Zooming and Aerodynamics

[Jochen Stier]

Here is a quick little update on what I have been working on recently. I am quite busy programming all the time, that’s why I sometimes don’t participate much in the forum discussion. After implementing the GUI and missiles, I wanted to get the laser cannons working. Since it is almost impossible to hit your opponent at the given distances and velocities I came up with a few things to make laser cannon dog fights more realistic.

First of all, I don’t like the idea of auto targeting, so I thought a high powered zoom function would do the trick as well. That’s basically the same idea as your typical BF1943 sniper rifle, where you can zoom in on a region via right mouse click. The idea is that you can zoom in on an opponent a few kilometers away and thus guide your laser fire more effectively. Implementing the zoom function in terms of the camera is actually quite easy, but it broke the algorithm I used to tessellate the terrain. So, when you zoomed on the planet surface, the terrain would not tessellate properly. I thus came up with a whole new algorithm to decide where and when to tessellate the surface. I love the way it works now! The algorithm is based on a screen space calculation and it is much simpler and more robust than before. There is still quite a performance hit though when you zoom in parallel to the planet surface, but it works really well when you looking straight down. Here are two pictures from the same spot, zoomed and not zoomed. The zoom only works when you are in first person, i.e. in inside the shuttle in the shamblers chair.

Secondly, I changed the shuttle to obey the physics of aerodynamics more closely. Air resistance now slows down the shuttle according to height within the atmosphere. At lower levels the atmosphere is denser and the shuttle will just not fly as fast. Higher up, you can really pick up speed. I have also made the aerodynamics similar to airplanes. Directly from the front the shuttle has almost no air resistance, but horizontally and vertically the drag forces are much stronger. Basically the shuttle now behaves like an airplane. Basically all this means that are now a bunch more parameters that can be used to make individual shuttle unique.

Next, I am going to make another download and then give it another shot with the laser cannons. Maybe I should look at an existing game for this one?  Does anyone know of a game with cool lasers fire?

[StormGnu]

I think that this is a very good idea that will add more feeling and skill to the game then auto targeting. A lot of weapon's going to be auto targeting anyway, like missiles.

How does the zoom operate right now, does it zoom in X km from your position or X km from your target? I still think it's going to be extremely hard to hit anything, even with the ability to zoom in on your enemy. Mainly because of the speeds and distance involved.

I think aerodynamics is going to be a important factor when fighting close to a planet, maybe it's easier to hide when you're in the lower atmosphere (different sensors used then in outer space) but you will be flying slower. Also, i don't think you should be able to dive into the atmosphere as fast as you like as the ship would simply burn because of the friction of the atmosphere. This would show really well as soon as there is a shader to illustrate this.

Can't wait to test the new prototype. I'm having some problems with my computer atm, can't install anything that uses windows installer. I'm reinstalling my OS soon so it doesn't matter.
Btw, look in my Contribute thread. I'm having some problems downloading the source code from Google Code.

[TorakunSama]

Fantastic, Brilliant idea! So the turrets will have a camera attached with zooming  , awesome!
You are hard at work! I wish I could do it with no interruptions!
Keep up the great work!

[zachzab]

This will make me feel more "at home" since I play Star Wars: Battlefield. Turrets should be able to lock on to targets though, and so should ships [to a point].