now installed. Currently going through the damage functions making sure structures can take enough of a beating from thirty mike mike. Materials having different properties require slightly different effects. Some entities will explode, some crumble, some give off secondary explosions. Fuel storage tanks when ignited should destroy any nearby lightweight vehicles or structures.

For testing I got make a new fast loading playground and recreated some scenes from a golden oldie, Novalogic's Comanche Maximum Overkill. Again forgive my programmer art/map design skills, they do what I need them to do.

Far too much fun. I'll get the bulk of this finished over the weekend. Some of the effects I want to achieve is a simple building collapse into dust (vertical movement into the ground masked by emitters and covered with a rubble mesh). I put in a few chimney stacks to see what I can do with those.

The gas station (we call them petrol stations or BBQ centres) is going to be a little tricky as like a lot of the more complex models in Combat Helo, they are reduced to single meshes for performance reasons. We had a discussion about blowing holes in mud compound walls and making them persistent, meaning a damaged wall will stay damaged for the duration of the campaign. What makes this tricky is that these walls are 500 instances. Internally the graphics card has one wall and draws the same geometry many times in different places. And variation in such structures has to be handled at the vertex shader level using some parameter that is unique to each of these 500 wall copies. With the Leadwerks engine you have two things you can vary, the vertex colour, and vertex alpha (one thing if you want to be pedantic). So we're going to implement a vertex shader to put 'breaches' into wall sections based on bit patterns in the mesh colour.

The idea being, rather than the literal approach in FPS games (hole at the position of missile impact) we'll adopt a tactical approach. A tactical breech will occur at a fixed location but enables a point of entry/escape in what would otherwise be static geometry. Functionally the same.

Scoring

Scoring (yes post mission scores just like in the old days, when I didn't have grey hairs) are going to be calculated from the structure values of buildings/vehicles along with realism settings and mission difficulty. With deduction for ordinance expended and mission outcome.

Also I want to finish up the player edit dialogue this weekend (dedicated to getting the closed beta ready in August).

Have a fun weekend.


*update* AD has been working on special destruction objects.

Quick update

I added ADs new vehicle database, he added some fields which will be great to use later. Some of the effects didn't scale correctly when using the data so I'm in a process of tweaking the effect elements as I come across them.

And just this minute I took delivery of the structures database so will begin adding that now. Buildings will have to collapse into a lot of dust and smoke, not so much fire. We have some rubble models that I'll try and blend in with the building destruction.

Manuals, key bindings and more

Organising the key bindings and adding missing functions. Adding these to the game manual as I go. Six down, about 100 to go....*sigh*

*update* Now up to about item 30 in the command list, new combos and logic for snapping to MPDs and back again. Much smoother and logical command key flow. Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface design serve as helpful guidelines for putting together any kind of software interface. The main ones being reduce short term memory load (by chunking), consistency in command grouping and short-cuts for advanced users.

The vehicle database is now being loaded, still to do, put in db lookups where needed (during damage updates and effect triggers). I'll finish that in the morning and hopefully we'll have the structures database ready to include soon after. That will stop things like barns and roads exploding. I promised a video of some pyrotechnics and this will go some way to make it a bit more logical. No video till I'm done with this weeks job schedule, also I want to do a more cinematic weapon cam.

Headtracking with padlock view is quite a powerful way of gunning targets, look at an object, hit padlock, line up as required and rain down some 30mm till either you overshoot or the target is destroyed.

Gobed - Game object editor

A tool to let us tweak settings in game on the fly has now been passed to AD for setting up all the necessary data for the firing range. I have a very busy week ahead putting in a number of features needed to get the game ready for the first closed beta testing.

I got the go-ahead to start updating the flight model with the current FM code from the test-bed, it feels very stable, Fred added a function to write out data for analysis, so even if the instrumentation is faulty there's some virtual flight recorder data to examine. HTR has proven to be a predictive flight model, behaviour in the flight model being later observed in a real helicopter. Looking forward to getting this bedded down. I'm sure there will be a lot of tweaking to do later.

The official web site still has a mid 2011 release date on it which I think is a little optimistic unless you consider closed beta a release (unless it escapes). Someone needs to take these dates around the back and given a good seeing to with a cricket bat.

AD proposed we call the firing range Operation Kickstart which prompted a round of YouTube viewings of the BBCs Junior Kickstart programme and the amazing antics of champion Dougie Lampkin.

Achievements - the things you didn't know

While putting some of the player recording keeping together I was debating adding achievement records. While you might think they are throw-away pop-ups, even to the point of being annoying, what you might not know is that in the console world these systems are rather sneaky ways of gathering information about player habits.

They tell a publisher how long people play games, what mode of play they prefer, how far they progress, what sort of game mechanics they adopt and much more. This data is automatically uploaded and can be mined for all kinds of information that go some way to shaping the sort of games that get made.

It's all good clean data that's of more value to the likes of SONY and Microsoft than it is for bragging rights.

Oh, I just unlocked an achievement, "Time Waster - For blogging instead of  getting on with some real work". Hope my boss doesn't see that one.

Player profiles

Following on the work to add more of the elementary game components, player profile data is loaded at launch. This stores career values like:

• Name
• Rank
• Squad patch
• Last map loaded.
• Flight time

Not much else yet. Tomorrow I'll finish off the kill counts, score etc. That needs to go into the class dealing with weapons fire I think, need to chew on that. My early diagram says player kills are registered post flight as part of the mission debrief but it's possible for the player to avoid the debrief in an open ended environment.

I stole eight US division patches (1st Cav, 1st Infatry, 2nd Infatry, 10th Mountain, 21st Cav, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne), there will be a few more to go in.

Fixed some command console issues, also I like to have the '/' slash key ready to take a command so fixed that up. Currently it's the only way to set altitude bugs till I get a working Keyboard Unit into the cockpit.

Also added some fade in/out callbacks for special effects and scene/mode transitions.

I will try and encrypt player data to prevent casual 'cheating'.