TUMBLE!!!!!

@thejmpr

What does *that* button do?

860 posts

I finally got A-10 Attack working! Sort of!

It’s using SheepShaver and OS9 emulation. Unfortunately there’s a pretty critical issue where the ingame mouse doesn’t work, which means I can’t click on anything in the cockpit.

Still, it’s enough that I can watch battles play out because this game was basically DCS World before DCS. It’s not just a flight sim where you bomb static stuff, each of the vehicles actually move, articulate, and get in their own fights. It’s awesome to watch. Horrible usability endemic to its era aside, this game was ahead of its time in a lot of ways.

There’s something so charming about those simple models.

Bonus drop testing because this is always fun to look at.

first-brother-asleep-deactivate

Remember when the US military conducted their largest war game to date meant to simulate an invasion of a power in the Persian Gulf and the American faction lost 20,000 men the first day? And then they changed the parameters of the war game to make sure the American faction won and the guy commanding the enemy forces left in disgust because he said it was all a sham and the DoD was unwilling to learn from their mistakes?

lone-brother-deactivated2019070

Van Riper gained notoriety after the Millennium Challenge 2002 wargame. He played the Red Team opposing force commander, and easily sank a whole carrier battle group in the simulation with an inferior Middle-Eastern “red” team in the first two days.

Van Riper adopted an asymmetric strategy. In particular, he used old methods to evade his opponent’s sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World War II light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications. Van Riper used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of the opponent’s fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, he launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces’ electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. This included one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of the opposing navy was “sunk” by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue’s inability to detect them as well as expected.

Well shit, now the current iranian strategy makes a ton of sense.

Van Ripper also had motorcycle messengers moving at the speed of lights and “light speedboats” somehow not capsizing while hauling 15,000 pound AShMs on their backs. Iran doesn’t get to abuse exploits in the simulation.

I can’t believe that of all the things on my backlog, a list that includes the spiritual successor to Girls und Panzer, one of my favorite shows of all time, I end up watching Wataten.

It’s not even that great or anything. It’s totally fine overall, but the show has a weird style to it that I’m not crazy about instead of the really round and blobby style of the comics that I loved. Also, everybody in the show is really shiny for some reason. Noa is still great though.

You will enjoy Kotobuki. The air combat’s spectacular and there’s some really great writing that sneaks up on you.

Different missiles are now loaded onto the plane dynamically (i.e. they aren’t baked into the plane prefab anymore), and can be reloaded when the player is at an airfield, weight on wheels, and stopped.

This was the easy part. The hard part comes next.

You should do another stream, those are fun!

Here’s a video of what landing looks like.

The flight physics are based on the Tiny Combat Arcade solution. I’ve been meaning to make a post about that because I always thought it was a pretty novel solution. The aircraft still rotate based on magic torques, but the lift to keep your plane flying where your noise is pointed comes from two pairs of perpendicular wings from the SimpleWings project.

Unlike the usual drag based method that you see in things like the arcade jet physics example project I made, you get cool effects like gravity giving you a speed boost when descending, and slowing you down when flying up. The wings also give you a much better representation of angle of attack. For example, at low speeds you will require more angle of attack to maintain altitude. This makes for much better feeling landings, as it allows you to use your throttle to control descent rate like you would expect.

*excitement.* I saw on twitter that post about your new idea. I’m deeply intrigued.

Thanks to @thejmpr, I’ve finally got something that kinda works. I’m not too happy with this though. It feels janky, is very fragile, and there’s a lot of magic numbers involved. Doesn’t feel too good.

This was supposed to be a walk in the park, but there’s a ton of little complications involved in getting the results I was looking for.

You realize this is literally rocket science, right? It’s not supposed to be easy. (Also, glad to help!)

Lately I’ve been messing with proportional navigation and physically based missiles. This is a missile which generates thrust with forces, flies towards the target using body lift, and turns by rotating wings on control surfaces. This is proving to be much more difficult than I thought. I get really bad oscillations at high speed and I’m having a really hard time narrowing down the cause.

It could be that my control system isn’t right. It could be that there’s something inherently wrong with my wings that causes them to function incorrectly at high speeds. My gut says it’s something wrong with my wings, but it’s hard to say. There’s so many moving parts here.

