Map editor is now available for pre-orderers. It contains two tools: the map editor itself and composite texture editor. Both are available for all three platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).

New version is available, most notable changes are: improved player model, added bullet spread and multiple damage zones to players, moved ragdoll computation from client to server ...

New version is available, most work went into adding major features into the engine (static meshes, composite texture, material system, normalmaps) and optimizations. On the game side the current map was enhanced, initial set of detail meshes was added and there is a new gun available.

It has been some time since last blog activity, more than it should be. It has two main reasons. The one is that I've been distracted with unrelated matters more than usual. The second is that I'm working on a new technology for Resistance Force's engine: something I called the composite texture. ...

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) is a major feature of Resistance Force ...

New version is available: it brings explosive grenades to the arsenal among with many bug fixes and small features...

Today I was browsing through my screenshot archive and stumbled upon old internal screenshots from early development versions of the game...

Since the release of alpha version some people asked if I need help with development, mainly with modelling, mapping ...

Public alpha version of this game was just released, also the website is now open. This game is in development ...

Almost two years have gone by since we released Wesnoth 1.8. To thank you for more than 5 million downloads via sourceforge.net, we now proudly present Wesnoth 1.10. You can look at the (translated) release notes to get an idea about what has changed since 1.8. For those who just want to play, the new release is available for download. This stable release is compatible with the last two releases from the 1.9.x series. If you have any comments, we would be happy to hear them in the forum thread dedicated to this release. We hope there are no bugs left, but if you find some, please report them to help us fix them in following releases.
We are also looking for help in several areas, so that many other releases of similar caliber can follow this one. We are especially looking for translators, graphic artists (sprite, portraits, terrain, story images), music composers (a background in classical composition, and good equipment required), sound artists (for special effects), authors (writing/maintaining campaigns, creating content like unit descriptions, improving the in-game help) and, of course, coders. If you want to participate in developing Wesnoth, just have a look at the forum or visit us in the IRC channel #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net.

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Finally the first release candidate for 1.10 is ready. We are confident that we are really close to the start of the stable 1.10 series now. For more some details about this release candidate and celebrating the new it please visit this forum thread.
Forum users and players with registered accounts for the primary MP server must read the separate announcement explaining the upcoming changes and unused accounts purge.
We offer two versions of changelogs: a rather nice to read players changelog that only includes changes every player will probably notice (and often feels empty because devs tend to forget to add their stuff there) and the (rather) complete changelog with (almost) all the details, which might make your head spin due to the technical terms used every now and then...
At the moment the Windows, Mac OS X and OpenPandora packages are ready. You can find them at the download page. Once the others are done you can find them at the download page, too. If you find a bug, please report it to help us fix them in following releases.

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Hey everybody! I’m working furiously right now to add in some of the things I want Telepath RPG: Servants of God to have upon release. I just wanted to take a second to remind everyone that I’m releasing the game on Tuesday, February 14.

TSoG has had a lot of positive previews so far. Some writers really like the setting; others really like the writing; and others are enamored of the combat system. Then you have still others who like that it’s from Chicago, though that’s really neither here nor there. (Unless you live in Chicago, in which case, it’s decidedly here–but I digress.)

It’s been a long, hard road developing this game. I started work on it during late December of 2007, while I was still in the middle of law school. I spent long nights on my ex-girlfriend’s bed typing away on a laptop, inspiring her to come up with a variant on this track (“I was makin’ TRPG”).

I’m pretty happy with how the game has come together, even though a few of my grander ideas didn’t make the cut. I’m looking forward to letting you all try out the finished game, and even moreso to making bigger and better titles for you in the future. Until Tuesday!

–Craig

With no end in sight after months of fighting, the warring factions of the galaxy are either unwilling or unable to continue. Infighting and internal political struggles are now the norm, as various figures dissatisfied with the current leadership attempt to take power for themselves. An effective “cold war” state has developed between the various factions, particularly the dominant Cybernetic Front and Empire Reborn, as overt fighting dies down.

It remains to be seen how long this tenuous peace will last, however, as new political systems and technological advances begin to change the face of the galaxy.

(PlanetWars? is closed for the time being. Stay tuned for new developments.)

If there’s anything I’ve proven to myself time and time again, is that I’m not good with Linux. Sure I can install it, use it, maybe play around with a bit if it’s got enough GUIs, but it all reeks of beginner. All I can do is pack an executable in a tarball when there’s a million people out there thet can make fancy packages and distributions and what-not.

