Deadstick - Bush Flight Simulator News

Characters in any game are a complex endeavour and one of the appeals of making a flight sim was that we could avoid them entirely! No human character models to perfect, no uncanny valley where faces somehow never look ‘right’, no matter how much you tweak, and no need for a team of animators to bring complex characters to life. No, instead, we could simply have an aircraft comprised of multiple meshes that either remain static, continually spin around (think propellers and wheels), rotate between two specific angles (most other moving bits of an aircraft!) or, in the case of some of the Deadstick team’s recent playthroughs - fall off entirely!

Whilst the focus in Deadstick is on being the pilot not the aircraft, playing in first-person means you don’t need to see your character - the pilot is literally you, playing through the screen and mastering your skills as a bush pilot - that is, until you introduce multiplayer!

Multiplayer with other aircraft is all well and good, but the beauty of Deadstick is being able to get out and walk around. Without avatars, and the ability to see one another, you cannot truly share that experience.

Those of you that came to see us at Cosford and had the chance to experience the multiplayer, will be more than familiar with our little red capsule characters. At the time, these were our solution (read, "hack") to representing the player character to others. These capsules had a certain simple charm to them and after all of the positivity generated from Cosford, we knew we needed a way to be able to introduce some form of avatar into the sim but without all of the complexity that comes with full human characters.



After much discussion, considering various different simplified and stylised humanoid options, it quickly became apparent however, that by adding realistic human avatars, we could do so much more to convey/express what players are up to, that it became inevitable that we would have to tackle the challenge head on!

[h3]The Traditional Approach[/h3]

As with all such things, it is often simplest to look at what others do when trying to solve such a problem and copy it. So we set off on a path to author a prototype humanoid character, get him rigged and set up with a few standard walk, run, and jump animations, and then sync his position with other players over multiplayer.

So just what goes into choosing a model for you, the player to be?

Firstly, we wanted to find one that could be used more-or-less off the shelf. We are a small team and, whilst we are lucky enough to have several very talented Vehicle and Environment Artists, character creation is a fairly specialised skill and models can often take months to develop from scratch. What's more, when designing anything new, there is always the challenge of trying to transfer a particular design/idea from one's own mind's eye to something that can be captured in a design brief and correctly interpreted by an Artist (I'm sure this is a problem any Police Sketch/e-Fit Artists can relate to!). It is by no means an impossible task, but one which usually requires several rounds of iteration before both parties can share the same mental picture.

So, we set about scouring the internet, to find a base model from which we could work. Much like the app store for playing games, these days there are several online marketplaces available to purchase assets which can be used in both film and games. This is great for creators! However, whilst models may look the same on the surface, they generally have very different requirements in terms of how they are authored, just how detailed the models are, and how they are then set up to run in-game. I'm sure you're all familiar with poly counts - whilst more generally look better, they are also (to somewhat oversimplify) a fairly good way of quickly bringing a graphics card to a crawl.

Unlike static assets, there is still more to consider however - characters need to be rigged to an underlying skeleton which can be manipulated and animated in a form that is friendly to the engine we are using, and any materials and textures also need to be developed in a form which is compatible with the rendering techniques we are using. PBR seems to be one of the buzzwords often talked about in flight sims in the last few years and it is the standard we are also using.

As I'm sure you can appreciate, the above narrows down the choice of what is suitable quite quickly!

What’s more, we had a fairly specific set of ideas of just what kind of look/feel we wanted to go for with our initial pilot and just what he should wear. It’s all very well dressing for the warmth and comfort of the cockpit whilst flying but, if things go wrong and pilots need to land out, then being suitably equipped to survive until rescued is a consideration that needs to be taken seriously. As beautiful as the backcountry is, it can quickly turn very hostile towards those that are ill-prepared for the conditions they may inadvertently find themselves in.

A great source of inspiration for Deadstick is the excellent videos produced by those at Backcountry Pilot. In one such video, there is a 30 minute presentation on what considerations should be made when dressing for the backcountry and what to pack in your survival bag. It’s well worth a watch here!

Another eye opener is the video with Bradley Friesen and someone whom I’m sure needs no introduction, FlightChops, on an inadvertent night in the cold and how quickly and serious things can change.

With all of that in mind, we scoured the internet and found this chap:



Arguably, a little over equipped and bearing somewhat of a resemblance to a lead character in a very famous third-person Action Adventure game, he wasn't exactly what we were looking for but was authored in a manner which was engine-friendly and also could serve as a good foundation upon which we could tweak and finesse the model to suit our needs.

