Monday 31 October 2016

v808

It's great to finally get v808 released as this update took way longer than planned.

The updated carrier is present. It's a big improvement over the previous model. You can't control the elevators yet - we might add that later if we model the hangar deck.




Air to Air refueling with a KC767 tanker has been added. This includes hose physics - I intended to release this with a static hose and drogue but that looked terrible. Here are some screens:







To aid refueling you can select levels of refueling help (off,low,medium,high). As there's no real life version of refuel help, this is a slightly artificial force on the AV8B to accelerate or decelerate towards the drogue. It's still a lot of fun with help and still requires a fair amount of skill. Before help was implemented I'd be flying manually, attempting to hook up and the effort and concentration required was absolutely draining. Hats off to the pilots doing real life refueling (although their 'simulator' is slightly better than ours!).
Refueling with TrackIR or VR is pretty cool giving you a sense of closure and also letting you see the probe tip to your side easily.
Currently the WARP (wing aerial refueling pod) hoses are modeled, I might add the tail boom hose adapter in a later update.
You can access a refueling mission through the Quick Start menu. Refueling will be a common element of missions as they are updated.

If there's no show stopping bugs found in v808 Beta it'll be assigned to the default build Tuesday.

A v808 VR build is currently being tested and will be posted this week with a view to adding VR to the default build the following week. At that point we'll update the Steam store page to show VR compatibility.

Next updates are focusing on missions and their associated gameplay/scenery requirements.