So, I’m dropping my Linux testing and binary builds (I don’t think they ever worked anyways).  Instead, I’m welcoming all the Linux enthusiasts to help maintain OpenXcom on their favorite platform of choice. This isn’t a serious commitment, just make sure to test it regularly and let us know of any issues, or even help distribute it by making builds, creating fancy packages or spreading it among your repositories. If it’s good I’ll even place your builds on the Downloads page and credit you.

This doesn’t apply to just Linux though, OpenXcom is a cross-platform project and I love to see it running on new platforms. If you’re good at porting to some esoteric platform or just optimizing for lighter devices, don’t be shy, share your experiences on the forum and help spread OpenXcom everywhere!

For those of you with YouTube partner accounts, we have a new policy up that you should read. Click here for more information.

At long last, we have something professional, clean, and resonant with our title.
At long last, we have something professional, clean, and resonant with our title.

Some of you may have seen the free game, a5teroids, in our games section, and may have played it. In conjunction with Tristaph media we've given it a facelift and added some code improvements to the game, including a high score list. The game looks really sharp now thanks to Tristaph, and the PC, Mac, and Linux versions are all available for free!

read more

The Challenge

As a skydiver adds more gear such as front packs and items strapped to legs or arms, the jumper’s basic stability in free-fall is reduced.  It becomes easier to tumble out of control and there is less margin for error.  Similarly, the aerodynamic wake of the jumper may interfere with pilot chute opening (known as “hesitation”). Investigating different gear configurations generally involves vertical wind tunnel testing, or actual tests with jumpers. To avoid some of the cost, and mitigating safety concerns, a tool to computationally analyze these jumpers and their gear is highly desired. Creare, Inc., an R+D research firm in Hanover, NH, under funding from the US Army, developed a Computation Fluid Dynamics toolkit for analyzing jumpers and their equipment, and model the resulting configurations in FlightGear.

Note: a flyable parachutist model is available to download and test at the end of this article.

Fluent (CFD) and Stability Derivatives

CFD = Computational Fluid Dynamics.  ANSYS Fluent is a high end CFD that models flow, turbulence, and heat transfer in 3d.   Imagine being able to take a 3d model of a sky diver (or an aircraft) and place it at different orientations and different poses.  Then for each orientation and pose, run a computer simulation of exactly how the air flows around the sky diver, where pockets of turbulence are generated, and what forces and moments are produced.  Imagine all the combinations of roll and pitch and body poses possible — it leads to a huge number of combinations.  Now imagine repeating that for several different arrangements of front and back packs and other equipment.  You will need a cluster of computers running for days or even weeks to compute all the permutations just for a single pack configuration.  This is essentially a “virtual wind tunnel” running on a super computer cluster of PC’s.

In the case of the parachutist simulation: the amount of computation time required to generate 2 scenarios (with a back pack and without) was approximately 25,000 cpu-hours — or around 2 years of compute time on a single processor PC.  1000 individual simulations were run, each involving approximately 4 million “elements”.

One of the detailed CFD models used by Creare

 

Validation

Real world testing and data collection was performed in a vertical wind tunnel (such as the one linked here.)  This real world data could then be compared to the the Fluent (CFD) results to validate and possibly improve the computer model.

Real Time Simulation Build-Up of Coefficients:

• For each component of the model, the local angle of attack and sideslip angle are calculated from the combination of the limb orientation and the overall angle of attack and sideslip of the entire model.
• For each of the six degrees of freedom, the contribution of the model component to the overall aerodynamic response is calculated from tables of non-dimensional coefficients:
  CFx,y,z = Fx,y,z / ( q∞ * Acomp )
  CMx,y,z = Mx,y,z / ( q∞ * Acomp * Lcomp )
• The two-dimensional lookup tables are compiled from data extracted from the CFD results in the Solution Database.

Forces and Moments:

• Aerodynamic forces and moments are transformed from the local frame to the global frame and then summed.
• Resultant forces and moments then determine accelerations, velocity and turn rates are calculated, and the model iterates.

Creare partnered with Jon Berndt (the founder of JSBSim–one of the core physics engines used by FlightGear) to contribute some clever additions to JSBSim that permit a “blade element” approach to parachutist modeling.  Jon helped tremendously optimizing and integrating the required new code into JSBSim which then ultimately led to its inclusion in FlightGear.  The parachutist physics model is an order of magnitude more complex than a typical aircraft model.