Primarily, by removing the unnecessary holsters and scarf (somewhat of a hazard around spinning propellers) and redressing slightly. Removing the scar revealed a deep v-style shirt, which was a little too action hero for our needs, and so, we set about scaling the look back a little and instead opting for the classic bush pilot go to - the lumberjack!



The base mesh as imported, ready for edit.

An additional complication comes in as to just how characters are authored these days. You’ll remember me mentioning that, generally, with more polygons, comes better looking models. Well, Artists certainly know this and are keen to throw every last one at their models to achieve the best result. There is, however, a little trick that can be used to achieve a similar result without all of the graphics card expense using a technique known as baking.

Not cookies sadly, but Artists can author their models in very high detail, then create a low poly approximation of it and ‘project’ or ‘bake’ the detail from one to the other. This isn’t just in the form of textures, however, but the same is true for lighting - tricking the eye into thinking there are 3D details and creases etc. on the model where, in fact, none exist.

This presented an additional challenge as the process is generally somewhat one way - the model is authored in high detail, then a bespoke low poly mesh is generated, and the details baked across. We only had access to the baked end product and would therefore have to make our changes there directly.

Manipulating the geometry isn’t too tough but editing the baked information (saved in the form of texture and normal maps) was a challenge. What’s more, in the process of optimisation, the source Artist had combined the holsters into a single mesh, removing any pieces of shirt geometry that were underlying, as they wouldn’t be seen by the end user and, therefore, would have always been rendered unnecessarily. We therefore had to reconstruct all of these shirt parts before we could remake it!

Whilst at it, our talented Artist, Matt, took the opportunity to separate out all the materials for each of the clothing items, giving us the possibility to customise characters in the future. At the very least, allowing us to swap textures for a given garment, but with the foundation in place to swap clothing meshes entirely if desired.

Once remade, the next challenge is that any changes to the polygons or, more specifically, the overall topology of how the mesh is constructed, quickly break the skinning (the process in which an Artist defines just how each vertex should attach to each bone) and so the next task was to rework all of the skinning, fixing any problem areas such that our character could correctly move once again.

As is often the case with skinning, things didn’t go entirely to plan on the first attempt...



However, several tweaks later, and our character was rigged and ready to go.

And here we have it - our first pass character (literally) up and running within our game world.





This is very much a proof of concept, there are certainly more tweaks we would like to make - adding additional details to the character and softening some of the ‘hero’ features. However, we are pleased with the results so far and have had lots of fun testing together in the multiplayer (more to reveal there later!)

[h3]Advanced Avatars[/h3]

So how do we make our avatar look and feel human? Once running around, he’s already a big improvement on the red capsules, but feels very robotic. One obvious problem is that he stares fixedly at the horizon at all times, as if he’s wondering if he left the gas on. I wouldn’t get in a plane with this guy!

Since he’s controlled by another player, we do actually know where he should be looking - it’s wherever the other player’s looking.

At one time, head look would be implemented by just rotating his head, but this doesn’t produce a great result - especially when the target is behind him. Unless he’s possessed, he shouldn’t be able to rotate his head 180 degrees to look behind him. Instead, his head, neck, shoulders, and even torso should be involved in getting his eyes on the target.

In technical terms, each bone needs to follow certain constraints and the whole system needs to be solved so the eyes are on the target without the bones breaking those rules. This is a very common and well understood problem, known as Inverse Kinematics (IK). Unity supports this out of the box, so it’s fairly easy to hook up.

So now your avatar can run, jump and look around. Importantly, I know whether you’re looking at me or not which makes him (and thus you!) seem immensely more human.

[h3]IK Avatars In the Cockpit[/h3]

When he gets into the cockpit he now sits rigidly upright and looks around correctly.

IK lets us do more… We can use the same approach as the head looking to put his hands on the joystick. As long as the IK is working correctly, he will realistically re-pose himself as the joystick moves according to the remote player’s input (This is a good way of understanding the literal meaning of “Inverse Kinematics” - he’s not really moving the joystick, the joystick moves and that moves his hand, which moves the arm’s bones. In other words, the Kinematics (i.e. movement) is Inverted (backwards)).

We can also put his left hand on the throttle and his feet on the rudder pedals. As the remote player operates the controls, he will move his whole body accordingly.



This is pretty good, but Deadstick has a lot of other controls. It would be great if he could interact with everything in the cockpit. We already know what the other player is looking at, so we interpret that as a guide for what the avatar should be interacting with. So when the other player hovers over the magnetos key, we can tell the avatar to reach out and do the same.

