DayOfWar LCAT Flight Test
by Bill Vee · 12/19/2007 (8:25 pm) · 7 comments
Videos
I was setting up some of the LCAT's flight characteristics , speed , rate of climb , camera lag and such, and every time I went back to the game to test it out I started spending longer and longer times just flying around.
Since I wasn't getting a whole lot of work done I thought I would share a 10 minute flight I took.
The flight control was with an Xbox controller but the keyboard and mouse can be used as well. I just like the controller more, it feels more natural.
The damage was turned off and I took a couple of runs at hitting the terrain as hard as I could to make sure I couldn't penetrate it or cause a code crash, we all know how fickle the rigid-body physics can be.
Keep in mind the terrain is still a work in progress. There are still a couple of seem issues. I haven't got the error metric tuned just right yet I think.
And for people running firefox , like me, and have problems viewing embedded videos on my site.
If anyone has a suggestion for a fix for this I would like to here it.
Video
All Videos so far
I was setting up some of the LCAT's flight characteristics , speed , rate of climb , camera lag and such, and every time I went back to the game to test it out I started spending longer and longer times just flying around.
Since I wasn't getting a whole lot of work done I thought I would share a 10 minute flight I took.
The flight control was with an Xbox controller but the keyboard and mouse can be used as well. I just like the controller more, it feels more natural.
The damage was turned off and I took a couple of runs at hitting the terrain as hard as I could to make sure I couldn't penetrate it or cause a code crash, we all know how fickle the rigid-body physics can be.
Keep in mind the terrain is still a work in progress. There are still a couple of seem issues. I haven't got the error metric tuned just right yet I think.
And for people running firefox , like me, and have problems viewing embedded videos on my site.
If anyone has a suggestion for a fix for this I would like to here it.
Video
All Videos so far
About the author
#2
12/20/2007 (1:18 am)
Seriously BAD ASS! If you don't watch it, Sony or some big publisher is going to pay you lots of money for this tech. And I hope they do :) 
#3
anyways would be intersting to hear about the technique,
12/20/2007 (5:42 am)
i wonder how you get the atlas terrains to play nice with a sphere? i dont really see how you could do this with a displacement map although i guess its possible.. i am assuming you dont do the start with a cube and then subdivide aproach since i am not sure that would work with tgea ? anyways would be intersting to hear about the technique,
#4
12/20/2007 (9:10 am)
It really is nice looking Bill!
#5
Look at it this way, the way the current atlas code works is you take highest LOD(level of detail) chunk(mesh) , derived from a hieghtfield data source, convert it to a mesh then cut that mesh up into a number of smaller meshes ,depending on your tree depth, and for ever level you go in the depth tree you take 4 chunks and make 1 chunk to represent 4 original chunks and you do this for each chunk for every level you go taking more detail out as you go until you end up with one chunk.
I know this is an over simplification of the process but you get the idea.
From a code stand point the original high detail mesh can be any shape ,sphere , disc , flat whatever, in this case a sphere.
The trick is the chunk positions and orientation as it relates to a sphere.
12/20/2007 (10:34 am)
@Fleeky The concept is easy the implementation was tricky. Look at it this way, the way the current atlas code works is you take highest LOD(level of detail) chunk(mesh) , derived from a hieghtfield data source, convert it to a mesh then cut that mesh up into a number of smaller meshes ,depending on your tree depth, and for ever level you go in the depth tree you take 4 chunks and make 1 chunk to represent 4 original chunks and you do this for each chunk for every level you go taking more detail out as you go until you end up with one chunk.
I know this is an over simplification of the process but you get the idea.
From a code stand point the original high detail mesh can be any shape ,sphere , disc , flat whatever, in this case a sphere.
The trick is the chunk positions and orientation as it relates to a sphere.
#6
12/20/2007 (4:43 pm)
Thanks to Ali Tahiri who sent me an e-mail with a tip on the video embedding problem on the DayOfWar.net website domain I was able to track down the problem and fix it. Now all the videos can be access directly from the website with FireFox. 
#7
12/20/2007 (4:46 pm)
I'm glad you got it fixed. Best of luck on you project and keep us updated. Cheers!!! 
Torque Owner Geom
For the purposes of a game tho, I think you'd have to make the planet smaller. In the video it's a little hard to tell that the planet/terrain is spherical.