Figure Animation and Posing

The character model is built out of several animated subcomponents: left & right forearms, left & right upper arms, left & right lower legs, left & right upper legs, head, torso, and pelvis.  The model parts are attached in a cascading fashion like a real figure, and each joint can be rotated through all 3 axis (roll, pitch, and yaw.)  In order to avoid unrealistic contortions, sensible joint range of motions are defined.

There are a number of predefined poses where the appropriate joint angles have all been worked out in advance.

• Box: a neutral pose minimizing rotational or translational motion.
• Left & Right Translation: mirrored poses that induce a “slide” either to the left or right.
• Anterior Translation: a pose that induces a forward slide.
• Posterior Translation: a pose that induces a rearward slide.
• Left & Right Dorsoventral: mirrored poses that induce a left or right rotation (yaw.)
• Dorsal: a “spread eagle” pose that maximizes surface area and thus minimizes decent rate.
• Ventral: a “compressed” pose that minimizes surface area thus maximizes decent rate.

You might notice that these poses map rather neatly into well understood pilot controls similar to flying a helicopter.  For the FlightGear simulation we can mix these poses together in proportion to the corresponding joystick axis deflection and throttle position and fly the sky-diver intuitively.  For those that doubt, this actually works quite well! Visualizing CFD Flow-lines

One of the neat things that a CFD analysis can produce are airflow lines that pass around the model.  We can take the 3d flowlines that are produced by the CFD and attach them to the 3d model of the figure.  This allows visualizing the flow lines from any FlightGear perspective.  One interesting technical challenge is that the flow lines need to keep a fixed vertical orientation even though the model may roll or pitch, yet the flowlines must track the heading/yaw of the model.  This can be done by setting up appropriate inverse transformations in the FlightGear model animation configuration file.

Smoke and Trajectory Markers

FlightGear offers additional visualization aids.  The model is set up to support emitting smoke.  FlightGear smoke drifts with the prevaling winds (which can often be substantial at higher altitudes.)  The model is also setup to emit “trajectory markers” at a fixed rate.  The trajectory markers stay fixed in 3d space and represent the actual path the sky diver follows.  In addition they represent the orientation of the sky diver at that point in space.

Splat

I know this is the first question everyone will ask.  This exercise is setup as a free-fall simulation, not a parachute simulation so the simulation is mercifully paused when the altitude reaches 100′ above the surface.

Download and Fly

Follow these instructions to download, install, and fly the Creare Parachutist model:

• Note: the parachutist model is not compatible with FlightGear v2.4, you must fly this model with one of the v2.6 release candidates, or the official v2.6 release scheduled for February 17.
• Download the Creare_Parachutist-v1.0.zip file.
• Unzip it into your FlightGear “Aircraft” folder.
• Start FlightGear and select either –aircraft=Parachutist-Scenario1 or –aircraft=Parachutist-Scenario2
• Make sure you specify  an initial altitude (such as –altitude=10000), otherwise you will just be sitting at the end of the runway working on your tan.
• Press F1 and F2 to toggle the two available dialog boxes on/off.
• You can manipulate the joint poses individually or select from a set of pre-defined poses, or select “Joystick” control and fly with a joystick (or keyboard or mouse) similar to flying a helicopter or airplane.

Credits

• Dietz, A. J., Kaszeta, R. W., Cameron, B., Micka, D. J., Deserranno, D. and Craley, J.”A CFD Toolkit for Modeling Parachutists in Freefall”, presented at the 21st AIAA Decelerators Conference in Dublin, Ireland, 23-26 May 2011. Paper AIAA 2011-2589.
• The Creare Freefalling Parachutist model was developed by Anthony Dietz (Principal Investigator), Richard Kaszeta , Benjamin Cameron, Daniel Micka, and Dimitri Deserranno of Creare, Inc., as part of an SBIR Phase II project sponsored by the U.S. Army RDECOM Acquisition Center under Contract No. W91CRB-08-C-0135. Additional contributions we made by Curt Olson and Jon S. Berndt as consultants. The resulting parachutist model is unvalidated and therefore, should not be used other than for demonstration purposes. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Army RDECOM Acquisition Center.  Due to the significant contributions made to the project by several open source developers,  Creare has released a version of the resulting parachutist model to the open source community for continued development and use.  The FFTK itself continues development as a proprietary Creare project. For information on the FFTK itself, please contact Richard Kaszeta at rwk@creare.com, or 603-643-3800.
• Flightgear modeling, animation, and scripting – Curtis L. Olson

Some very big changes are coming to Conflict Terra!

Some very big changes are coming to Conflict Terra!
Some very big changes are coming to Conflict Terra!