F-117A NightHawk - Alpha Released

[PuFu 4599]

WOW

Can you add a radar function to it like this

or integrate the DLIR image into the cockpit?

That was done via armalib. It is in fact a bit of a hax (dll changes etc). Not possible using tools available atm for A2 afaik

[Fortran 1]

Yeah would love to be able to but as pufu said was only possible with armalib. Unfortunatly also not possible to have the DLIR screen in the cockpit, no render to texture feature in the ArmA2 engine.

---------- Post added at 01:28 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:27 AM ----------

Also another question for Sakura if you read this. I get how you animated the stick in the cockpit, but how did you get the hand to follow it ? As far as I know the pilot anim is just a static pose ? If I could move the pilot I would add moving pedals and stick. Pitty the engine doesn't support (as far as I know) an IK chain feature, even back in my BF2 modding days adding moving feet on pedals and moving joystick with hands was easy.

Edited September 21, 2009 by Fortran

[abs 2]

If I'm not mistaken, I remember seeing a video that showed someone (I actually think it may have been Sakura) who made a gunner's hands follow the minigun on the Blackhawk in ArmA1...so it may be possible for the pilot too....but only better people than I will have the answer.

Abs

[Apache-Cobra 0]

If I'm not mistaken, I remember seeing a video that showed someone (I actually think it may have been Sakura) who made a gunner's hands follow the minigun on the Blackhawk in ArmA1...so it may be possible for the pilot too....but only better people than I will have the answer.

Abs

73nRw6YcH1w

Sakura indeed. Another amazing addon. See 1:07

[MasterRevan2009 10]

very nice nighthawk addon there. it completely outmatched the ms flight simulator versions even ace combat 6 and hawx

:-)

[chris330 0]

That's lovely! I'm really interested in the cockpit gauges the most. How tricky is it to write scripts for gauge programming? In Micro Flight Sim there (2002) was a special file that bundled with the plane files which handled gauge programming. How does it work on here? Can you mimic or recreate the same files/methods BIS have used to make them or are tricks needed? Cheers!

[Fortran 1]

Thanks for the comments guys. If you take a look here: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Model_Config you can see all the engine available sources for animating the gauges. Any that aren't listed that you would like to create need to be scripted. Basically you can define any animation as a "user" driven animation, which gives you control of the anim, then it's just a matter of writing a script which captures the data you need from the game and using that to drive the animation. To get them to return accurate information is just a matter of A: making the texture on the dial at a high enough resolution so it is readable and B: tweaking the anim in the model config (for vanilla engine sources) (or both model config & script for non-vanilla sources) so that it relates perfectly with it's source data.

[chris330 0]

That makes perfect sense, thanks alot for the reply. What's it like retrieving information on the vehicle's bank and pitch and other data in this game? In OFP days it was a bloody nightmare without access to engine code!

[sgt_flyer 0]

That makes perfect sense, thanks alot for the reply. What's it like retrieving information on the vehicle's bank and pitch and other data in this game? In OFP days it was a bloody nightmare without access to engine code!

you have the vectorup command, which is there since arma, but requires trigonometrics scripts. (the command gives you the vector going up from the center of the vehicle) with this, associated to the object's dir, you can get the picth and bank degrees.

[chris330 0]

Great that sounds far more sophisticated than the horrors of having to use drop arrays to get pitch and bank data like in ofp.

What about height above sea level? Does (getpos _unit select 2) return a value above 0 or the terrain height in ArmA 2? In OFP it was the terrain height only.

Edited September 23, 2009 by chris330

[Defunkt 431]

Take it to the editing forum please eh?

[chris330 0]

Do you mean:

"Hi that's interesting but that'd be best in the editing forums where they'd be more use as it runs the risk of going offtopic :)"

Great idea! And seeing as you asked so nicely I might just start a thread there on this particular topic :rolleyes:

[Fortran 1]

Updating again with a night time movie showing the interior and exterior lighting systems for the F-117A. Have also now completed the 3d/2d hud (save for some fiddling with text sizes and adding the waypoint marker to the compass) so this is also demonstrated in the video.

After adding the duplicate faces for the night illumination I am now running perilously close to the poly limit for the view-pilot LOD so have had to take the call to drop the FuelFlow, EngineGasTemp & FanRPM counters and just make them static. No big loss as they were purely eye-candy, but unfortunate non the less.

81gzUELZsxs

[prowler.wolf 0]

amazing, how do night vision goggles perform with the light from the dials?

[Fortran 1]

No problems, the green is just negated by the goggles making them appear as normal:

[ThaGZAgenius 10]

That is crazy. The attention to detail is amazing. I really love the lights so far. Everything seems so real. Cant wait to see what comes next. Awesome man. Just awesome.

[luki 53]

You are crazy this baby gets better and better, cant wait to fly it :cool:

Did you planned some startup procedure like enable avionik,fuel pumps, fire turbines... and such stuff?

[Alex72 1]

Fortran, that is exterme! Amazing work.

Can i ask you if you notice any significant FPS drop with your aircraft in view? Im thinking about some tanks made before in ArmA1 etc that was really nice and detailed but you really noticed drop in FPS when looking at them.

Anyway with this aircraft you usually only have 1 or 2 in a mission so i think its ok to spend awesome detail on it. :)

Alex

[Tom_48_97 523]

Really great work.

