Joined: Jan 2001 Posts: 2,477HomeFries
Air Dominance Project
HomeFries
Air Dominance Project
Member
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 2,477
He's still around, Mike. He spends a lot of time in Community Hall.
-Home Fries
"Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty." - Robert A. Heinlein
The average naval aviator, despite the sometimes swaggering exterior, is very much capable of such feelings as love, affection, intimacy, and caring. These feelings just don't involve anyone else.
Thanks. It's utterly tragic to see that the F-19 project has taken a back seat to the pursuit of physical health and going to concerts with the wife. Some people just can't get their priorities right.
Is there still interest in this? I ask because i have been prototyping a remake of F117 Stealth Fighter by Microprose, and i want to emphasize the radar/stealth gameplay. Plus i want to preserve the look of the original. This is a small preview:
So I've been fiddling with this a bit more and I think it's a feasible effort to pull off. I'd still be super happy if one or more other interested parties were to join in. ATM I'm still working on the terrain since there's a specific look (i.e. that of the original game) I'm trying to achieve. I'm also looking into procedurally generating roads and cities. Making this (and especially things like runways) work with the procedural terrain is a bit tricky
You'll notice that the scale of the terrain is still a bit off, and thus it's difficult to find enough room for a runway. But I'm getting there slowly!
I always loved that effect that was caused by the fact that old DOS games couldn't display sub-pixel lights very well due to lack of interpolation and AA, so they always kept a minimum size:
I got the scale to where I want it, now it's time to think about some procedural roads, buildings and associated lights. And of course SAM sites. Then I'll look at the stealth meter and associated gameplay. Shooting back is probably gonna come much later down the road.
I spent today working on the SAM missiles. In line with trying to keep things to low-poly visuals (and to make things easy to render on weaker machines), I used a vertex based smoke trail. Yes I know this is not realistic, especially the smoke continuing after the initial boost phase. I'm thinking this is something for a future realism setting in the options...
I've started work on the whole radar side of things. It's a mix between a little bit of realism and a little bit of accessibility. Each radar has two components, a detection radar and a tracking radar (there's also an option for just a general surveillance radar, and radar can be put on missiles or missiles can be command guided)
Entering the detection range of a radar makes it possible for it to detect you, if your detection factor (a mix between your aircraft's cross section by type, your attitude and altitude, gear and bay door status, etc) is above a certain threshold. Once you go over that threshold, you are detected and your position will (in the future) cause the nearby airbases to react and scramble fighters to your last reported position.
The idea is that if you are not detected, you can approach the radar further (head on for pulse radar, perpendicular for doppler radar) and nobody will notice you. But if you ARE detected, and you enter the radar's tracking range, then it will start illuminating you with a tracking beam. Command guided SAMs will need to have tracking lock to be able to launch missiles at you. At the moment that's all I've implemented so far, in the future it will be possible for SAMs to launch missiles at you without tracking, provided the missile has its own radar system.
Once you are being tracked, there's a minimum detectionFactor threshold which will break the tracking lock. Basically either going out of range, or flying low, or otherwise keeping your emissions below a certain threshold will break the tracking lock.
I haven't implemented the detectionFactor calculation or the aircraft's own visibility factor yet, which means at the moment your altitude and roll/pitch angle don't matter. But they will in the future!
What I have implemented so far is a generic radar system that can be attached to SAM Radars, SAM vehicles, airplanes and missiles, as well as the whole RWR audio cue system. Note that the models are all placeholders. Also the SAM site doesn't do launch decisions yet, I have to figure out some launch decision parameters that are reasonable to simulate.
Missile launchers can now rotate towards the target, and will only fire once the angle difference is within a configurable limit. Still need to implement proximity fuzes so that missiles detonate even when not achieving a direct hit.
In the Missile Test video it looks like the smoke is instantiating at the base of the flame. If it's not a hassle you might want to try having it start at the base of the missile/top of the flame so that it follows the missile better during pitch/heading changes.
For a proxy fuse I think what I did was have it go off once it stopped getting closer to the target. It's a fast check, easy to store the last distance value and still allows for a direct hit.
Roger that on the smoke trail and fuze, completely agree. Suffice to say there's lots of room for improvement
Here's some progress for today: A simple FLIR system with automatic FOV. Of course a realism setting with manual slew and zoom is very much possible. I don't have a good way to render thermal highlights per camera yet, been playing with some stuff but nothing worked satisfactory yet. But I'll figure this out.