Plan for Phil Carlisle

Ok, so this plan is deliberately NOT going to include images! :) why? because I'm at work and besides, you really need some movies to appreciate the game.

Its been a bit of a strange last couple of weeks. Getting down to the process of production and generally just "getting it done" kind of stuff really.

We got most of the animation issues for the planes sorted out, aerelons, rudder, elevator etc. Nothing huge. But we had some little issues with the Elevator control messing with the Rotor anims.

Now thats fixed, but I've still got a small bug with the Rotor animation, which is strange. If I play the rotor animation from the script thread, it revolves ok UNLESS I animate any of the other threads (which I generally do).

I really dont quite have a grasp of the whole animation thread system functionality yet I guess, because I'm calling setTimeScale without really knowing why :)

But anyway, mostly works, and thats fine, just a minor fixup.

I got the code in there to allow us to add bombing to any of the planes, so Rog made up this lovely bomb. Weirdly I had some real fun the other day by tweaking the bomb into sort of a projectile rocket (adding faster muzzle velocity on the bomb). So I'm wondering if any WW2 planes actually had rockets? :) especially for land-target strafing.

It turns out that we should have more than enough in the way of targets to blow the hell out of :)

Also last week, I implemented the runway logic. This means that you can land on a team specific runway and repair. We dont have ammo limits, so there isnt anything to re-arm, but repair is critical. Obviously these runways can be protected by team specific flak cannons and machine gun batteries.

We're going to have some kind of radar/gun implacement akin to the BF1942 BOB map in there for added objectiveness.

I guess now I think of it, having some bombable factory stuff is pretty much a must-have right? Although its too complex for Air Attack gametypes, it should add some fun to the game in terms of objectives.

I'll probably add some script to the runways to allow teams to "claim" them (i.e. start off with some runways neutral, allow a team to claim it by landing 2 planes on it for a set period of time).

I sat down over the weekend and designed the team/plane/etc interfaces on paper, only to remember whilst doing some rough layouts for them in gui editor that I'd forgotten that we will likely want to support console play sometime down the line.

So that got scrapped.

I really want the whole "dink dink dink doink" interface that Pat mentioned Jeff wanted :)

So right now, the gameplay is UBER simple really. Actually as far as the first release of the game goes, there really isnt much beyond the physics and modelling we need to complete. Physics should see some major effort in a few weeks as our physics partner goes off to do his duty! :)

In the meantime, I'll be carrying on with the scripts, getting the GUI in place, looking at how best to implement and integrate the lobbying and game-startup functions and generally starting the long slow test period.

Oh, on another note.. well... you'll see in the news!

So its coming along. More shots when we have some more coolio stuff. Not far off thankfully :)