Chopper-Zone Demo

Alright. First of all, I was pretty much amazed at the environment from the moment I first played it. The terrain and sea (I love the water!) pretty much fit together perfectly (except for a small seam in the sea at the edges of the terrain which Im sure you'll fix). What should be done though, is things like trees and buildings should cast shadows on the terrain. It makes a big difference.

The helicopter model is great, but for some reason it changes when you crash (I think that's your old model). Sounds could also use improvement. Also, the machine gun bullets look a little unrealistic, your better off using tracer type models (I've got one, id be happy to share with you). Smoke also looks unrealistic.

Actual explosions are better, although all those debris bouncing around looks a little unrealistic, apart from that its all good. Also, noticed a bug. Your supposed to explode as soon as you touch the ground, right? I'm in front of a hill, and I lower myself until I'm just above the ground (not touching). I then back into the hill, and nothing happens.

About the controls... not that impressive. I'd much prefer the following system:
w,s - fowards, backwards
a,d - strafe left, right
q,e - lower, raise helicopter

and ofc mouse to aim and direct the chopper, which would feel much more intuitive considering most games these days use a wasd/mouse control system.

Also, I like the music, although the piano could be replaced with something which more fits the genre, either a more sci-fi sound or strings (like you get in most movie soundtracks). Also, would be cool to get music ingame, especially music that flares up during a fight. Would feel much more cinematic and epic and stuff.

Well anyways, that's all for now. I honestly see this turning into one of the best 3dgs games out there (if you find the time to finish it).

Regards,
Vartan

nice demo, first of all if you have problems running it and you have avg antivir you must disable your resident shield.

now to the game, some things that came to my mind when playing... dont take it personal its just to help you make it better.

-buildingtextures need mipmaps
-trees are too transparent or hard to see against the landscape
-treefadein is too late
-most of the models and explosions look a bit ugly
-explosions are way too slow/unrealistic
-shaders are very good and fast at least here
-menu is not soo good
-the landscape is too deserted (no roads, no trash, no broken trees, no rocks? ...)
-enemy? cars drive into napalm if you place it in front of them

well, i think you will be able to get the above stuff right. however the biggest problem i see is the gameplay. you have taken a road between realism and arcade wich is a bit confusing in my mind.
you need some kind of waypoint system or objectives that point the player to the next thing to do. otherwise he is lost in the big area.

the controls are okay i would say... however i would limit the maximum distance the player can fly above the ground in some kind of auto hover mode just to make things easier... think of flying over a big mountain that ends in the ocean, you will have to fly all the way down again with this controls... whereas if you would implent autohover, the player could just press forward to fly over the mountain.

you could really turn this into a fun game, if you spice up the graphics, make the controls a bit easier and make intuitive missions(like search and rescue, defend against attacks, destroy something...)

im looking forward to the next demo! greetings

Hi Slin,

I'm new to this and still learning. For flying, is there a specific script available for controlling planes? Or did you write your own from scratch? I've looked all over at tutorials but nothing for flying planes.

Thanks!

Warren

Today I uploaded a new Version I did some minor fixes and added the mission panel. And I did not pack it with Nacasi this time^^

you can download it here:
http://files.filefront.com/Chopper+Zone+Demo+V11/;9417728;/fileinfo.html

Here are two much better screenshots:



Here is one of the first screenshots I did^^:



Edit: Thanks for your comments vartan_s and ulf. I wasn´t able to change the steering to use thw mouse at the moment because that would mean a big change to the helicode. But I will hopefully do that somewhen. At least I added mipmaps to those models with "normal" texturesizes (realspawn created some very weird texturesizes for the placeholders...^^). The good looking models were done by fuxerz

@CrashBox: I coded it all myself from scratch.

Small but effective update
Thanks again for your continuing effort Slin

Cheers

Frazzle