Up until this point, we were using Unity’s built in IK, but we start to see some issues. It seems that it only does a limited number of bones, so when we tell him to position his hand he only moves his shoulder and elbow. This would be sufficient for anything within arm’s length, but in this case it leaves him grasping helplessly for the key - he needs to lean forward to reach it. In IK terms, we need full body IK, which Unity doesn’t provide. Happily, there are 3rd party solutions available - we use FinalIK.



So now he operates the controls fairly well and he’ll look around, but he will sit bolt upright no matter what happens to the plane. To solve this, we can apply a bit of feedback from the physics to his position, moving him around in his seat as he would if he was really flying. The IK will keep his hands on the controls (as far as possible).



Finally, for the human touch, we’ve added some simple emotes - these are just animations that play on the top half of the character whether he’s on foot or in the plane. So you can wave to other players - it’s only polite when you’ve just avoided an in-air collision!



[h3]The Future[/h3]

As with all of the systems we are developing in Deadstick, we like to think about what the future may hold for them and, in turn, develop them in a way that provides a solid yet flexible foundation upon which we can build. The two most exciting areas here are customisation and VR. Of course, we will want to expand upon the range of characters we can offer, such that all players can find one that appeals to their inner bush pilot persona, but allowing players to take that a step further by being able to choose their attire would be a lot of fun and make pilot recognition much simpler!

As we focus on VR post-Early Access, we are keen to exploit the full body IK system further also, not just guessing where pilots should be moving their limbs based on the instruments/cockpit controls they are interacting with - but rather let them drive the animation directly through their real world movements, further increasing the immersion that players can experience.

Finally, on the post-Early Access wishlist, is the option to transport humanoid passengers, either in the form of AI characters, which must be transported from A to B as part of a passenger job, or perhaps, more excitingly, by teaming up with one of your buddies for a shared cockpit flight and being able to accurately gesture and interact with one another.

This and more will all be possible thanks to the foundation upon which we have built our characters.

[h3]Avatars In Action[/h3]

We weren’t planning on releasing a video with this social update. However, we had so much fun testing the avatars in multiplayer that we couldn’t resist sharing a quick sneak peek of what we have achieved so far!!

The following video is spliced together from that play test...

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

People often ask what the motivation was behind making Deadstick and with that I have to recall my own flight training. One of the biggest surprises was how little of the course was dedicated to physically learning to fly an aircraft, and how much focus was placed on procedures and the discipline involved to operate one safely.

There are many sims that do an incredible job of simulating aircraft, but I always found that the experience of simulating the pilot and airmanship was somewhat lacking. To that end, the concept of Deadstick was born, to give players the experience of what it’s like to be the pilot.



Those that have been lucky enough to fly in a light aircraft, will also likely have experienced the sheer disappointment of having your trip or lesson cancelled at the last minute due to poor, unforecast or, in my case, British weather! And with good reason.

The weather presents one of the biggest risks to general aviation pilots and continues to catch pilots out. Gasco (The General Aviation Safety Council) here in the UK have identified that weather related accidents, be that loss of control in poor weather or controlled flight into terrain, often as a result of hitting rising terrain whilst in cloud, accounted for 20% of all aircraft accidents between 1980 to 2006, with the figures remaining much the same to this day, and similarly echoed around the world.

The dangers are numerous -

• Clouds can quickly lead to spatial disorientation and rapid loss of control.
  
• Icing can quickly lead to loss of aerodynamic lift and the ability to maintain altitude/flight.
  
• Fog and poor visibility can entirely obscure a runway, leaving you trapped in the air.
  
• Wind can wreak havoc on take off and landings, as well as ground speed and fuel planning.
  
• Combine wind with mountains, and dangerous downdraughts on the leeward side can pull you down into the terrain.
  
• Not to mention the implications of flying into storms.
  

Is Deadstick a game or a simulator? I’ll leave that to the community to debate but, if it is a game, then the weather is certainly the enemy!

For Deadstick to provide a compelling pilot experience, it is essential for us to create a dynamic and realistic weather model with which the player can interact with, plan around and hopefully avoid. This created its own unique challenges. As other simulators have increasingly turned to grabbing live weather data or giving the user a choice of fixed scenarios, the former isn’t an option for us in our fictional world, and the latter doesn’t give us the challenging unpredictability that we want the player to experience.

We have therefore set about creating a plausible dynamic weather model which can create an environment in which the player can experience all of the hazards described above.

Those that have had the opportunity to play Deadstick will have encountered some of these before - Thick overcast layers of cloud making it difficult to let down for an approach amongst mountainous terrain, strong crosswinds presenting challenging approaches and dangerous topographic effects when trying to fly over mountains in strong winds.



