posted 11-01- 12:52 PM               

What's that...you pay my wages....oh....

still, there is still a few hours left in the day....

The engines are all done, and looking very sweet! The one on the left has the cowling hidden to show off the 9 cylinder radials. The funny looking object on the right is one of the old engines....just for comparison!!!

The fuse has an outside now, and a full set of windows too. Glass panels are correct for a 17F without the cheek extensions. The nose guns are atraight forward flexi-mount jobs. You can't see it in these shots, but the tail interior is all done too. The turret has glass, and to get the view forward from the tail right, I have put a bulkhead in to obscure the upper part of the rearward view. You will still be able to look back from the waist and see the tailgunner coz I think that is how it should be! Just can't see forward from the tail perch!

Last of todays little teasers is the new ball turret. The old one was rubbish, and this looks a littel better! Has corrected windows etc. and will be damageable when finished. Before, the turret was like the airline black boxes......however bad the crah, you could always find that ball turret left intact!!!! Well, no longer.

Will have this lot plugged into the game in the next couple of weeks I hope, and then there will be some crewmen......waist, tail, upper and pilot / co-pilot. Probably a bombardier too.

Thats all for now...

posted 11-01- 01:26 PM               

and the hardpoints!

posted 11-01- 03:35 PM            

A thought I'm sure its gonna take up some serious framerate, (totally worth it though), I wonder if someone should design a gutted B-17, that's strictly for building missions and no one would fly it except AI. In a mission for example you could have 1 or 2 "real" b-17s but have two or three more gutted ones. When I mean gutted, you know, on the outside it looks pretty much the same but on the inside hardly any graphics or objects, dials, levers, working guns, etc. etc.

Then you could certainly raise the number of b-17s in a mission. Without too much loss of fps.

Am I just talking nuts here, or what? I'm just a peasant when it comes to designing stuff.

posted 11-01- 04:34 PM               

Are you freakin kidding me??? This is soooooooooo coool!!!

Great work! Your are to be commended sir!

Thanks from all of us who bought this game when it came out just for the B17.

Sweetness

posted 11-01- 04:53 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sturm Spieler:
gutted B-17, that's strictly for building missions and no one would fly it except AI.

---

Would this have any effect at all? Unless you fly close enough to load up the interior, wouldn't there be no framerate hit whatsoever? I thought the big hit with the planes was the CPU being spent on the physics, not the graphics detail?

posted 11-01- 04:56 PM               

Indeed, you are to be commended.

Keep it up mate... can't wait to get her.

Cheers,

AGAS 5

posted 11-01- 05:22 PM               

Just make the engines look a little better, then maybe the fuse is a little angular....then people start DM work so I make a few bits that can come off....then the old bits look a little rough, so I touch them up....then Aladar made his new plane look good on the inside, and I thought...well the inside of the B17 looks..naff...so a new interior...etc. etc.

On the bright side, though, a lot of this stuff will now be piled into the B24.

Less good, is that the B24 now looks so dowdy by comparison. Lots more modelling needed there now!

posted 11-01- 05:47 PM               

W T you got em beat already, their nacelles and cowlings are octogonal, yours are much rounder. Oh Yeah! What nice work, our old gal is comin' out with a big smile.

Check out them radial engines, way cool. And that fuse is getting rounder too. Wow.

Ok, ok, I'm takin' my medication now.

------------------
Hawk
http://rcwarbirds.com/

posted 11-01- 11:08 PM               

WT, that is AWESOME!!!
Looking VERY SWEET indeed, and I'm sure she'll be a pleasure to fly.

Will you make a version without crew for online play?
Another question, has the texture mapping changed at all?
I know big textures bogs down memory, but nose art on the old B-17 seemed a bit grainy.
Hmm... maybe a large high-res TIFF right where the noseart should be would do the trick.

posted 11-01- 11:45 PM               

How many polys compared to the original? What kind of framerates are you getting on the current model on your machine, and what about the original?

B17ii may still have its attributes, but imo it just lost another "comparative advantage" to sdoe. WTG TG!

