When will this game be available
AnonymousThis game is a hobby of mine, so there is no timeline. But when there’s any news you’ll find it here.
AnonymousI’ve been working on three coding projects in parallel lately, so when I sat down this week-end to fiddle around with AirportSim a bit I wasn’t to keen on delving into even more code. So I decided to finally learn at least some basic 3D modeling as I figured I wouldn’t get around doing so anyhow.
Obviously, nothing would make more sense as a starting project than an aircraft, right? The result is the rather crappy looking B737 you can see in the first picture. It doesn’t have any of the fancy modern shader stuff, it isn’t even lit right or anything, that’s why there are no shadows. The texture, by the way, is sponsored by a fellow AirlineSim team member’s virtual airline. It was originally made for a high-quality Flight Simulator model, that’s why it doesn’t quite fit. Also, I didn’t bother UV-mapping the wings and the wheels yet, but I’ll take care of that some time later.
For now I’m rather happy with the result as I don’t have to rely on simple blocks as placeholders anymore while I can stop looking for decently looking, free and low-poly aircraft models on the net (they are usually unrealistically looking, expensive and high-poly).
When the model was showing up in the “game” for the first time I was wondering how many instances could be rendered at the same time without the system breaking down. I repeatedly incremented by 20 instances until I decided at 202 visible aircraft that I’m rather happy with a framerate well beyond 300 frames/s on my 3 year old MacBook Pro. (Disclaimer: As mentioned, there’s no lighting, shadows or other graphics effects involved, so take the framerate with a pinch of salt).
Anyhow, that’s it for this week-end. Back to real work :-)
EDIT: Just noticed that the FPS in the screens are lower than what’s mentioned in the text. This is due to the framerate dropping when taking a screenshot. The actual values are about factor 2 higher.
So, since AirportSim is officially a hobby now and progress will be unbearably slow anyhow, I could as well fool around a bit…
As you might remember from the previous screenshots, so far I was going for a grid-based layout of the scene. In some areas this allows for easier handling, but a real “airport look” is almost impossible to achieve because taxiways usually follow smooth curves while perpendicular angles are rare.
Therefore I’ll be trying to get the system completely vector-based and to generate the meshes of taxiways and roads on the fly. This way, variable taxiway dimensions, complex crossings and authentic markings should be possible. Since I’m very new to the field of 3D graphics, I was playing around a bit with rolling my own meshes and UV-mappings programmatically today (see picture). Yeah, nothing great or impressive, but small steps…
In recent weeks, I noticed somewhat of an increase in interest in this project. Some people asked about whether AirportSim is making any progress and whether and when there will be a release. I’m very happy that there are others out there who would like a game like this see the light of the day and as such I’d love to put more time into it. But as of now, AirportSim is merely a hobby and currently I only have very little time to spare.
Anyway, whenever I can, I will try to do some work on AirportSim. It will be little steps and they will probably address certain aspects of the full game I find particularly interesting (I’m doing it for fun, after all), but if you want to make sure not to miss bits of news, subscribe to this blog, the Twitter stream or the Facebook page. I will keep a public log of any development progress made the way I did it when this blog started…just don’t expect any regular updates!
Thanks for your understanding and stay tuned!
Besides a bit of work on roads the past two weeks did not yield much for AirportSim. Other projects kept me from putting in more time.
The interesting bit about this rather boring excuse is the fact that when you get back to work on code you wrote just two weeks earlier, you immediately notice whether it makes sense or whether it’s the evil outcome of nasty prototyping. As you might have guessed, the latter is the case. If I have to step through various source files just to figure out how my contruction code works it obviously hasn’t been well designed in the first place.
Since this is probably THE most important part of the game - after all, you are supposed to BUILD an airport - I might as well put some work in cleaning up the mess before I jump into what I actually wanted to do today. Oh jolly programmer’s life!
Today was the first day this week I got to work on AirportSim. So far I primarily used it to finally finish the save/load function, thereby building a basic framework for a (development) GUI. The GUI employs the regular system look-and-feel so it doesn’t look like a “game” very much yet. Next on my list are terminals and roads for apron vehicles.
I’ve decided to do a save/load function first and that’s what I did in the end of last week. It’s not quite done yet as I clearly underestimated the effort it takes, but I suppose it’s a good thing it will be out of the way once finished and can be built on incrementally instead of restructuring everything after the game is done.
This week starts out with work on other projects and therefore I don’t expect any bigger progress during the next few days. I’m evaluating where to source the graphics for the game from though, so it’s getting more and more serious every week.
AI is looking good so far. Aircraft don’t collide anymore, they don’t block each other (at least not in the more realistic of setups ;-)) and they find their way around the airport. I haven’t quite decided yet on what to do next. Options include apron traffic, a basic GUI, some form of actual buildings or even a save/load function so I don’t always have to rebuild a complete airport for testing.
Too many choices…I’ll call it a day and will think about it tomorrow…
