Dave got me started on the lighting system, the first results are not too bad. Instrument back-lighting is to come, we have the artwork ready. And I exaggerated the intensity of the nightlight to compensate for the ambient light. In retrospect this was not a good idea.

Lighting is controlled from a panel left, behind the power levers.

These are taken on a minimalist testing map that I use to for working on the helicopter systems.







Turning on post processing is pretty awful, way too much light, bit of tweaking to do.

Here's the panel back-lighting. Once the back-lighting is combined with the spot lights, we should have something very special.





Cheers

I assume that you destroyed the vehicles of the FLIR somehow, so your weapons are already shooting? if yes which ones?
About the light on the cockpit, as you say there is a bit too much light, but the overall feel is pretty good.

Stratos - regarding the FLIR, that is a temporary placeholder image taken from LB2 - used just for effect.

There, you can adjust it till your heart's content. There are 3 brightness knobs for instruments, dash and dome at each station as well as MPD and UFD levels. Made a nice diversion from the AGM systems.

Our lights were bluish green... Rich, I was wondering, your level of detail is great in the sim, where do you find all the other reference, do you also have the -10?

PS. Arggh, being a crewmember, those curved edges of TEDAC & MPDs are killing meeee...

Easy enough to tweak to color, I'm influenced by the movie "This Island Earth" where Cal the scientist is saved from certain death by his air-force jet turning into a refreshing mint flavoured green. I used your photos as a guide but when I was boosting the green component I hadn't done the same with red and blue.

Don't have a dash 10, don't want one, black vans and helicopters over my house if I did it's not allowed unless you're not a DoD contractor.

*edit*

I adjusted the blue intensity to match, results are much better. MPDs are easier to pick out.







Time to fix up those menus and the master arm/ground override.

Those screenshots look really good, as real as it gets.

Even the F-16/F-18 stuff is for sale online.... I don't think black vans and helicopters are coming to your house. Unless you are doing this to train Taliban, LOL!

Hi Flexman,

This all looks very good, realistic. Been following the progress for some time now, I'm really impressed. Also I've been checking out the leadwerks engine possibilities, and I must say that it seems that it's graphics engine is very powerful.

I've got some experience in modeling for computergames. I think it is one of the few modern engines that allow to do modeling/texturing in a different, more dynamic way than we've been used to. The shadowing/lighting of the engine is so powerful that one doesn't have to "paint" the lighting effects onto the textures, but instead, let the engine to it itself, in a dynamic way. Take the shiny pneumatic tubes on the right of the pilots cockpit for example: couldn't help mentioning that the shininess is painted on them as an effect, while you also could paint it a diffuse grey and assign a reflective and specular properties to it. Saves you some work, and the result is dynamic and better looking. This can be said for ALL the cockpit textures, where almost EVERY texture should have a bump map, specular map, and reflective map assigned to it.

I've been thinking about implementing this into your cockpit and I hope you don't mind if I make some suggestions:

- diffuse color map with only the base colors of the structure. That means no effects whatsoever (no scratches/smudges/shadows etc.)

- with carefully placed effects with bump maps, you can have every edge of every structure have a subtle smoothed effect on edges: hardly any edge is completely sharp.

- with reflection maps, you could add nice reflections to the glass of MFD's, instruments, but also canopy glass, and even shiny metal structures. You could add subtle scratches to the surface with the bump map (take a look at LOMAC's canopies for example).

- with specular maps you could add different amounts of shine to all the surfaces. Applied carefully this simulates dynamically lighted smudges.

When you combine these properties with the self shadowing of the engine and the screen spaced ambient occlusion, you've got a entirely dynamically painted virtual cockpit.

Just my 2 cents Keep up the excellent work.

And about half a dozen frames per second, if you're lucky.

Our pit model is constructed of close to 40,000 polys with somewhere in the region of 450 separate objects. It's a heavy burden upon the engine. I understand the techniques you discussed would make the pit model look shiny, bumpy, reflective and whatnot, but it would be totally unfeasible to render it in that way. We also have to bare in mind that the graphical look we're going for is not ultra-modern, but retro and 90's.

Final point I'd like to make is that while using the techniques discussed, we would have something that looks more aesthetically pleasing, it would almost definitely look less realistic. Take a look at the LOMAC/DCS series for an example of how pits are 'done in the sim world'. Photo-textures galore.

Cheers

Lookin' good, guys!

Just a few more to show. I've walked around the aircraft in "Ground Crew" mode, this is activated by approaching the aircraft on foot, when close enough you see options to either mount or arm the helicopter.

Choosing to arming the helicopter places you into the crew mode. Here I've selected all the pylons and click loaded AGMs. They get applied to the helicopter entity's Stores so you'll be able to arm each other's choppers or your own before mounting up.

Before, we've talked about having cooldown timers to re-arm and refuel, adding elements that only serve to slowdown playing might not be a good idea.

Here I've tooled up with a heavy loadout, 8 LHFs and 8 RHFs. I will add a round hat to the Hellfire gfx.



And looking over the pilots right shoulder...



A quick flight in the test area to check nothing is visually broken, had to add some lights to the helipad object for night flying.

It's a beautiful thing when a plan comes together.

Night shots...

Sorry to get a bit off-topic, but you wouldn't happen to have a photo/drawing of the search light (when extended) would you?

Cheers

I'll look AD, sorry for the late response, I upgraded the computer, so I was getting it back to shape.

Hi Flexman and AD,

Have to say this is looking superb!! Well done so far, keep up the good work.

I'm currently building a pit based on the comanche in EECH. If I had spotted you sim before I started I would have been tempted to wait and use yours.

Is it possible (along with the other 64 million things you still have to do) to include some sort of data export for the pit builders out there ? Basically indicator lamps, MFDs, that sort of stuff.

Having waited around 10 years to find a chopper sim that exported data, I know that pit builders tend to be ignored by program developers. I contacted both Raworworks and Novalogic in the past to ask for this but didn't even get a reply.

Anyway, keep doing what you're doing ..... it's great!!

Cheers,

Andy

Andy, it's funny you should ask about data export. I just made a test DLL that I sent a simple structure to, just to see how it works for external flight model control. What we need to do is work out what data you are going to want and format. The aircraft State information as is might not be good for pits. You should start a thread on data export with the sort of things you need.

We don't have any plans to do a Commanche though.

I better be able to do this...

Cool photo! Really nice to spot the moon! :P I was wondering as I saw the virtual cockpit, where this machine have the circuit breakers?

Amazing light mapping of the virtual cockpit!

Regards.