Helicopter

Just a couple of screens to demostrate I am still working on this... progress has been slow due to real life getting in the way, but things are moving forward!

Been spending a fair bit of time texturing to try and make things look a little nicer.











The bad guy helicopters have a bit more inteligence now... they shoot at you now and avoid your shots better, they don't just sit infront of you shooting they actually do fly by attacks, which does look very cool.

The parenting works well now so you can parent an object to a building (or whatever) so it stays within range of it. If the parent gets attacked it attacks the attacker and if it the child gets too far from the parent it returns to it.

Generally this makes it look quite intelligent... sort of!

Anyway... I've been asked to do a worklog for this so here it is:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/logs/userlog.php?user=547&log=626

It looks really very good, except ... blue ground and green trees?

i luv that last shot (the in @#!*pit view)... gives the look and feel of actually being in a chopper... cool...

(the texture for the gauges has to be a lil sharper though... )

--Mike

Banshee i think its just trees growing out of shallow sea. Oh. But compared to other shots it really is land. Well, it looks ok when you move around but a bit of extra green/gray/brown would be good.

Also true that you should have the guages texture increased. When a player sees something often, you dont want to save memory on those bits.

My younger bro keeps asking for a game exactly like this. The only one i found was a SNES rom game (3d with 2d), and now this one which would run on his system.

im jealous, doing an awesome job so far rob

I love the graphical style of this game - the internal textures could be better though.

Thanks for the comments guys, internal detail is not important as you won't be seeing it, I just like to have a bit of extra detail incase the camera drifts round. The bulk of the time you'll be seeing the helicopter from the 2nd and 3rd shots, mainly the 3rd.

The ground is still a little blue, this was mentioned before, this is due to my global tinting thing I've done where the sky cube is examined and the average hue returned, this hue is applied to all the objects and terrain. It works well when you've got red sunsets etc as everything tints red, I think maybe it's a little strong at the moment, need to subtle it up a bit!

[edit] Made some adjustments to the RGB bias onthe global tinting...

Wow great, any demos?

Looks great!

Are the orange men in the last picture guys that you have to pickup like in choplifter? :)

PCD, no demos yet I'm afraid still trying to get all the elements working together properly before releasing one.

Foppy, Yep, those are the guys you've got to rescue.

I like the look of this - has been slowly evolving into something a bit tasty.

Try to cross Desert Strike and Hunter (Amiga), well that's what I imagined anyway :-)