Wednesday, November 17, 2010

AI Models

I'm adding a section to the hangar for AI models. These are low poly-count models with no cockpit, no landing gear and minimal texture. These models are intended to be airborne, hence the removal of landing gear. My goal is to have AI models of support aircraft, such as tanker, cargo and surveillance types, which can be added to your simulation as objects of type AIAircraft.

The first AI model posted is an E-3 AWACS. Poly-count for this model is 1090, and the texture size is only 3 KB! It does have one animation - a rotating radome, spinning at 6 RPM. Getting this animation to work took a severe hack, since I couldn't figure out how to get the spin animation to accept a "value". It seems a "property" is required, so I found a property at "sim/session" that has (or usually will have?) a value of 1, which I could then multiply by 6.0. Ugly, but it works.

4 comments:

  1. Would be very cool to see some AI SR-71's flying around.

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  2. I'm wondering if the SR-71 should be modeled as only two contrails. Nobody would be close enough to see the airplane anyway.

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  3. In most cases, people would probably be far away. But I know some people(like me) normally fly at really high altitudes, so it may help to have a model. I have an SR-71 model if you want it.

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  4. I've gotten the E-3 working in my edition of FlightGear, it ended up looking pretty decent. Surprising considering the gymnastics it sounds like you went through to get that result!

    One thing I didn't get to work was the download link for the DavePack, I tested planes on the site to make sure it was just DavePack, and that was the only one of six links I tried that didn't work.

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