Plan for Derk Adams

BattleTech Simulator Demo 6 is Available

The latest release of my game is available and has added a very difficult feature to implement; visual damage display. There were two issues, first, since texture or mesh swapping was to intensive to use in real-time, I had to figure out how to show damage without textures. The toon outline resource got me started on altering the render process. I finally settled on rendering a black layer over the model with the alpha value connected to the damage amount. Second, I needed a way to color only parts of a mesh, not just the whole thing. After diving into triangle strips and vertices, I was able to map the triangle strips to the bones and then color the mesh based on the bone to which the strip was attached. From there it was an easy update to color the mounted weapons as well.

I also fixed some bugs and added arm flipping and extended torso twsting.

The last two major hurdles to be cleared are hit boxes for physical attacks and switching to multi-player, which I'm waiting for 1.4 to do.

The demo and supporting material is available at BattleTech Simulator.

Also, since the topic of intellectual property has been such an issue, I will update the topic by announcing that I have joined MekTek as a developer and as such get "access" to their rights from Microsoft, FASA, and even Harmony Gold to produce fan works and mods.