Worklog for Chroma
Ghost Rocket Flight Engine
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I purchased Particle Candy about a week ago and now I've god some nice
smoke and fire effects. It's also working well for flak bursts. I've
tweaked the lens flare a bit but still need to make proper flare
textures. I've only got about 4-5 things left before I can do a
multiplayer alpha test. -choose a network module -get the landing gear physics worked out -bullet and damage code -make a decent desert area for combat [Core2D][Sprite][MaxVerlet] |
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Last night I got a couple of things done. I snagged Rob's Fast Hud
routine from the archives. It works great and is pixel perfect (as far
as I can tell). I also utilized his lens flare code from the archives
too. It works a treat when combined with his hud routines. Getting the hud working inspired me to create an altitude gauge. I thought inkscape would be limiting but I'm finding it's on par with PSP9 and actually allows me to create things incredibly faster. You might think vector art isn't a good match for a flight sim but there's a Blur attribute for each vector piece so you can smooth out the straight edges. Give Inkscape a try, you might be surprised. What I really need to do is get a world creation pipeline finalized. Right now I'm taking real geographic elevation data and converting it into terrain (thanks to all Krischan's hard work on BlitzTiles). Which will work really well if I wanted to map out a real battle that took place in for instance, Metz, Belgium. That would also allow me to recreate actual combat missions straight out of history (which would also be a good selling point). As for the effects, I'm looking into all kinds of solutions. I've been watching old WWII air combat videos on youtube and studing how the bullets tracers look. I really want to capture realistic gun firing visuals. And explosions. I've also been thinking about actually deforming the terrain when a bomb is dropped. That way you can crater out the enemies airfield and it will stay like that. That'd make defending the base even more important (AA guns). Speaking of AA guns, like how the shell explodes and the smoke expands. Things like that that will really put a sense of danger in the game. As for the terrain, the game will be played on one 10K x 10K meter terrain. I'm leaving the terrain_quality setting on 32 for right now (which is very low poly). I still haven't incorporated the scenegraph stuff but will hopfully get to it next week or so. So much to do. For now I'm just working on the hud and lens flare. The lens flare will meld NICELY with Krischan's sky in BlitzTiles. Until next time. Chroma [Core2D][Sprite][MaxVerlet] |
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Well I finished the Server side of GNet for BMax. When you start the
dedicated server, it adds your server to the blitzbasic.com BlitzNet
page. Now to just write the client portion where you perform a server query and retrieve the list of servers. Gonna have to do that tomorrow as I'm beat. Oh, I put the GNet thing in the code archives. Next on the list. Incorporate the scenegraph stuff into blitztiles and also use it to limit collision checking. I only need to check collision on the segment of ground that the jet is directly over. And since the terrain is split into segments and each of those meshes is stored in a 2 dimensional array...I just get my x,z position and store it...and then do a one time check to either enable collision. THen if the segment i'm on changes then I do another switcheroo with collision. [Core2D][Sprite][MaxVerlet] |
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I'm using MaxGUI as the vessel to make this happen. If you do a simple
loop and use PollEvent(), the framerate is outrageous. To the point to
where trying to use delta time is nuts cuz the frames are so fast. This is gonna work well and provide a nice sleek interface and also lightning speed. The speed was never really a problem though because each client will spawn their own thread upon connection. Hopefully I'll have something in the next couple of days. I'm dying to get a multiplayer version of the flight engine up and running. I've also reworked Mark's GNET sample code to work with bmax. So the flight engine server will be available from the blitzbasic site. [Core2D][Sprite][MaxVerlet] |