It isn’t just enough to randomly select from various weather parameters and change them throughout a given playthrough. Whilst weather can be chaotic, over time, pilots can often learn how to interpret or predict how the weather will change based on current conditions. What’s more, certain locations will often have their own region specific weather conditions or micro-climates - be that prevailing winds, a predictable early morning fog, which will burn off as the sun warms the ground, or building afternoon cumulus clouds which could catch out any unsuspecting pilots. These are all elements we wanted to ensure we could somehow capture and feel plausible to the region we are most inspired by when building our fictional world - Alaska.

So how exactly does it work?

Well, we decided to cheat.

We might not have access to live weather data given that we are using a fictional location. However, what we do have access to is years of historical weather data for Alaska, so we opted to analyze that data over a 10 year period, looking at how the weather evolves each day and, from that, build a statistical model with which we could use to represent similar effects.



[h3]Introducing Markov Chains[/h3]

Markov chains have often been used to predict the weather but, in their simplest form, describe how things move from one state to another using probability. Grossly oversimplifying, a sunny day might have a 60% chance of continuing to remain sunny, a 25% chance of turning to light rain and a 15% chance of storms. We can roll a dice to determine which outcome occurs based on the above probability and then in turn do the same for our new state.

The reality is far more complex as we include many more parameters to describe how the weather might evolve over given days, weeks, months and, in turn, how these affect wind, cloud base, temperature, dew point, surface pressure, visibility, etc. All of this is generated using historic real world data to create a statistically accurate model.

[h3]Game vs Simulation[/h3]

This alone isn’t enough however. Deadstick provides a sandbox environment in which players can take on various flying jobs in an ever changing weather environment.

Having an accurate weather model is nice but we also want to be able to prod our weather model, whether that be for good or for evil.

In the early game, perhaps we might want to have the weather system lean towards clear sunny skies whilst players learn the ropes of navigation. Similarly, for more experienced players, we might want to have the weather be far more changeable to present more of a challenge, all whilst remaining plausible. Similarly, whilst jobs are often procedurally generated for a unique and dynamic experience, we wanted to add in specific jobs and events with their own exciting challenges. To that end, it was essential to refine our weather system such that it could be influenced or entirely overridden by specific events within Deadstick. This is exactly what we have been working on over the past few months and we think you’ll like the results!

[h3]Planning and Forecasting[/h3]

Having an accurate weather model is great but we also need our virtual pilots to be able to plan for how best to fly in it. In the real world, this is done in two ways - by looking at the current weather at our local airport, en route and at our destination, and by looking at forecasts where available for all of the above.

Actual weather is generally delivered to pilots in the form of METAR’s (Meteorological Aerodrome Reports) and forecasts via TAF’s (Terminal Area Forecasts).

These are encoded messages for brevity which pilots are taught to decode in order to best understand a given day’s weather. It was essential for us to be able to represent these in-game with particular attention on the forecasts.

Forecasting has improved over the years, but it isn’t an exact science - sometimes forecasts can be very accurate, sometimes less so. This is one of the exciting areas of Deadstick - forcing players to deal with the unknown and unforecast and seeing how they react.

One of the benefits of our weather model is that, as we are simulating it, we know exactly how it is going to evolve and can in turn deliver perfect forecasts…

But where is the fun in that!!

In much the same way that we can use Markov chains to determine how the weather will actually evolve in our simulation, we can also analyse the probabilities for the other states we could be transitioning to and use that to drive our forecast system. If we are feeling particularly nice, we can just forecast the most likely outcomes which would probably represent what will actually happen with the weather. However, for more experienced players, we can start to have fun with the forecasting and instead forecast very plausible changes which could occur, but which ultimately won’t, forcing players to think on their feet!

[h3]Fly By the Seat of Your Pants[/h3]



It’s all very well being able to simulate the weather under the hood, but what about being able to feel it? In Deadstick, every aerodynamic surface of the aircraft is broken down into tiny sections and each one is simulated individually. Each section flies through its own parcel of air and, as such, will react uniquely to the air that it encounters, be it rough or smooth. This means that as you fly through the weather, each part of the aircraft is affected differently, making for a much more dynamic environment which truly feels ‘alive’.

These parcels of air are aware not only of the global weather, but also the local terrain topography, which can make for some very interesting dangerous flying conditions if flying low in the mountains in high winds. It’s entirely possible to encounter downdraughts which can exceed the climb rate of the aircraft, the consequences of which can be severe!

