0.12.2.5 New Island terrain, water improvements, and munition fuzes!Thu, August 24, 2023
Tools for building terrain didn't evolve in this direction so new old tools had to be remade.Hello, the new island is finally available on the tester's branch. Keep in mind, that it's still a work in progress, so not all features are in yet. Most notably, the new island map cannot be used in the Arena as there's some pending Arena work to handle the more varied terrain.
New Island Terrain
The biggest addition in this patch is the new island terrain. This is the culmination of months of new work using new tools specifically designed for making terrain like this. I've already previously written about this, so check out the original news post for more details.
Once again, the new map is currently not usable in Arena, but this is where the next major's patch's focus will be. This is to support the first campaign, which will essentially act as a tutorial to show off all of the mechanics available for Arena missions.
Improved Water Collisions
As the mechanics of the game are getting closer to finalized, many loose ends are getting tied up. One such example was how the game treats water.
Previously, it was simply recolored terrain, and only some specific weapon-related effects really cared about them. From the aircraft's perspective, water was basically identical to terrain. For a plane that spends a lot of time near water, this isn't acceptable for the final game.
Water now damages aircraft, and when planes smack into water you it's a splash instead of a thud with dirt. In addition, a plethora of new water related effects for collisions and weapons have been added to the game to round out its depiction.
Airburst and Proximity Fuze Improvements
While the game did have airburst fuzes, they were only really supported for cluster bomb canisters. They didn't really quite work correctly with normal dumb bombs, and even when they did, the resulting visual effects could be confusing. Variations of most of the explosion effects in the game have been added to support both air bursting and splashing against water. There are even new interactions with explosions that happen low above the ground (or water!) and the terrain below it.
Munitions now respect arming time. For most bombs and missiles you probably won't notice this, but in the event that a weapon hits something before being armed it won't explode. However, it can still cause damage through the raw kinetic energy of the impact!
An Mk82 variant with an airburst fuze has been added to the game under the "Convoy Attack" loadout in preparation for a future feature. Airburst bombs trade off penetration damage for a much wider area effect of splash damage. This makes them perfect for attacking unarmored targets such as APCs and soon to be in the game trucks.
I wasn't planning on doing this yet, but it resulted from the above water material changes. This is a long, but interesting, story. If you missed it the first time, check out this post for how it all came together!
Night PreviewBefore the 1.0 release, the plan was to support night time. The game has had a working time of day system since practically its inception, but because of a lack of night lighting, it's never been enabled for the game. The PAPI lights were only the beginning. Work on night time lighting has been happening in parallel with the terrain development, night time building lights, and now street lights.
While the game isn't yet ready for a full night time setting, the Evening time preset in instant action has been changed to just late enough that city and street lights start to turn on so you can check out where this is going! The plan is not just for night, but for something that works best under the cover of dark.
ChangelogNew features:- New island terrain featuring hills, rivers, bridges, and a tunnel
- New line rendering used on roads, runway markings, landmarks, and scenery objects
- New buildings featuring LODs to maintain consistent detail density
- LODs updated for many existing buildings
- New fog rendering
- Bases moved around
- Murasa is now a large airbase
- New scatter system using pre-defined scatter positions (Still EXPERIMENTAL!)
- Faux "HDR" when looking at the sun darkens objects
- Lit windows at night time
- Effects when aircraft "slide" on water
- Engine wash effects for water
- Flyover effects over land
- Effecs for fuselage collisions with water
- Debris hitting water splahes and gets destroyed
- Water applies damage over time
- Air and water explosion effects for use by vehicles and weapons
- When killed by water, camera is closer and looks at impact
- "Dud" munitions when weapons impact something before their ArmTime
+ Dud munitions play collision impact effects on impact
+ JSON: "SplashWater", "SplashHard", and "SplashSoft" added to "WeaponEffectProperties, used for dud impacts
+ Duds create Rigibdody impulse proportional to kinetic energy of impact
+ Duds do impact damage proportional to the kinetic energy of the impact
- Effects for when a munition airbursts low over ground or water
- Effects for when munitions explode from airburst/proximity fuzes
- Effects for when munitions impact water
- Buildings have meshes for lights at night time
- Mk82 Airburst
+ Mk82 with increased splash radius and 30m airburst fuze
- "Convoy Attack" loadout which uses the new Mk82 Airburst
- Streetlights added to main roads with lights visible from a distance
- Modular helipad models created and populated around the island
Improvements:- Building shadows made optional
- Map selector handles longer names better
- Arena runs in its own independent scene (back end dev change but hopefully doesn't cause bugs)
- When in arena map, fog is disabled
- Scattering code 50% faster
- Water made "slippery"
- Flyover effects triggered by airspeed rather than throttle setting
- Flyover effect handled per-airframe rather than per engine nozzle
- Optimizations to Flyover and engine wash effects
- All collision impact effects (hard, soft, dirt, ground impact, and impact explode) tweaked
- Debris hitting the water
- Bright water splash effects for weapons
- Fence shadows added to Kogasa
- Inroads for Kogasa/Nazrin
- Buildings baked into navmesh
- Terrain colliders centered terrain meshes to improve physics precision (fixes wrong material detected for weapons/collisions)
- Removed base offset from vehicles now that navmesh is way more accurate
- Grass colors tweaked
- Old islands color palette tweaked to match new islands
- Wire roads added to old islands
- Old island buildings use new prefabs
- "Evening" time of day made late enough that lights are on
- Added buildings to populate the small islands
- Larger new version dialog
Bugfixes:- Fixed typo on instant action Strike not allowed button
- Removed the random debug M113 groups spawning on the old island map
- Ocean has collision again.
- Removed ocean ghost trees
- Landing gear non-functional on water
- Navmesh for big island continuously connects roads and bridges
- Fixed misaligned navmesh areas
- Terrain sorting prioritizes grass over water
- Improved terrain material detection
- Multi-select dialog wouldn't show second page under certain circumstances
- Flexible select dialog doesn't change size when going between pages
- All strategic targets have correctly assigned airfields again (fixes rearming in instant action)
- Fixed NRE from explosions near buildings
- Fixed NRE from proximity explosions on large terrain objects
- Airburst explosion damage now centered on explosion instead of ground splash
- More accurate raycasting, fixes airbursts sometimes having the wrong effect
- Ejecting pilots have collision disabled for just long enough to clear the plane
+ Prevents ejected pilots from instantly dying when ejecting from grounded planes
- Fixed "Middle Bridge" having its collisions ignored
- Fixed tail/fuselage slime lights on right side of F-4E not rendering correctly
JSON:- Renamed "Mk82Snakeye" to "Mk82SE"
- Added SplashWater", "SplashHard", and "SplashSoft" to "WeaponEffectProperties, used for dud impacts
Translations for our friends around the world.
Topic: Tiny Combat Arena, a simulation-lite, yet fun polygon-shaded flight simulator (Read 8003 times)
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