Helicopter Gunship DEX News

This update adds the following....

1. New glow/holographic effect for the HUD. There are also 2 new sliders in the Game Settings menu to control how much glow intensity and glow spread.

The default values should give a subtle glow for most colours. However, the glow is calculated based on colour "brightness" so a whiter/lighter colours will naturally have more glow while darker colours have less. Setting the Glow Intensity to 0 will remove it completely.

A particular favourite of mine is...
Red: 255
Green: 120
Blue: 0
Glow Spread: 3
Glow Intensity: 0.2

Which then looks like this...



2. New main menu music which is actually from Stealth Fighter D.E.X. It's a bit more subtle for menu music while still being a little retro.

3. Removed foliage from under the runway

I think this now brings the terrain streaming beta to an end. It's working as far as i can see.

Early next week I will push all the updates to the public branch and we'll be starting on the upgrades for the sector system which means I am now working on Dynamic Campaign elements.

While the main focus of the next beta will be sectors it will also include a lot of other bits and pieces such as mission upgrades and A.I. upgrades for both fixed wing and rotor aircraft - you might even see vehicles starting to move as part of the supply column system ːsteamhappyː

This update adds the following...

1. Fixed the white lines that sometimes appeared underneath terrain foliage

2. Reduced the brightness of the tree foliage so it no longer looks too bright.

3. Adjusted the sun brightness in Central Libya. The idea is that midday sun should be extremely bright and the sand should reflect this light making everything terrain look more washed out.

This may look too bright, but it does work well with the cloud shadows which is something only I can see at the moment as the weather is always clear.

I will be exposing some image settings such as Gamma, brightness, contrast etc so you will be able to tune the image to your monitor / own preference in the future.

Fixes tracer colour so red tracers are now red instead of green!

This update adds the following....

1. Updated some more of the U.I. elements.

2. Waypoints can now be created and repositioned on the Mission Planning screen.

3. Adjusted tracer colours and glow so that they now fade into the distance more realistically

4. Restored the 4k terrain textures along with their 4k normal maps.

5. UPK-23 Gunpod now available for all Hind helicopters.

6. Fixed the shadows on the dead trees

7. A few more optimisations done on the terrain streaming system.

8. Adjusted shadow map cascades so that cockpit shadows are rendered at a higher resolution which sharpens them up nicely.

This update adds the following...

1. Adjusted the switching distance for "Wind Effect" trees and also increased the frustrum culling angle to hopefully prevent trees from disappearing at the edges of the screen.

If you do spot trees doing this then let me know what you screen resolution is and also what your field of view angles are.

2. Fixed a bug that prevented the Harrier from taking off when using high "Low Speed Drag Force Mutiplier" settings.

3. Updated some more of the U.I. buttons.

4. Fixed a couple of none critical errors with the button animators.

5. When starting a mission the music will only fade out once the mission has fully loaded. This prevents the music fading but not fading back in while the game is loading making it look like it may have crashed (but hasn't).

6. Music fading in/out is now much faster.