This system has been designed to be as extensible as possible such that, over time, we can continue to add and refine effects. It’s not uncommon in the real world for certain airstrips to have their own unique weather quirks and dangers, particularly where trees are involved close to the runway and the subsequent wind rollover effects that can occur. These are all details we hope to develop and refine over time.



[h3]Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining[/h3]

How many of you have been flying an instrument approach on your simulator of choice in limited visibility, only to find yourself instantly pop through a sheet of cloud into perfect weather - breaking the immersion and destroying the challenge of your zero visibility approach?

This is a common problem which occurs when trying to represent clouds using traditional meshes or billboards. These meshes, constructed from triangles or quads, have no thickness and so, whilst it is possible to produce some beautiful looking results, they can only ever be seen ahead of you and will instantly pop away as soon as you pass through the camera.

Traditionally, it was too computationally expensive to consider alternative approaches. However, with the advent of modern graphics cards, volumetric rendering effects are now a reality. This allows for true fluffy clouds with realistic depth and lighting which the player can fly in and be fully immersed inside.

We don’t just want to stop with cloud and atmospheric effects however. In one of our previous posts, you will have seen the progress we have achieved with our dirt system. The next step is to marry the two together such that the weather can dynamically affect the terrain surfaces you are flying over which, in turn, will have drastic implications on the ground handling of the aircraft. A challenge that always needs to be considered when flying from strips or operating off airport!

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this month’s update and digging into the details on how weather will work in Deadstick. See you next time :)

[h2]Tactile World[/h2]

One of the key philosophies of Deadstick is the focus on being the pilot not the aeroplane. To this end, we have tried to capture as many of the processes that a pilot would go through and faithfully replicate them in-game.

Some of these features we have demonstrated previously, however we have since identified a few areas in which we felt we could go even further to enhance the experience within Deadstick. Some of these items are highlighted below.

[h3]Briefing Rooms[/h3]

One of the key elements of Deadstick we have yet to reveal to the public is the map screen and job planner. Its development has been very fluid with constant iteration as we work to make it as user-friendly and intuitive as possible. As such, it has never quite been at a point where it has been representative enough of the final version to show it off (one for a future update)!

One big lesson from this process however, was the discovery that we were making life far too easy for the player. From the map screen, players had constant access to weather information (TAFs/METARs) and airfield information (NOTAMs). Any jobs that were available would be displayed on the map screen and could be selected at any time.

A key part of good airmanship is gathering relevant information for a planned route and using that information to safely conduct a flight. By providing constant access to this information at the press of a button, we were robbing the player of the opportunity to gather this information in a realistic manner – and so, we decided to make things more difficult!

All weather (TAFs, METARs) and notices (NOTAMs) must now be gathered by the player by visiting an airfield’s briefing room, walking in, and using the briefing computer. Any information obtained will then update the map screen and can be used for planning. As in the real world however, that information is only relevant at the time you retrieved it and will quickly go out of date. It is therefore important to factor these briefing room visits into your daily flights to have a good idea of the forecast and/or temporary airspace restrictions that might be active that day. To complicate matters further however, as in the real world, not all airfields have such facilities and, as such, the player will need to carefully plan their flights to make sure they don’t find themselves in unforecast weather/temporary airspace!

[h3]Cell Phone[/h3]

In much the same way that weather and NOTAMs must be obtained manually via the briefing rooms, we wanted the manner in which the player obtains jobs to be done in a similarly physical fashion and so it was only natural that we equip the player with a cell phone. This is your central device for communication within the game.



Should you start to get a reputation as a safe and successful Bush Pilot within Deadstick, you will likely start to get text messages with job requests from which you can choose to accept or ignore. Everything you do in Deadstick will have some influence on your reputation and, as such, you must manage it carefully should you wish to grow your bush flying empire. Don’t worry though - if you ruin your reputation in one location you can always fly elsewhere and hope to start afresh. A word of warning though - the extent of damage to your reputation caused by a particular 'event' will also determine how badly that ripples through to other airports and may therefore have implications on your job offers elsewhere. If you’re going to crash - best to do it where no one will see you - although it may then be a long walk home!

With that in mind airport facilities can also be contacted via text messages including salvage companies, should you find yourself stranded out in the bush with a broken aircraft.

Be careful however, as much like the VHF radio simulation, we also simulate cell phone coverage and reception. If you’re in an area of little to no coverage, you may just find yourself walking around on foot searching for signal before you can make that important rescue call. Yes, you can text and fly. However, we don’t recommend it!

