Helicopter harassment... or, things you've never seen in FG.

[chriscalef]

Just thought I'd drop in to share, apologies for the framerate and the terrible rotor effects, this is a live video capture with VirtualDub, from Torque3D, while running FlightGear and also rendering a separate movie in Blender, so my CPU was a bit occupied at the time. But my Ka50 (thank you @Emmanuel Baranger!) can now interact with my human actors. And it's surprisingly fun.

[Johan G]

Oh, so you are herding humans.

[Hooray]

FWIW, I do think that we had cows (and possibly other cattle) respond to aircraft in the early 2000s - I believe it was Erik, Norman or Melchior who implemented that at the time.
Given that this is video is featuring a military aircraft and that the video looks eerily similar to war-zone coverage we get to see on the news, this might be considered controversial by some folks ... especially if you add a FLIR/night-vision filter and some actual payloads.

Anyway, at that point, you can stop making games and sell the whole thing as a "war-zone simulator" ...

[legoboyvdlp]

I believe I recall Marc Kraus made a horse that could be herded with a helicopter, such as in Australia

[chriscalef]

And, it's gotten worse... we are now blowing the **** out of humans. If it makes anybody feel any better, this is not being done technically *in* FlightGear... and if you follow my project all the way through you will find that it is being done with a virulently anti-war message, not a glorification in any way, shape or form.

That being said: Sorry for the terrible particle effects, my weekend ran out before I got Blender's particle systems under control - but soon we will have rocket trails and explosions, for now we have a placeholder. What we do have is rockets launching out of our helicopter, receiving collision callbacks from PhysX when they hit the ground (which is a bit of an ordeal in PhysX 3.x) and creating explosion effects among the hapless humans.

[Hooray]

If this was using a little more fgfs related technologies, this could be of interest to some folks given that the 3D models can undoubtedly be changed to make the whole thing less controversial
Anyway, from a "combat sim" standpoint this could certainly be of interest to some folks here (think flug's Bombable addon).

[chriscalef]

One thing that I have found very interesting is that I'm having a _much_ easier time flying (and especially landing) the helicopter in my game engine than I do in FlightGear. I think the reason for that is because of the accurate realtime shadow on the ground. I almost felt bad for "cheating" by using a third person view instead of a cockpit view, but then I realized at my level of helicopter piloting skill, I need all the help I can get!

But I did find it interesting.

[wkitty42]

something else, too, that may be helping you is the physics employed by your game engine... unless maybe somehow it is the FG physics in play and your game engine is only displaying what FG tells it to display...

[chriscalef]

Yeah, the helicopter is being driven only by FlightGear - all of the other physics (humans, rockets, etc.) is being handled by PhysX on the game engine side.

[wkitty42]

i would guess that control over the vehicle being easier would be due to the craft's position updates being somewhat slower then when in-sim... likely because of the gathering and packaging for transmission from FG... but that's just another eWAG