Werner

posted 11-02- 07:36 AM               

Will the engines be able to be blown off, cowls also? Will the ball turrent retract?

Looking forward to flying her.

posted 11-02- 07:55 AM               

The ball turret won't be retracting. I'm not sure how it should do this for the B17, though when I get back to the B24, I will have to make damn sure that one does!

Concerns for a slide up into the fuse type of DOF would centre around whether the AI would do it, otherwise the guns end up clipping through the fuse. For the B24, Iwas going to make the ball turret mount part of the undercarriage, with it lowering when the gear was raised. Haven't tried it, but that may be a way of doing it.

As to the differences, I have adopted a clean sheet of paper approach to doing this plane! None of the bits in the screenshot are from the original, except for that rngine comparison! I wanted it to look right, and that was never going to happen with a mod of the original. It was made up of lots of merged bits and pieces, andthe seperating of those would have taken longer than a fresh start!

I will use the wings and Hstabs from the original, but I'm going to re-texture the elevators....

So far, texture wise, all the internal textures are takeen from a single 255 x 255 tile. The external textures are pinched from the original, only I rotated it 90' since that worked better in AC3D. I don't know yet whether I will go for a complete new exterior texture......

I MAY NEED HELP WITH THAT....

posted 11-02- 10:55 AM            

Maury

responding:

posted 11-02- 04:39 PM               

Just plugged the engines onto the old B17 and ran a few framerate checks.

With engines, cowlings and motors, I was getting framerates inthe region of 18-20 FPS over an airfield. Pulling back beyond the level 1 LOD, revealing some engine remannts where the new models were grafted on, I got 19-21 FPS. Seems the models with all there polys were not making all that much difference. The engines were made up of extra engines with the propertied gone, so when you zoomed out, all you saw were 3 engines ontop of each other at each point.

All tests involved F2 exterior view, looking from the tail and nose in turn, zoomed in as close as you could go. Figured this was about as framerate hungry a viewpoint as a single plane can give! The sim ran smoothly with no freezing.

As a baseline, I got 23 FPS in the same place with the stock B17.

Well.......I'm only running a Celeron 333 with a Voodoo2 and 96Meg of RAM.

Looks like I may need to upgrade my processor!!!!!!

Wonder what the fuse and interior will do!

posted 11-07- 10:47 AM               

Yep, I could save a lot of polys by reducing detail, but then we start to head back towards the old model.

The project was aimed at making the B17 look GOOD. Having run some framerate tests, the framerates do suffer a little from the strain, but not as much as you might think. The B17 coplexity has a lot to do with it's framerates, and there is a whole lot of pyhsics and guns. These have as big an effect.

To illustrate this....

I swapped in teh new engines, and ran a test mission. 3 B17's on an airfield. framerates 20ish. Zoomed back so the detailed lods vanished and were replaced with crude engine blobs....framerates 22ish.

Mt PC is a wimpy Celeron 333 with only 96Meg of RAM and a Voodoo2, so if I can run it, then just about anyone can!

I will soon know the full hit with the fuse in place, but as long as it is still playable for me, that will be fine. If I have to, I will make myself a flat and featureless terrain, just so I can fly the plane!

Besides, in practice, anyone wanting to shoot one of these down shouldn't get close enough to see the highest level LOD. If you do, you probably won't be flying for long!!!!

Looks so much nicer from the pilot seat too!

Engines that look rouned! And the damage possibilities. Cowls blown away etc. When the engine is destroyed, I may even leave a damaged engine LOD there!

Should have some in game screenshots of the exterior very soon, with the interior not far behind!

Hawk....Engines will stay 3D !!!!!!! I love them even more now they are textured!!!!

L'il Bastard.....go for it! The SM79 isn't anywhere near as complex as a B17. You should be fine. I made similar units for the PBY, and we get reasonable framerates there too. That motor has even more polys too! It's a 14 cylinder DOUBLE ROW radial, and all the cowl flaps are seperae models to allow animation! Yep, Snickers has placed all those DOFs!!!!!

To finish my sermon for the day