[h3]Refueling[/h3]

Managing weight, balance and fuel loads are key elements to performing a successful flight and, as such, we felt it important to improve upon our previous proximity based fueling mechanic with players instead being able to physically refuel the aircraft manually. It is now possible to taxi up to the pumps, remove the fuel hose and manually refuel the aircraft with the hose physics correctly simulated. A small detail that goes a long way to creating a believable and physical world.



You’ll have to pay for this however, using your hard earned cash, so be sure not to overfill the aircraft and limit your cargo carrying capability should you not need to!

[h3]Checklists/Walk Around[/h3]

One of the goals with Deadstick is to provide purpose to people’s flying, by gamifying the bush flying experience without compromising on the simulation aspects where important (such as the flight model). It was therefore important to us to design an initial aircraft that is forgiving and simple enough for a newcomer to fly, whilst being accurate and faithful enough to the real world inspiration that experienced pilots and simmers can push it to the limit.

Whilst we are happy we have such an aircraft, one thing has continued to foil people not familiar with the type – the Master Switch location! We saw this as a great opportunity to think about and develop our walk around and checklist system. Checklists can now be pulled out and flicked through in the same tactile manner as our other interactions, providing clear and concise instruction to the pilot when performing external walk arounds, pre-flight checks, power checks, etc. For each item, it is also possible to click on a given action and have it highlight the relevant object on the aircraft for your attention – No more searching for the Master Switch!



Checklist usage is not mandatory and, similarly, does not force the exact sequence of events to be followed accurately. In the real world, it is possible to skip checklists or read off items out of habit vs properly checking the item leading to mistakes. These all play into the human factors element we see as key to the challenge of Deadstick.



Our walk arounds have been updated too. It is now possible to perform all of your full and free checks whilst examining the exterior condition of the aircraft.

[h3]Towbar[/h3]

At times, it is not always convenient to start up and taxi your aircraft, particularly if you want to go in reverse! As such came the need to be able to maneuver our aircraft on foot. What better way to do that than with a towbar which can be quickly hooked onto the tailwheel? This is a physical process, with your character applying forces to the aircraft to get it moving. Maneuvering the aircraft on a flat apron may be relatively straightforward but trying to pull it up hill or, worse, stop it from rolling downhill, could lead to an expensive mistake!!



[h2]What's Next[/h2]

We hope you’ve enjoyed this small series of updates which represent a small snapshot of just some of the features that have been going into Deadstick over the past few months. We look forward to sharing more in the future, particularly when our planner is complete and we can start to dive deeper into the career and economy side of Deadstick.

If you're interested in talking more Deadstick, other flight sims, or real-life flight, we have an awesome Discord community! Come say hi :)

You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter!

As mentioned earlier, the delay whilst unforeseen, has allowed us to spend more time developing and refining existing gameplay mechanics as well as identifying what truly makes Deadstick a unique simulator and doubling down on those features.

Much has changed since we last showed the game and it would be impossible to cram everything into this update. The following therefore is a selection of some of the items that the team are most excited to share. Will dive into some of these systems and others in much more detail within future updates!

[h2]Living world[/h2]

[h3]Biomes[/h3]

Whilst much of our focus has been on the underlying terrain generation systems and improving run-time performance, another big addition has been the support of varying terrain biomes. This allows us to have distinct and varied locations within our world, each with their own challenges/considerations as a pilot. From dense forest to sparse tundra and snow capped peaks, pilots will have to learn to quickly adapt to operating in a variety of different conditions and locations all with unique challenges!

[h3]Environmental Effects[/h3]

With an environment comes the need for players to be able to interact with it in their aircraft. Be it snow, mud, grass or gravel, we want each surface to be faithfully represented and have a real impact on the players aircraft.

Many of you will have seen the lengths we went to with the Aircraft damage system to create a real-time dynamic deformation system, ensuring that when you see a dent in a specific location on your aircraft, you know it’s there because you caused it, not because we swapped out a part for a pre-damaged model variant. This feeds heavily into the aircraft ‘survival’ aspect of the game and so, it is only natural we apply this same philosophy to the environment and weather/dirt effects.

As a result, each particle of mud/dirt is accurately simulated and will splatter dynamically all over your, now not so clean, aircraft! These dirt effects aren’t just for show however and will have very real implications on your flying, from obscuring visibility to actually increasing drag and degrading lift on your aircraft.



Not only are splatters simulated but so too is the wetness of the mud – wet mud will stick to the aircraft and actually visibly dry out over time. This may sound like an odd thing to simulate, however this will allow for greater interaction of different dirt types when flying around the world and even washing off dirt during wet weather or, when supported, water assisted landings.



