Greetings Folks,
We’ve been working hard for the last few months to deliver the fully updated HD ‘4k’ version of our latest B-17 aircraft model. It’s been quite the journey, with a lot of twists and turns along the way.
The new model tops out at 50k polygons, compared to the original’s 2.5k, which ironically is now the polygon count for the lowest level of detail. We even use the original model for the OG crew member in the HD B-17, so you can see each crew member in detail and inside the aircraft.
We felt today was a great opportunity to share more specific details about the work accomplished already, and how that translates into the features you’ll see in our next game update.
Tech Improvements
-Scene Groups Increased from 64 to 128
- Allows for improved damage meshes
-Updated “Skin” Damage System (Bullets, Smoke, Oil, Decals)
- The original game used many textures that were much smaller in size (64x64, 128x128), whereas the new model uses improved 4k textures. The skin damage system has also been updated for performance and memory efficiency.
-Multiple Livery Support
- B-17 textures and material properties can now change by bomb group.
-Improved Performance - MAX Exporte / , OMF CLI
- HD B-17 model scene (including all LODs and Damage) is 300k triangles vs 10k in the original game. Export process is now improved by an order of magnitude.
- MAX exporter was upgraded to do a better job of determining face transparency. Originally labeled a face as transparent if the material texture had any transparency on it.
-Bone nodes added to Skin:
- Originally, the skin exporter ignored bones, which given the complexity of the new B-17 caused a bunch of problems. So we’ve added support to the skin for bones, allowing the skeleton to drive the scene graph.
-New ‘Per-Pixel’ Specular Shader
- OG had per-face specular, a new shader has been implemented for per-pixel specular for better visual impact.
Art Improvements
-New HD B-17 Model @ 50k+ polygons
-New Physical Damage Components:
- Actual panels modeled with flak and bullet damage that will augment the dynamic texture damage system, increasing immersion and emotional investment/engagement
-Randomized bullet-hole size/shape on dynamic damage
-4k textures - NMF, Olive, per group
-Specular Restored
-Crew able to turn on/off in external model as they take/leave positions
-Reconstructed source data from compiled models - had to rebuild the source data (models, rigs, textures) from the game data as the originals were all lost to time
-New Pipeline improvements - import, extraction, packer - this will help all future development updates.
-Texture damage added to glass, as well as fuselage
-Fuselage texture damage now supports transparency, so we now see inside and through bullet holes
STILL TO COME | IN-DEVELOPMENT
-Virtual Cockpit [More details and updates on this are planned, so rest assured!]
Screenshots
It's come a long way.
Bullet holes are generated using a secondary texture and Barycentric transformations from world space positions into texture space. The texel density governs the size of the holes, which are too small here:
What does the texel density look like?
Thanks for all the great feedback and stay tuned for more news soon!