I’ve got some progress on Ace Combat resources research, have added code to unpack resources from base containers of AC4-6, besides Assault Horizon. Actual progress is shown here.  Actually, it’s a low priority task I do when I’m stalled with others, so I’m not sure how soon Open Horizon will actually use resources from previous games.

Sound is a different story. I don’t want to mess with legal problems of CRI’s patented HCA proprietary codec until Open Horizon get any descent community around. Possibly, never. Upd: found an open source implementation under MIT license GARbro so I can port that to C++ and use in Horizon without messing with a suspicious source code from japanese boards.

I have successfully implemented collisions. Missiles and planes can hit buildings now.

First multiplayer flight in Open Horizon’s history, with duct-tape implementation over boost::asio. While I’m resting(got red eyes lately, so trying to stay away from laptop for a while, at least at home), asked a friend to help me with network. He’s going to implement an important part for some miso soup. I’m not going to implement full multiplayer support right now (who will play it anyway?), but still think that it would be good to have multiplayer-aware architecture before I go deep into game mechanics.

Demo 4 release and new features – effects, trees, radar, terrain, enhanced fonts, missile warning and lots of small improvements.

Camera modes could be changed with V key. Most cockpit avionics works, other requires more work on the flight model, so I’d like to leave it as it is for now. Continue reading →

After a long period of time you expected some major updates? (insert Sayaka pun here). Still, there are a lot of things done – clouds, post-processing, landscape data, fixes, and also dlc pack decrypted. Continue reading →

I’m glad to share with you my current progress. As you can see, I’ve loaded landscape (with hacks that I’ll fix later), loaded animations and added basic post-processing – color correction and FXAA. I also wrote linear approximation to AH’s flight model, it works pretty well, but another approach is required to get exact formulas. What’s next? Clouds, perhaps.

Continue reading →

Hurray! The title speaks for itself.I have learned how to load map files. Not everything, but enough for testing. Finally, I’m able to work on flight model! In fact, I don’t know how to do it. I shall start with simple manoeuvres and find relations between plane’s flight model parameters and speed/acceleration. I hope it’s possible to read AH’s memory at runtime and dump values to collect reference data. Memory address of each value can be found with ArtMoney but it’s not an easy way, so I’ll start with visual development of a simple model based on common assumptions and see where it goes.