[h3]Multiplayer[/h3]

Whilst a beautiful environment will make for a fun playground to explore in Deadstick, it will not feel alive without other aircraft. To that end multiplayer has always been a key ambition in bringing the world of Deadstick to life. A passive experience in which players don’t have to battle with hosting their own servers, configuring firewalls or sharing IP addresses but, instead, are simply able to enjoy the experience of being a bush pilot and naturally find themselves flying amongst fellow like-minded pilots.



Initially planned for Early Access, this has now been fully realized and requires no effort on the part of the player thanks to our cloud hosted servers. Though it can be disabled if so desired, players will find themselves in a living and inhabited world from the start.

For those pilots who fancy a spot of formation bush flying with their friends, we also have the option of creating private/public rooms in which you can fly together and define your own flying conditions/scenarios.



Whether flying with friends in a custom room or letting Deadstick take care of the ‘matchmaking’ for you, players also have the option to enable or disable aircraft to aircraft collisions – should you not wish another player’s lapse in concentration to cost you your hard earned flying dollars!



[h3]Voice Communication/VOIP[/h3]

It was absolutely essential to us, if doing multiplayer properly, that voice communication be simulated out of the box.

Deadstick now simulates VHF communication and allows players to tune their radios and chat to other players on the selected frequency. Range effects are also simulated creating a realistic radio environment with which players can communicate.



When players are not flying, proximity chat can also be used to speak to those on the ground within the vicinity.

[h2]Breathing World[/h2]

It isn’t just enough to simulate the world and aircraft in Deadstick without too considering the pilot. There are various ‘human factors’ that we expect to occur naturally within Deadstick as pilots attempt to push the envelope of their flying. However, we also wanted to model some of the physiological effects that can occur when flying.

[h3]Fatigue[/h3]

Flying for long periods of time and maintaining situational awareness can be tiring. This is something we want pilots to consider. As a result we now simulate Pilot fatigue. The longer you fly, the more tired you will become. Fly for too long and you will start to get drowsy – vision will darken as eyes start to close, controls will feel less precise and, if you’re not careful, you might just fall asleep! A quick wiggle of the controls can help you wake up if you are just drowsy but, push it too far, and you may find yourself asleep and unable to control your aircraft!

(Terrain early WIP, time asleep shortened for demonstration)

A tent can be used to catch up on a few hours of sleep between flights or when the weather makes it impossible to fly.



[h3]G-Force[/h3]

A staple amongst flight simulators, but nonetheless something we couldn’t miss from Deadstick, are the effects of G-Force and the loss of peripheral vision that can occur by their sudden onset. Beware though, it’s not just blacking out that should concern you, but the very real chance of structural damage/failure that can occur to your aircraft.



[h3]Hypoxia[/h3]

Most bush planes are not pressurised and our starting aircraft is no exception. If the weather is bad at low level and you are patient enough to endure a long climb, then getting on top of it all could be a good solution. With this in mind we felt it important to also simulate the effects of hypoxia including the time of useful consciousness and how it varies with altitude. The effects of hypoxia are subtle – starting with a loss of colour vision, before coordination deteriorates and eventually consciousness is lost. All again now simulated within Deadstick.



[h2]What's Next[/h2]

While this week's update focused on how we're breathing life into Deadstick's world, next week we'll be touching on the tactile part of the world. We'll cover ground on what kind of processes players will be undertaking as a pilot, from gathering weather and airfield information to refueling and completing checklists.

Greetings Deadstick fans!



Building a new Flight Simulator from the ground up was never going to be easy, however I don’t think any of us quite anticipated the challenge that was building our living, breathing environment!

We always knew we wanted to create beautiful and detailed worlds that would compliment low level bush flying and have steadfastly refused to compromise on that ambition. The reality however, has been that many of the tools that we had been using to develop the game simply were not capable of handling the size, scale, volume or complexity of the world we have been trying to develop.

Try as we might to push these to their limits, we reached a point where it became clear that even simple progress was being held back by the tools and something needed to be done.

After some deliberation, the difficult decision was made to de-prioritise progress on the gameplay and instead, focus our efforts on the tools. Designing and building new tools from the ground up which are purpose built for the task of populating the world of Deadstick, that can run fast, take full advantage of all of the hardware we can throw at them and allow us to realize our ambition without compromise.

