#tiny combat arena

[laguzmage]

War has changed in gensokyo...

[why485]

[why485]

If you were following this account for gamedev stuff, I recommend you follow me on Twitter. All my gamedev progress is posted over there, and much more frequently than I posted it on here even when I did.

Since the Twitter’s “brand” is so completely focused on gamedev, I don’t feel comfortable talking about things like whatever trash I’m currently watching, how I can’t believe that Youmu took first in annual Touhou popularity contest, or the deep VTuber rabbit hole I’ve recently found myself in.

Now that I’m out of several Discords, I don’t really have an outlet for this stuff anymore either, so I’ve come back to posting it on this blog. Going forwards, consider this blog my After Hours posting.

[why485]

I am absolutely blown away by FMOD and Turbine. For someone who knows nothing about sound editing, FMOD is super intuitive and extremely powerful.

All the things I would normally script by hand in Unity can now be done in a tool specifically designed for it, that then reacts to inputs given to it from Unity. So for example, I feed in an RPM, and it automatically plays the correct looping sounds automatically pitch shifted so that they blend well together. It's an incredible tool.

Things the new sound engine and new sounds do:

RPM based engine noise

Finally there is proper sound support for an engine starting up/shutting down

All external audio becomes quieter and muffled when in the cockpit

Jet engine exhaust is louder and boomier when looking down the nozzle

From the front of the jet, the turbine whine is much more pronounced

At a distance, the engine noise becomes much deeper and all the highs cut out

Afterburner is not a special sound effect and instead just a more powerful and distorted version of mil power

It's an incredibly powerful tool and now's the time to make this kind of fundamental shift for the game. It means all sound effects have to be re-implemented, but I've already done testing with the gun sound and it's now so much better since I can trigger it and fade it correctly.

[why485]

Experimenting with using dithering for transparent effects.

[why485]

As I said in the previous post, I’m still on the fence about if I want to go the route of simulated control surfaces. My primary concern is that it creates some not-insignificant problems with the player’s controls. The biggest of which is trim. Either trim controls need to be added so the player does it manually, or there needs to be some way for the plane to automatically trim itself.

The mouse controls auto-trim to some extent just by the nature of how they work, though it’s not perfect. However, if you’re playing on a joystick, or especially a gamepad, you don’t want to have to hold the stick slightly in a direction just to fly straight and level.

One thing that did work out nicely though, is that I added in a smoothing for the control surfaces input. Flying with the gamepad in a realistic flight simulator can feel pretty finicky due to the lack of precision in a small thumbstick, but just smoothing out the inputs makes the experience a lot better and more comfortable. This was a problem I encountered in Over-G Fighters where it’s awkward to make smooth movements with the stick, so it’s something I specifically wanted to address. Ideally this smoothing factor goes into an options menu somewhere so people can configure it as they like.

[why485]

Everything about the flight model up until now has essentially been prototype code. I've spent the past week adding a ton of features to both the planes and environment to get the flying to where I want it to be for the real game. It'll have simulation leanings, but it's not DCS, nor is it meant to be.

I said to myself that I wouldn't do real control surfaces, but I'm starting to think that might be the right way to go. It lets me remove pretty much all of the hacks I had in place to script the effects you would expect. No need for hacks when the plane exhibits those behaviors as a natural consequence of physics.

In the video are the debug visualizations for the wings. The actual shape of the wing doesn't mean anything, it's just meant to give a rough estimate of the surface area of that wing. The red lines are drag, while the blue lines are the lift. If you'd like to mess with these wings, they are only a slightly modified version of the ones on my GitHub page: https://github.com/brihernandez/SimpleWings

I'm still on the fence on if I'll keep this flight model, as this is much more difficult to tune from a game design perspective. It would also make setting up the flight model for a new plane take some more time.

[why485]

Tiny Combat Arena 0.3.0 demo released!

Check it out on itch.io here

This is a huge update to the game featuring the beginnings of a lot of the core systems I want in the moment to moment flying and combat. New features for this release:

New Map: The new island is much bigger than the original demo island and has interesting terrain to fly around and through.

Sensors and Radar: Use your “eyes” to spot targets that get close, and the Basic Air Radar, on the planes that have it, to identify distant targets.

Heat Signatures: Critical to IR related systems, objects have heat signatures on them that IR seekers can detect and react to.

Infrared Seekers: Missiles use IR seekers to guide in, which has all sorts of fun consequences in effective use of missiles.

Flares: They spoof missiles, but they don’t magically work. Their effectiveness depends on the geometry of the shot.

AI Aircraft: Finally the planes fight back! Different planes with different skill levels are flying around the map. Beware the aces.

There’s many, many more changes beyond that, but these are the most important ones. A full changelog can be found inside the download folder.

Thank you all for the support, it’s been invaluable in keeping this project going.