Holiday Project

[Starglider]

Completed the fourth island, which is mostly swamp with some shallow canyons and towns (lots of bridges). Also completed some boring but essential stuff; the mode select and pause menus.

[Zixinus]

I understand that you want to use an Xbox 360 controlloer, but I wonder: if you are going commercial, will you allow some mapping? I mean, a xbox 360's controller and your average dual-shock doesn't have much of a difference.

[Starglider]

I understand that you want to use an Xbox 360 controlloer, but I wonder: if you are going commercial, will you allow some mapping? I mean, a xbox 360's controller and your average dual-shock doesn't have much of a difference.

A PS2 or PS3 controller would work fine as the controls are basically identical, but I am unsure what the driver situation is for those. Last time I checked the only way to use them on Windows were homebrew drivers of dubious reliability. Other gamepads would work as long as they have two sticks, two triggers and at least as many buttons as the Xbox/PS controllers.

Frankly I am going to do the Xbox360 version first and then think about how to release it as a PC program.

Currently the main thing lacking before people can playtest it is the tutorial that teaches you the controls. I will do that next.

[Starglider]

All birds are now upgraded to BLOCK 30 standard with conformal distributed phased synthetic aperture radar, TERCOM and GPS.



Or at least, a map. Of course as with everything else it is procedurally generated; gotta keep that 150 mb max download size clear for the 90 minutes of music.

[Starglider]

Sometimes the small things take as long as the hard things;



Various pop-ups from the tutorial and mission start. The tutorial is voiced, but out-of-character stuff and things that benefit from a diagram go on pop-ups.

My biggest concern with this game is that the control scheme will be too confusing for new players. It's fine once you get the hang of it - actually simpler than a lot of modern games as it only has one mode (well, some changes in free flight mode) - but possibly intimidating due to being non-standard and having to learn most of it before you can start playing.

[Hawkwings]

If it's not too late, I would recommend swapping the controls for roll and yaw. After all, roll is controlled by dropping one wing and raising the other, while yaw is more of a trick without a vertical stabilizer.

[Starglider]

If it's not too late, I would recommend swapping the controls for roll and yaw. After all, roll is controlled by dropping one wing and raising the other, while yaw is more of a trick without a vertical stabilizer.

I'm not sure what you mean. Currently, the sticks are directly mapped to wing position (well, strictly they are control inputs to the wing servocontrollers), and the aerodynamic model generates the actual changes in orientation and velocity. To roll an aircraft, you increase the lift on one side and decrease it on the other. I'm implementing this as a combination of wing fold and angle-of-attack changes - the AoA isn't easily visible to the player or for that matter understood by most people, so the tutorial just talks about folding and spreading wings. 'Dropping one wing' would work in principle, because the unequal dihedral would create a roll / slip moment, but it isn't a good idea beacause (a) the control authority would be poor, (b) it would interfere with flapping and reduce available thrust and (c) I don't give players direct control over wing flap angle because two dimensions (sweep / spread) is already hard enough. I did actually try mapping wing flap angle directly to the triggers, and it was an uncontrollable nightmare.

Since birds don't have a rudder, yaw can be done with either differential thrust, differential drag or inclined differential lift (via differential sweep combined with dihedral). The first one is supported in the game but doesn't work when gliding, the second one kills speed and is very hard to use due to cross-coupling, so the primary yaw control is based on differential sweep.

In an aircraft, you move the stick left or right to bank. This mapping is similar in that respect, but you move the sticks in the opposite direction to the way you want to bank. Yaw control actually works the same way as tank tread steering; the fact that it's harder to use than the roll is in one respect a good thing, because that discourages players from trying to turn by yawing (which bleeds off speed like crazy) instead of rolling (which preserves speed).

[Starglider]

Sorry, I should have said, 'you probably meant a more abstract mapping, where the sticks directly control where the bird is going, rather than what its limbs are doing'. The reason I'm not doing that is that a major aim of the game is capturing the 'feel' of bird flight, which means mapping the controls to wing positions. If I wanted the controls to be as easy as possible I'd use something like the Hornet controls from Halo 3 (and dump most of the aerodynamic model) but that would take a lot of the fun and challenge out of the game.

[Hawkwings]

Ahh, wing positions instead of flight controls, got it. Though it's going to be tough re-wiring flight sim brains to think "push the sticks forward" for "pull up"

[Starglider]

Ahh, wing positions instead of flight controls, got it. Though it's going to be tough re-wiring flight sim brains to think "push the sticks forward" for "pull up"

Well there's that and the fact that pushing the sticks forward is not a good way to pull up.