Sometimes it is necessary to take a step backwards before you can move forwards, however this had left us in a difficult position. Many of you have watched the trailers, participated in the livestreams or even had hands-on experience with Deadstick. Stripping our world back to its bare bones made it very difficult to show screenshots of ‘progress’ when, to outside viewers, it would look as if things had gone considerably backwards. We therefore made the decision to focus on getting the tools done and letting the results speak for themselves as and when the time came. The reality, as with developing any new set of technologies, particularly with a small team, is that things took longer than anticipated and the community, rightly, grew anxious waiting for updates.

The good news however, is that whilst there will always be minor tweaks and improvements to be made, these tools are now done, give us better functionality and performance than we could have ever imagined and will serve as a foundation on which to build our current and future worlds.

In addition to the development of these tools, we have also had much opportunity to think about and refine existing gameplay mechanics and systems within Deadstick. Prototyping new ideas and incorporating functionality into the simulator that we had not anticipated prior to Early Access. Functionality we have been itching to show off, but without a world to show it off in, have been unable to do so, until now! But more about that later...



[h2]The Technical Bit[/h2]

For those who are interested in exactly what goes on behind the scenes, the following is an attempt to break down the technical challenges we have faced over the past months of silence and our solutions to those problems. For those that want to see the end result, simply skip ahead to end.

‘Styx’ and ‘Stones’ may break my bones...

The task of generating a beautiful, dense and believable world is split into three problems:

• Authoring the base terrain model for our world.
  
  
• Populating the terrain with natural and man made elements.
  
  
• Efficiently rendering that populated terrain within the simulator.
  

We have been hard at work tackling each of these head on with two purpose built tools - ‘Styx’ and ‘Stones’.

[h3]Introducing Stones[/h3]

Working much like a traditional 2D layer based paint package but manipulating terrain heights instead of pixels, Stones is the initial building block for developing and crafting our detailed world, allowing us to stamp and blend various terrain features such as mountains, rivers and valleys together in realtime. Don’t like a particular mountain’s location? Stones allows our artists to drag and drop them to a desired location and then quickly and easily blend them into the surrounding terrain. What was once a slow, laborious and error prone process which struggled to cope with the size of the worlds we envisaged, can now be done in realtime with instant visual feedback.



Stones was designed from the ground up to support and even combine both fictional and real world features. This functionality gives us powerful flexibility to explore different opportunities for future worlds once in Early Access.



[h3]Introducing Styx[/h3]

Once we have our base terrain, the next challenge is how to populate it. The traditional flight sim approach has been to overlay aerial imagery. Whilst this technique is very effective at high altitude, it quickly falls down at low level where resolution becomes a challenge. As the emphasis in Deadstick is on low and slow bush flying we wanted to steer away from this solution and instead represent the world entirely from geometry, where every tree, rock and blade of grass within the world is a 3D object the player can both see and interact with.

It simply isn’t practical to place every tree by hand, let alone every blade of grass, and so a system was needed with which artists could define rules for different surface types and the computer could generate and place the appropriate features accordingly. This isn’t entirely new, we have shown off similar technology in all of our previous demos. What we hadn’t anticipated however, was the sheer volume of assets that needed to be created and placed.



As it stands, there are currently 2.3 billion trees which are generated and exist within our world. To arrive at that figure, the tool must first test many more locations to determine which ones are valid based on rules such as surface, slope, texture type, etc. Once a valid location is found, it must then be tested against all other trees/objects to ensure that they do not overlap. This testing takes time and subsequently our terrain generations quickly ballooned from several hours to several days. Try as we might to optimize this process with our existing tool it was simply becoming too burdensome for our artists to make even minor changes without having to endure very long regeneration times.

By moving this functionality to a separate tool, and by taking full advantage of multi threading and clever caching of previously built rules, we have managed to remove much of the generation overhead and waste, reducing our build times from days down to minutes or in the worst case, hours. This gives our artists the freedom they need to experiment with new ideas and maximise the visual quality they can achieve.

As the majority of this work has been rewriting / redeveloping much of our build system’s inner workings, it is probably the least interesting to show visually, but has by far the biggest implications with regards to efficiently authoring and populating our terrain.



This may look like a fairly mundane screenshot but this tool has dramatically improved the way in which we work and in turn, the detail and quality we are able to achieve within Deadstick.

[h3]The Result[/h3]

Beautifully detailed worlds at any altitude no longer limited by scale or build times but instead, only our imagination!















[h2]What’s Next[/h2]

As mentioned above, in parallel to our work on the terrain functionality and tools, much has been done to develop and refine the gameplay systems and interactions within the simulator. Next week we shall release Part 2, in which we start to explore some of these systems in more detail, giving you a glimpse into what you can expect as a day in the life of a pilot within Deadstick!