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[Stainless]

Yes, the main reason I wanted to add this code was so you had visual cues for wind speed and direction.

I need guidance on the java side to make it easy to add the animation, then I will publish this tool and all of you can play with it.

[Pursuivant]

Would it be easily possible to link to other physical elements in the game, like water movement, gravity, or "X sort of object at Y location"? Also, if If the animator supports animated textures that brings an entirely new dimension to ground objects: things that change color, pattern, or light intensity. Lighthouses, stoplights, blinking lights, outdoor movie screens, neon billboards, airfield runway control lights and glide angle landing aids.

The combinations allow players to easily program:

* Buoys or floating docks which rock on the waves or which follow river currents.

* Floating debris, dye, or oil patches which move with wind and waves.

* Objects that slowly sink into water.

* Waterfalls, dams, and spillways, landslides & avalanches, buildings which visibly collapse when destroyed.

* More realistic parachute/drogue behavior (e.g., the possibility that parachutes can tear, tangle, burn, or spill their air).

* Falling bundles of "Window."

* Radar dishes and similar devices which track a particular aircraft's movement.

* Visible waypoint or mission objective markers which appear or vanish when the player achieves some goal. (For example, Rise of Flight has training missions where you have to fly through giant artificial rings in the sky which change color once you've gone through them.)

More realistically, you could have flares or fires on the ground which are extinguished when a player achieves some objective or just rolls past them on a takeoff or landing run. (Great for covert SOE/OSS missions where temporary airfield lights only go on when the player's plane gets near and which are extinguished immediately after the plane passes them on landing.)

* Animated landing signal officers aboard aircraft carriers who give you correct paddle/light signals based on your behavior during the landing approach. Animated ground crew who do things like pull chocks away, ride on the aircraft's wing to guide it during taxi, start engines (either manually or with a Huck starter), or cheer you as you take off or land. Animated aircrew who physically move or perform some action on your command.

* Herds of animals which panic and run when an aircraft gets too close. Flocks of birds which respond to aircraft movement. People who run for cover when an aircraft gets too close!

[Stainless]

I can do most of them.

I can see places in the java code that expose a lot of the variables I would need to change. So as far as the engine goes, it can be done.

I am happy to right a load of animators that can be attached to objects, BUT I need a java expert to point me at the correct way of doing it.

To be more precise, how would these objects get into the game?

My best guess is that in the mission editor you would need to add these objects as AnimatedActors.

I could then change the AnimatedActor base class to support my animators, and write a bunch of them.

My tool would then output a java class that controls the animation as well as a live.him and a set of msh files. Oh and collision meshes.

If that is something you guys want, then let me know and I will have a look at it.

[Stainless]

Damn got another problem to solve.

To get multiple animations to work properly, I have centralised all the mesh parts.  I calculate the centre of the mesh part and subtract that from all positions then create a translation matrix to position it properly in the world.

This allows me to rotate a mesh part and attach other parts to it.

However the centre point may not be the centre of rotation I need as can be seen in the video below.

[Stainless]

Added option to centralise an object about an axis, fixed the problem in the previous video

[Stainless]

Decided I needed to really get stuck in, the first stage of this is to generate mission maps.

I don't have a team of graphic artists I can task with creating maps, so I decided to write an app that uses GIS data to generate maps of any region of the world at any scale.

The data is out there, so why not use it.

Went really well at first.



Notice something ?

I don't think the M25 was around in 1940 

[Pursuivant]

"We shall fight in the caravan parks, we shall fight in the housing estates, we shall fight in the shopping centres and on the motorways, we shall fight in the industrial estates; we shall never surrender"

Seems like a relatively simple cleanup job in Photoshop or similar program, at least as long as the post-war motorways don't overlap prewar roads and they don't share a common color.

Of course, there's been a ridiculous amount of change to coastlines and other geographical features since the 1940s. It might be simpler to make it easy for players to import their own GIS data and to customize existing maps by adding or removing certain types of features. Sussing out historical roadways, coastlines, etc. from WW2 era maps and aerial photos is the sort of semi-skilled labor that fans do well.

[Stainless]

Well I started again using a lot of the code I had already written.



Once you have selected the region you want using the centre latitude and longitude and scale, set the output bitmap size, you can turn on the features you want to include.



Now I just need to add a load more shape files and databases.

The code allows you to specify your own colour scheme so the maps can be given your own style.

Adding data is pretty easy. First you convert the dbf file supplied in the GIS data to CSV.

The header includes a value "Featurecla" this is used to colour the lines/polygons. Each one has  an entry in the colour scheme.

Some databases require more detail, for these you look for "Type" and add the types to the colour scheme.

Then add code to load the database and shape file.

Attach it to a checkbox so it can be turned on and off and that's it.

[Stainless]

Well starting to get there

The image you see in the tool is distorted by the screen resolution.

An example output is here.



Now I am going to add the option to include your own GIS data.

[Stainless]

Wow.

There sure were a lot of airfields in the UK in 1940

[Stainless]

[Stainless]

Finally sorted out the normals in AC3D

The files do not include normals, instead each sub-object has a crease value.

The documentation says "this is used to determine smoothing normals", which isn't very descriptive.

So I worked out smooth normals for every sub-object, then when I convert the AC3D file into a static mesh, I calculate a face normal for each triangle and calculate the angle between the face normal and the smoothed normal.

If this angle is greater than the crease value, I use the face normal.

It seems to work....