When you make an aircraft pitch up, you are not actually changing the direction of travel. What happens is that the aircraft's wings are now hitting the air at a steeper angle, which creates more lift, which converts some of the aircraft's forward speed into vertical movement. As the climb rate increases the effective angle-of-attack decreases, eventually balancing out. Aircraft in cruise point along their motion vector to minimise drag, but aircraft under heavy climb or flying at low speeds have a noticeable nose-up attitude. Most combat flight sims don't simulate this because it makes landing and strafing harder.

With birds, it isn't necessary to pitch up to climb, because the wing angle of attack can be independently adjusted. Doing it this way avoids the parasitic drag penalty that aircraft experience under non-zero pitch angles. Birds can also spread and fold their wings, which gives you more control authority compared to AoA changes alone (important at the low wing loadings smaller birds have). In Windhaven, while yawing to turn is a really bad idea (yaw is for targetting and slip compensation), pitching to climb/dive will work ok in normal mode. You'll just sacrifice a bit of speed and maneuverability. In 'expert' mode heavy pitch inputs have a highly unpredictable effect on climb rate; you can easily float, stall or go into porpoise oscillation depending on your airspeed and what kind of maneuver you're doing (largely due to the cross-coupling, since pitch works by changing the relative positions of the center of lift and center of gravity, not by direct deflection thrust like aircraft controls). Using the wing spread/fold/AoA is a much better idea.

To teach the player this I've disabled vertical control inputs completely for the first half of the tutorial. The player is required to fly a course around the island using horizontal inputs only. Hopefully this will get them used to the spread wings / fold wings mechanic.

[Starglider]

Completed the tutorial. This is the first dev video with voice acting in it. I thought the subtitles would be easy to implement but they were actually a pain in the ass. Still, had to be done.

[salm]

Brilliant move to use this type of music for the game.

[Starglider]

Brilliant move to use this type of music for the game.

Game music should support the gameplay rather than intrude on it. The soaring and free flight should be relaxed, the racing energetic but not to the point of being harsh or annoying. The music for the tutorial needed to be soothing and low key, so as not to distract from the instructions, plus if the player gets frustrated with the controls we don't want to make the situation worse with annoying music.

The air combat sections have somewhat different music; not exactly techno, but definitely harsher and with a lot more energy. I will include some of that in the next video.

[Starglider]

Some initial concept art for Sakoti;

[Starglider]

Concept sketch for the game cover art;



As you may have guessed, I have enlisted the aid of someone with actual drawing skills.

[JointStrikeFighter]

If you want any sales it will need bigger titties.

[Starglider]

If you want any sales it will need bigger titties.

But if I give the hawk bigger titties how is it going to fly? This is a realistic physics engine remember!

[JointStrikeFighter]

[Starglider]

Despite being only 60% complete, I submitted the game to the DreamBuildPlay competition. Which required me to make a teaser trailer.

[Zixinus]

The trailer is awesome. The voice actors sound better than what I sometimes saw in professional games.

[salm]

Very cool, again. One thing, though. Maybe it´s just me but i find that "bing" sound that is triggered when you pass a ring pretty annoying.

[Starglider]

The trailer is awesome. The voice actors sound better than what I sometimes saw in professional games.

Really? We all thought the voice acting sucked and needed to be re-recorded, but then most people hate to hear their own voice played back. I got off lucky; none of my lines made it into this teaser.

One thing, though. Maybe it´s just me but i find that "bing" sound that is triggered when you pass a ring pretty annoying.

The challenge there was to find a sound that always stood out from the background music, but you're right, I should try to find something softer, particularly for the soaring challenge.

P.S. Storyboards for the first cutscene;

[D.Turtle]

I'll agree with the voice acting sucking. The woman doing the talking most of the time talks too quickly some of the time and the tone is too even (no up or down in the pitch). This is especially extreme in the beginning of the video you just posted. The "You look like you're having fun" is fine. The voice acting in the tutorial video (dev. video #9) is especially bad in the beginning (both voices). Talking about that video, I thought that the constant teleporting back to the start of that training area extremely vexxing. That area should be a lot larger - and start higher too.

I thought the "ding" sound was fine.

Otherwise, the game seems quite nice, too bad I don't have an XBox or a controller

[Starglider]

First try at the box art. Several elements of this will definitely need to be redone, e.g. the typography. Perspective on the hawk is a bit off.

[salm]

The composition lacks overlaping elements. At the moment every element stands for itself. The woman, the building, the bad guys and the bird. Some overlap would do wonders.