Helicopter Gunship DEX News

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.

This is being released as a 2nd beta called "Terrain Streaming Testing" to ensure I haven't broken anything from the Fixed Wing beta!

This update adds the following....

1. Terrain streaming system. This allows terrain tiles to be streamed in as needed which reduces overall RAM usage as well as allowing huge, if not massive map sizes. 500 km x 500km is easily possible with the only real limit being the time it takes me to create a tile.

The terrain streamer only works on the Central Libya map and you should see the terrain tiles take a lot less time to load when starting a mission.

Over all RAM usage has also been reduced from 8-12Gb to a more sensible 5.5Gb. This should make the game much more stable on devices like the Steam deck. My aim is to keep RAM usage below 8Gb.

2. New terrain textures. Seeing as RAM usage has been lowered I am able to cram in some extra splat map textures on to each tile. Instead of 3 they now have 6 giving much more variety to the desert.

3. New foliage. The whole foliage planting system has been recreated to give a much more realistic feel to the desert. You will now see hardy grassy tufts for the most part but in valleys and other depressions you will see more varied plant life.

Terrain foliage no longer uses GPU instancing as the performance difference was negliagable.

4. New trees. You will now find trees living in the depressions and valleys where water is likely to gather. Trees are fully GPU instanced and have negligiable performance impact.

Trees with leaves will react to your helicopter's rotor wash when you get close.

5. New U.I. I have started upgrading the user interface. Some buttons have been moved and their placement standardised across all screens.

Most of the default menu screens have been upgraded to the new U.I. Mission planning screens still use the old style U.I. at the moment.

A small update that adds the following...

1. Harrier now has nose wheel steering.

2. Mavericks now have their correct Lau-88 Triple Launcher on the A-10

3. There is now an airbase to the South West on the Central Libya map to practise your take-off and landings!

4. Special Forces troops are now excluded from the player bubble system so they will continue to work and complete their mission even if you're not around to watch them.

Added an option to switch the "Thrust Vector" control to "Relative Control" in the "Control Settings" menu.

This is very important for those who do not have a axis on their controller and instead want to bind the controls to buttons/keyboard.

There is also a slider to set how fast the relative controls will move the thrust vectoring system.