Have you tried writing a simpler flight model that just applies forces directly to the missile? The oscillation looks PID wobble. The Pro-Nav guidance system could pump out perfectly good data in the form of a desired velocity vector. You’d still get wobble if the missile’s flight-control system can’t effect the desired velocity change smoothly.

I’m betting that’s what’s happening. The missile starts to wallow as soon as its fired and never settles on to a constant-bearing-decreasing-range course.I could send you my pro-nav missile code if you want. It’s using simpler godzilla forces, but the seeker’s been good as far as I’ve tested it.

oldschoolsciencefiction

Tonight’s entertainment at Casa Old School Sci Fi is variously titled “F.P.1 antwortet nicht,” “F.P.1 Doesn’t Respond,” “Secrets of F.P.1.,” “Floating Platform 1 Does Not Answer,” and “I.F.1 Ne Repond Plus”.

Austrian director Karl Hartl took sci fi author Curt Siodmak’s novel and produced three different versions of the movie: German, English, and French with different casts. This 1932 (German version)/1933 (English & French versions) science fiction film revolves around a permanent air station in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The English version of this film is on YouTube: LINK

Something unintentionally awesome about this, is that this was seriously considered around the time of Desert Storm. It was called the Mobile Offshore Base and is exactly what it sounds like: an offshore airbase. It was meant to be built out of separate and independently mobile sections that would then hook up to form a 2km long air strip.

It was found to be a bad idea for fairly obvious reasons such as cost and being a big dumb target for modern weapons.

I Ship It

Kantai Collection, 2014 (colorized)

Messing around some more with World Creator. This tool is still surprising and amazing me. In this, I took imprecise heightmap from the real world, and then used it as a base for procedurally generated terrain to fill in the detail.

Areas are proving to be the secret sauce to getting manual control over what you want the terrain to look like. Before I learned about these, I was thinking that WC was really only good for super procedural stuff, and not really anything designed. Areas give you manual control to paint your heightmaps, and then use them in combination with the procedural filters to get the effects you want.

I’m guessing you’ll want planes that aren’t just flat-shaded then?

Not necessarily? I can still use the same weird method I was using before in Tiny Combat Arcade for importing realistic heightmaps from World Machine. Really though, I’m just learning a new tool. I wan to know how to use it “properly” before I start using it in weird ways.

This is what this map looks like in Unity. Still can be just as much of a blurry mess as TCA’s current maps are.

Though I didn’t use this method for Tiny Combat Arcade, you could also use the heightmap as source for a memepoly style mesh terrain.

By the way, I recovered that terrain shader from a while ago that I thought I lost. Thankfully it was just in a place where I never thought to look.

Oooh, that looks really cool!

Messing around some more with World Creator. This tool is still surprising and amazing me. In this, I took imprecise heightmap from the real world, and then used it as a base for procedurally generated terrain to fill in the detail.

Areas are proving to be the secret sauce to getting manual control over what you want the terrain to look like. Before I learned about these, I was thinking that WC was really only good for super procedural stuff, and not really anything designed. Areas give you manual control to paint your heightmaps, and then use them in combination with the procedural filters to get the effects you want.

I’m guessing you’ll want planes that aren’t just flat-shaded then?

Aggregated units can now fight each other, and the results of combat are persistent whether units are aggregated or not!

Video is pretty boring to watch, but there’s a lot of cool stuff happening here. (I think it’s cool anyway.) The red and blue group closest to the camera are de-aggregated, meaning each of the units contained in the group are physicalized and firing physical bullets at each other.

Meanwhile, the two groups in the back are aggregated, meaning their units are “simulated” but do not physically exist in the world. Combat can happen regardless of if the group is aggregated or not, and the state of the group and its unit is persistent even when the groups gets aggregated and de-aggregated.

In the video, both blue groups fire on the red groups. You can watch the physical exchange of fire with the de-aggregated groups and its effects on the targets. The aggregated group is meanwhile running a much more simplified version of the combat, but based on many of the same parameters.

Both groups destroy 3/5 units of their respective target groups, and when the two rear groups are de-aggregated their states are preserved, i.e. the destroyed units are destroyed.

