Damageable Areas And Wonky Maths

 I had been coding an external camera. Move it horizontally and it would extend out and wrap around so you could view all the way from the front. Vertical worked in the same manner except it stopped directly above or below so the whole scene didn't appear upside down. Then I merged the two together and everything kind of broke. In retrospect this probably due to me fixating over the Y value of the movement  of the camera whilst ignoring both the mvoement distance and actual camera rotation. This appears to have led it to wander off when both x and y values exceed 0.5f.

Having previously coded a hitbox solution for individual areas of the airframe, I had tied all of that together with damageable modifiers for how perfromance of the aircraft would deteriorate. Damaged wings reduce maneuverability, damaged engine losses speed and acceleration, etc, etc. I added a HUD element so that the player could visually see the state of the aircraft with a total airframe health bar for overall damage.

Aircraft systems on the lower right, radar to go lower left

There was a minor conundrum with weapons and their placement on the model. I was considering adding extra variables to weaponImage code so that a gun could fire from up to 3 seperate points from an aircraft with their own particle emitters and fx. In the end I simply added a gun to each of the relevant aresa and had them synchronize to fire alternatively.

Guns go brrrrrr ... and in order

I started to figure out AI and which tasks they should be concentrating on in some sort of order of importance. At the top of all of these is not stalling because falling out of the sky due to making a dumb maneuver at low speed would be considered bad and also rather embarrassing. I'm developing a skill system for AI pilots where lower skill will mean being more reactive and higher skills more proactive. This can be used for simple and obvious things like taking an aiming line ahead of a moving target, to how to respond to and evade an attacker, turning from the role of defender to aggressor, such as pulling up, rolling and reducing speed all together to get the opponent to fly past - and so we are back to not stalling.

Speaking of stalling, I have been contemplating adding a high-G turn or stall turn maneauver, where rapidly losing speed when decelerating boosts maneuverability - with the ever present danger of pushing it too far and stalling.

So next up, code some basic AI that can be able to perform a basic Combat Air Patrol, move to a location and circle that area, do some basic dogfighting with an opponent and the such like. Also need to code a radar. I have a few code examples from this, including the 3D style radar from Elite, but think that I will probably stick with a top-down type like Ace Combat 7.