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Combat Helo: Operation Ouroboros is a team effort and has been since we started development this time last year. The workload is at present cleanly divided between Rick and I. He writes the code, I make the artwork. It's a simple team structure that has been extremely successful.

Out-sourcing map production to the community is not something we have considered. On the one hand it would relieve us of a major job. However, CH is a commercial product and it wouldn't be fair to profit off the backs of community members who would need to spend 5 or 6 months building a map. It's also such an involved process that intricately links into the engine that it leaves very little margin for error. Atleast 1/3rd of the time I spend working on the map is spent optimizing objects and textures to get it to run smoothly. Leaving this aspect to chance would be a potential mess waiting to happen.

It's quite important for us to collectively make the map and technical art in-house in order to get things looking right. Every object and texture must be built and painted to match the colouration, tone, fidelity, resolution and appearance of it's neighbour. A loose bag of community-made artwork with differing visual styles and a variety of fidelity levels would be difficult to combine into a natural looking product.

Finally there are legal reasons preventing us from accepting work from external sources and handing over development tools to 3rd parties.

For Combat Helo 2 we plan to radically modify the terrain system which should allow for 3rd party terrains to be built. However, the official map(s) will still be built in-house.

Cheers

holy cow, already planning on a CH2?

can you give us a teaser? Different theater, helos....or?

Will this game feature multi-player?

If so, I would appreciate persistent battlefield smoke. It's so helpful in for finding targets, especially in multi-player games.

You're accomplishing things many people would have reasonably judged as in impossible nowadays. Reminds me of Andy Hollis or Eric Parker. I really hope you make it to a release, since this would prove (as it seems now) many predictions about simulations and what hampers their development today wrong.

This is plain the most impressive thread about a project I ever witnessed.

Michael.

Are you saying the community won't be able to make maps, period, in this release, or just be unable to make the terrain (ie no community jungle theater mod)?

also, for the current work, any idea what community created content would be possible?

I have to say kudos to AD and Flexman, they're working wonders here. I wish you both the best with the release of this product. It'll definitely be worth the wait.

We appreciate that cheers, as it happens today is the anniversary of the project. I just wanted to comment on one of the previous images.

This industrial unit reminds me of one of the scripted LB2 missions where you had to watch all these little infantry guys running around the fence and into a compound to inspect it and plant C4. You followed them all the way in on the TADS, and all the way out again.

Funny the things you remember.



It's just itching for an F15 to come along and "shack".

Depends what you mean by that. If it helps, one of the mission profiles has ground units in contact with an enemy, these units call you in on the radio and will attempt to mark the target (with some possibility of error) with different coloured smoke.

For player marking we have rockets and some survival gear. All of which will persistent in multiplayer modes (they are just active entities that happen to emit smoke).

On the radios note...Will there be chatter? I know this is prolly to hard to model, but would would be a cool thing, and increase the workload a bit more ( even more?!)...
Congrats on the 1 year Birthday :), can't wait to fly around Herat *cue AirWolf theme*

The terrain, I believe, is of a bit of an ugly duckling. It doesn't have the appearance of a flight sim terrain and it still lacks colour and tone variation but it's rapidly evolving into an environment with a different feel to other sims.

The levees and corresponding tree lines provide fantastic cover and the 10M terrain resolution provides tiny pockets to conceal yourself in.

Yesterday I updated my drivers and there was an overall frame-rate increase of about 25% Subsequently the feeling of flight is massively improved, zooming down alley ways and hovering behind cover is pure fun. Rick's done a fantastic job fixing up the MK1 flight model. It feels solid yet highly maneuverable.



That's a very positive response, especially as the original intention of this development thread was not necessarily to impress people, but instead showcase the negative aspects of the terrain engine.



If modders would like to heavily modify the map, add vegetation, or create new objects, then they'll need to purchase the Leadwerks development kit. Jungle type terrain would present the engine with quite a challenge and load times would be extreme. On that front, modders will have a much more enjoyable experience if they wait for CH2 with it's improved terrain development/streaming/rendering.

