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Author Topic: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)  (Read 23963 times)

Offline Destructavator

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #15 on: November 18, 2012, 08:55:55 am »
wow thats really cool! Will there be any city backdrops for air combat, like when the UFO flies over urban areas?

There could be, possibly.

I've actually got more than one idea on how to implement cities and densely-populated areas.

One idea is to create the terrain and then plunk down a ton of static meshes of city buildings, much like how I did with trees, they would be VERY simple building models with no more than perhaps a dozen or so faces, so that a large number of them could be rendered on the terrain at once.

Another idea I've been thinking about, one that perhaps might work better depending on how it is done, is to totally replace (get rid of) the terrain for city areas and instead of building a terrain mesh, simply use different algorithms to create streets and buildings.  If this second idea was done right, it could work quite well IMO.  I'll really have to do some tests to try this out.  As far as the textures for the buildings in this second idea, that would actually be rather easy, it could be done with several grey-scale textures lumped together into one texture file, so that several "base" starting textures are used for variety in buildings, and then after mapping the texture use vertex colors to color the buildings differently, so the resulting combinations of buildings would be a fairly large number but without using too many resources on the rendering system.  I know how to do this in Irrlicht but will likely need help from a few others with coding it to work in UFO AI's render engine.

An alternative is to map two textures to a city mesh, in layers, so that one would have the grey-scale textures and the other would be a low-res collection of colors for coloring the faces.  The only big issue with this idea is that all the faces would need two independent sets of texture coordinates for the two different layers.  I don't know how well OpenGL can handle that, I'll have to do some research on this version of my idea.

Offline Anarch Cassius

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #16 on: November 18, 2012, 10:45:39 am »
Will this still support mass fights? I can't imagine trying to bring down a Harvester or Corrupter with one aircraft.

Offline Destructavator

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #17 on: November 18, 2012, 02:05:29 pm »
Will this still support mass fights? I can't imagine trying to bring down a Harvester or Corrupter with one aircraft.

From the beginning of my plans I intended for support for multiple aircraft within the combat area, as well as the ability to get reinforcements involved mid-battle, so to some extent, yes, although I'd imagine there would be a (hard-coded?) limit of some kind on how many aircraft are in the zone at once.

I'm not sure what that limit will end up being, whatever number it will be will affect gameplay balance and of course be subject to Mattn's approval.

Offline Crystan

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #18 on: November 18, 2012, 04:09:00 pm »
Its just an idea but what about if we not add a cap which is restricted by the count of aircrafts but rather by a "value cap" which is effected by aircraft type and aircraft equiptment. So you can attack a corruptor with 4 stilletos (with standard weapons) but not with 4 starchasers.

Offline Sandro

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #19 on: November 29, 2012, 10:49:33 pm »
An alternative is to map two textures to a city mesh, in layers, so that one would have the grey-scale textures and the other would be a low-res collection of colors for coloring the faces.  The only big issue with this idea is that all the faces would need two independent sets of texture coordinates for the two different layers.  I don't know how well OpenGL can handle that, I'll have to do some research on this version of my idea.

In OpenGL, every texturing unit got its own coordinate array.

Offline Unisol

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #20 on: November 30, 2012, 01:06:45 pm »
Regarding number of aircraft: I realize it's a little bit early to ask about it, but are there any plans to implement aircraft collisions? So far, none pilots expressed kamikaze tendences, but who knows what may happen...

Offline Destructavator

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #21 on: November 30, 2012, 07:13:28 pm »
Regarding number of aircraft: I realize it's a little bit early to ask about it, but are there any plans to implement aircraft collisions? So far, none pilots expressed kamikaze tendences, but who knows what may happen...

Hmmm....  I hadn't really thought of that.  Thanks for bringing that up, I don't know if that will be in the final product or not, but I'll keep that in mind.

Offline Snowblind

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #22 on: December 15, 2012, 03:42:47 am »
I hate to be a killjoy, but I think I'd rather have something like XCOM's air combat, with just the little window that pops up. Abstracted a bit, but it tells you everything you need to know (how fast are we going, how far away is the target, which of my weapons are in range, how effective is my attack?). It also let you just shadow the UFO until more interceptors showed up, so you could gang up on particularly tough ufos.

In the game, these UFOs are hundreds of km away and are moving at speeds beyond 1000 km/ hr. No camera could show you the whole battle, every aircraft would be fast-moving specks tremendous distances away from each other at high altitude. Really, there isn't much to see there, I'd hate to see some corny Starcraft or Galciv type air combat in an otherwise gritty, realistic game. Or the UFO interception happens right over the obscure town I live in, I expect to see how house, not just some green and hills and stuff. I also don't imagine all the aircraft fighting anywhere close to the ground to see anything anyways, they'd be way up in the stratosphere and everything, with the alien craft and interceptors being unaerodynamic bricks and all.

If you want to use the 3d models, then have each aircraft shown by it's self in it's own little window (along with a menu with all the data on it, it's weapons, distances to the target, damage, ect) with clouds and whatnot rushing by it. Maybe don't have a top-down camera angle so you don't have to represent the ground. Blue skies, dusky/ dawn night. So the 3d model, with swoopy camera angles with blue, orange, purple or red or black in the background, with clouds.

Just a thought, the whole 3d modeling landscape idea thing is still better then the interception combat the way it works now, which really does need improvement.

Offline Destructavator

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #23 on: January 27, 2014, 12:03:30 am »
I realize this has been on hold for quite some time, but I got this going again and after a lot of hard coding (C++ and GLSL), I have a new little demo for all of you to try out:

You can find it in the folder at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/tribalcreature/files/terrain%20demos/

It features 3D moving clouds as well as some of my better terrain generation code and such.

Right now it is only built for Windows, it has 32 and 64 bit binaries in the download plus a config / game launcher utility for setting up video options and such (which is incomplete at this time, I admit, but most of the important stuff needed for the demo is in there).

Use the mouse and cursor arrow keys to move around, and ESC to quit.

Yes, it's from my own game project, but I plan to use some of the same code and concepts for air combat for UFO AI and possibly along with a new system for the battlescape as well.

It does have some known issues, which I plan to fix.

On my test machines it runs smoothly, in real-time, and mostly looks great, but I wanted to post it here so others could tell me how it works for them.

I await feedback...

Offline Crystan

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #24 on: January 31, 2014, 12:01:42 pm »
Works and looks great for me! Good work Destructavator! :)

Offline NicSO

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #25 on: February 06, 2014, 12:12:29 am »
When will you implement this into UFO AI?

Offline ShipIt

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #26 on: February 06, 2014, 06:46:09 am »
Well, it´s meant to be soon.

Whereas "soon" has a special meaning here, especially for those guys that spend their rare spare time contributing to the project. Usually it will be "as soon as its ready". :)

Offline NicSO

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #27 on: February 11, 2014, 10:59:29 pm »
Well, you all id great work here with this game. Best UFO inspired game there is and that is amazing considering how much money is being spent on crappy ufo clones and they stay just that..crap!

Offline fireday

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Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« Reply #28 on: February 28, 2014, 08:14:49 pm »
Regarding to the TigersEye version, released in the coding topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbFM_moCEMI <--- i think that explains my anticipation good enough. ;)
why video in private?