2 questions about performances... The fist is the same as Alex72, the other concern textures, what is the resolution ?

[rocket 9]

After adding the duplicate faces for the night illumination I am now running perilously close to the poly limit for the view-pilot LOD so have had to take the call to drop the FuelFlow, EngineGasTemp & FanRPM counters and just make them static. No big loss as they were purely eye-candy, but unfortunate non the less.

You could make the additional faces for night illumination a proxy, and then simply hide the whole proxy when not in use (that's what I've done on the CH-53E). That way you don't have to spend your polys on it. Looks fantastic BTW.

[Fortran 1]

Thanks guys.

Can i ask you if you notice any significant FPS drop with your aircraft in view? Im thinking about some tanks made before in ArmA1 etc that was really nice and detailed but you really noticed drop in FPS when looking at them.

Well the external view model of the F-117A is actually fairly lowpoly, due to the actual design of the plane itself it's 99.9% hard straight edges apart from a few bits and pieces so externally it actually performs slightly better than the vanilla A-10. Cockpit wise as well although the cockpit is high poly, the design of the aircraft prevents the player from seeing anything else outside of the cockpit (ie wings etc) so the performance ends up being, again, about the same as the original A-10. Here is a quick fps benchmark.

"Control" : No models = 71fps

"F-117A" : External = 65fps

"BIS A-10" : External = 62fps

"F-117A" : Internal = 66fps

"BIS A-10" : Internal = 66fps

Really great work.

2 questions about performances... The fist is the same as Alex72, the other concern textures, what is the resolution ?

The main sheets for the external LOD's are 2x 2048x2048:

Internal textures range from 1x 2048x2048 (arm panels L&R for text readability) 2x1024 (MFD displays) and the rest of the gauges and instruments use 512x512 sheets. There are quite a few textures for the internal model but without separated sheets at a high enough resolution there would be no text readability for the gauges. However as shown above, there is really no performance hit from using this method.

You could make the additional faces for night illumination a proxy, and then simply hide the whole proxy when not in use (that's what I've done on the CH-53E).

Ah nice idea, will definitley give that a try, many thanks Rocket.

[DaSquade 0]

Can you share some info on the cockpit section count (can be found in O2 on the button, near face count etc). As this is in some ways more important then the sizes of textures and polycounts.

As pointed out by Rocket, you can always consider replacing some parts (prefured static items, like maybe even the cockpit body) by a proxy model. Forgot exactly what the polycount (read: vertexcount) limitation stands for again in a single p3d file..but it is sort of an indication you are walking on the borderline of visual quality of a model for game use. I'm all for model details, but sometimes you have to drawn a line (luckly for my type of models that is often within the limites :d ).

[Fortran 1]

Yeah sure:

LOD0.000 = 31 sections 7804 faces

ViewPilotLOD = 145 sections 15776 faces

The high sections count is no doubt down to the "modular" way I had to build the cockpit. As I wasn't exactly sure how the engine handled 3d when I started working with this engine, alot of corrections had to be made and readjustments so I chopped up the mesh into smaller components so I could fix and add things without having to affect the entire model. I realize this is probably not the best way to go about things and for the next model I make I will be better prepared next time.

The cockpit model (mesh wise) is all in-place now so I won't be adding anything else but if it improves performance I may, as rocket and yourself suggested, use proxies for some of the static parts. As for detailing your absolutley right, it needs to be traded off against performance, but I wanted to see how far the engine could be pushed in regards to cockpit fidelity. This was mainly an experiment in that area and also to learn the engine at the same time. From testing I can't really find any major performance impact from this plane but that will of course be un-covered, if there is any, during alpha and beta testing phases when others can run it on other systems than mine.

[DaSquade 0]

Hm section count looks very bad, no offence mate. Maybe i'm not following correct but is that the final section count or is that the cleaned up version?

Maybe a small overview of the amount of textures and used material could reflect that number better. Meaning, in theory one mapped part with one texture and one material counts for one section. When you have in that selection a part with the same texture but different material it will make 2 sections etc...

I'm aware that if you import stuff or sometimes even copy/past workparts the section count will raise...where it in reality should be lower due to certain things.

So might want to go true your model and see if you didn't made any mistakes on that part.

Sometimes it can be a big mess cleaning it up if intense workfiles (like you mentioned yourself) and there are several things you can do to clean up the section count. But often that involves it will screw up your set alpha layer orders aswell...

In casr you are a bit now to that part, there is a short tutorial on the forums that covers that. Will need to search myself, hoping i or someone else can dig it up.

Anyway, as many including the devs have mentioned, section count is one of the most important performence killers in the game...bigger killers then texture/materialcount then tris/vertex count. Just wanted to bring that to your mind :) .

We all learn by doing and again, this shouldn't effect your overall workresult.

Keep it up.

EDIT: Link to above mentioned tutorial.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=65537&highlight=sections+tutorial

Edited September 23, 2009 by DaSquade

[Fortran 1]

Its probably due to the number of textures then partly I guess. The p3d is not optimized as of yet so I will go through it properly and double check everything you have suggested and after going through the tutorial you linked to. Although I have yet to get a major performance impact so far and due to it's nature there shouldn't be more than one or two of these on the battlefield at any one time, I would like to get it as optimized as is humanly possible. Thanks very much for your help and the link, will go back and have a good look through and see where im going wrong with this. :)