Cheers

AD,

if you ask me, making your simulation mod-able in the broadest way and to the furthest extent possible is the best investment into the future of it. Modable sims, even if buggy and premature released, usually keep living on, guaranteeing sales in years to follow.

But it sounds to me like you are already focused on CH2... don't know how to take that

Anyhow, to call your terrain ugly strucks me as a bit of an understatement ....
And yes, I followed this thread since your announcement and I cannot remember having been impressed more since joining SimHq.

Michael.

We're not focused on CH2 at all, if this is a bit of a flop there may not even be one, it's costing me personally close to $300 per month in regular outgoings on interest and host services. Still cheap in development terms. But I think of it as a longer term investment as it's about developing core systems that can be used in the future.

We have talked about what things we want to do differently, a roadmap of sorts, expansions and the next project beyond Combat-Helo. We're always limited by what we can do using off-the-shelf technologies, but we're stuck using it due to costs and time-scale. We want this done as quickly as possible as frankly I'm itching to play the finished game before the debt collectors come around

Personally I'm confident that it'll be a sleeper hit, certainly when we get in the expansion aircraft and a new theater to play in. Tools to help build the maps are something we need to work on later but we have a good idea on how to import veg-data now.

Building a retro-esque game is one thing, but you can't keep doing that as expectations are frankly at the point where games are unsustainable except by the super-rich publishers. But I like to think that simulation enthusiasts are less shallow than your typical gamer and will play something that is fun, challenging and assumes they are intelligent.

Modability ideally needs to be built-in and that consumes time, and there are license/legal considerations. That's something that we can't address properly this time around. But eventually I want to improve the vehicle system and include some kind of SDK, probably LUA based to enable third-parties to go into gauge level detail. But again that's way way off in the future. So let's not get sidetracked by sequels until we have a finished game we can take forward to the next level.

I am curious how this sim will avoid the Russian Pitfall, which is creating an utterly convincing environment but with a completely sterile feel to it (the Flanker lineage products suffer from this badly). The world feel uninhabited and empty despite working SAMs etc.
How are you going to avoid this sense of emptiness in your lovely sim?

Sorry if I gave you the impression that we are focused on CH2, as Rick says that isn't true. I brought up the subject of CH2 as the question regarded terrain modding, which is an area we have discussed opening and improving in a follow-up product. Although plans do change.



Primarily, by not following in the footsteps of the Flanker/Lomac/DCS series and instead looking towards LB2 and EECH for ideas and inspiration. We've also developed ideas relating to sub-games and even a quest type system that will bring character and feel into the gameplay.

Cheers

Ejecto is perfectly right, and your answer so encouraging that I am already stashing away money for your sim. Please, give it a working and heavily swearing crew, if possible, task sharing and serious, context sensitive background chatter. Not only dull recordings. You both may right about judging a retro sim, but LB2 (and perhaps F15, F/A 18 and in other aspects F4) was in these aspects unmatched until today, so one can hardly call it retro.
The voice pitch, the unnerved tone, "S**t, we're hit" and all that - there is still no sim that's anywhere as immersive than LB2. OK, mayby BOBII.

Michael

We threw in a few funny lines, what I dubbed "extra cheese". I can imagine they might get a bit annoying after a time so you'll be able to flag 'em off.

We have some of the "drama" dialog too, including that very line you mention, Jim recorded that one for us with his trusty co-pilot.

I am always in for some extra cheese, sounds good (the other toppings as well).


michael.

What I meant was say one person finds a target and attacks it. It is destroyed and burning. He wants the other player to engage targets in the same area. The second player has a much easier time finding them if he can see the smoke plume from the targets that have already been killed.

Thanks for the response and I am really looking forward to release

Note #38

A new, yet to be named FOB is in the works. It's located smack-bang in the middle of the AO and will become the central hub of NATO army air operations.









Cheers

AD, none of the images is visible to me. Says due to Photobucket bandwith exceeded on your side.

Michael.