Can a de-aggregated unit attack an aggregated one (and vice versa?)

What did you think about the target-identification mechanic in AC7?

It’s a fun gimmick for a few missions, but I’m glad it didn’t overstay its welcome.

As a story device though, everything surrounding why that happened is I think an awesome premise for an Ace Combat and where the story could have potentially gone to some wild places, but it didn’t because there was no time. As far as I know, something like that has never happened in Ace Combat before and it was a real treat the effect it had on the player’s squadron and war.

Could you imagine though, in the near future of Strangereal, all planes have these super advanced amazing foolproof computers built into all fighters. Nothing could possibly go wrong, until it does and suddenly all these hyper advanced fighters are useless. The only planes with that can still fly are crappy old 2nd and 3rd generation fighters using the old systems that were mothballed. Now, MiG-21s, F-106s, MiG-23s, and F-4 Phantoms are your new high-low mix.

Eventually they’d retrofit the new planes so the mainstream Ace Combat fan can have their Su-57s and F-22s, but give me an Ace Combat with crappy vintage planes! Zero was almost something like this, but didn’t really commit to it.

So… basically 3rd Aerial Girls Fighter Squadron?

Yeah I guess so. It goes back to what I wanted to do for Tiny Combat Redux, but just don’t have the time to actually finish. There’s not enough games that focus on that era of air combat, even if my take on it was going to be a bit more fantastical.

There’s not enough games focusing on any era of air combat, to be honest.

I stared at that image for a good thirty seconds before realizing it wasn’t a rotated image of a tail-sitter.

So yeah... I’m smart.

What if ships in Freelancer had options?

I’ve been working on this in “secret”, mostly because I don’t want to give people the wrong idea, but this is too fun and cool to pass up.

The two little guys here are using a drone controller that I wrote to prototype a different way of doing formation flight. I was planning on throwing it away after I made it, but had an idea for how to re-use a totally separate ship controller in a fun way. I tie them to a parent ship, and then they copy the weapon inputs from the parent ship to fire and aim their own guns.

To be clear, I am not remaking Freelancer. This is only a project for me to experiment with space sim ideas I’ve had. Formations was a big one of them, because I’ve never really been able to figure out formation flying. The drone version of formations is in this video. The ship ones are a little more complex.

Now take that concept and make the drones SD chibis of your main ship and watch the dollars roll in.

What did you think about the target-identification mechanic in AC7?

It’s a fun gimmick for a few missions, but I’m glad it didn’t overstay its welcome.

As a story device though, everything surrounding why that happened is I think an awesome premise for an Ace Combat and where the story could have potentially gone to some wild places, but it didn’t because there was no time. As far as I know, something like that has never happened in Ace Combat before and it was a real treat the effect it had on the player’s squadron and war.

Could you imagine though, in the near future of Strangereal, all planes have these super advanced amazing foolproof computers built into all fighters. Nothing could possibly go wrong, until it does and suddenly all these hyper advanced fighters are useless. The only planes with that can still fly are crappy old 2nd and 3rd generation fighters using the old systems that were mothballed. Now, MiG-21s, F-106s, MiG-23s, and F-4 Phantoms are your new high-low mix.

Eventually they’d retrofit the new planes so the mainstream Ace Combat fan can have their Su-57s and F-22s, but give me an Ace Combat with crappy vintage planes! Zero was almost something like this, but didn’t really commit to it.

So... basically 3rd Aerial Girls Fighter Squadron?

Guns and Bullets is now on GitHub!

Check out the repository here. If you’re only interested in the standalone asset package, you can download it directly.

This project is a set of generic gun and bullet components to be further expanded upon for specific projects. They are designed around my usual use case of fast moving bullets fired from vehicles.

The goal was to create a sort of “canonical” version of bullet and gun code that I so frequently write and rewrite. Rather than constantly pulling and gutting code from old projects, it’d be nice to have a single package that I can just import.

Some interesting features of the guns:

Deviation can be added to make guns inaccurate. The value is the max error off boresight that a bullet can have.

Using GimbalRange, guns can auto-aim to some degree.

Multiple barrels are supported, and can be set to fire together, or sequentially.

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