Hi, I made a small MD-500 Defender sim available as a donationware on itchio and steam. it’s called ‘Hijong Park’s Defender Patrol.‘ (Can’t upload link)
it’s a rather unusual game that happened to support both the HOTAS with clickable cockpits (like DCS world) and fully interactable VR (like VTOL VR) at once, at the cost of having terrible graphics and extremely cluttered keybinds menu.
it was fun to make this flight sim but i’m not sleeping at there, I’m now working on the sequel introducing more refined contents and engaging game modes than just random mission generator.
Right now I’m focusing on making the AH-1F cobra, the attack helicopter for the player, and the first announcement trailer of Low level hunters in this christmas.
furtuer informations about the new features of this helicopter and future development plans of the project will be revealed with the announcement trailer. Right now I’m having fun playtesting this snake bird…
To talk about why I started to make a flight sim myself, MD-500 and AH-1F (or S. the point is that it should have FLAT CANOPY) are my favorite helicopters but everyone is just making apache, apache, apache and maybe blackhawk when it comes to helicopter games. I’m tired of it and decided to make my own flight sim exclusively featuring all my favorite helicopters. (Huey will be coming at some point too !)
Instead of the Apache, I’ll explore rather obscure era of cold war around 1974 ~ 1985, where AH-1Q to F models were flown in war before AH-64A was a thing.
I’m really enjoying this progress a lot because I was tired of flying MD-500 for 2 years.
750 rounds of M197 can destroy everything, Mi-24V that were the serious trouble in Defender patrol is now a piece of cake with Cobra. any soft targets within 2000 meters are doomed.
But that means I need to make some badder bad guys to compete with this snake. like S-75 radar guided SAM and MBTs that can use missiles !
Low Level Hunters will not drastically change the graphics from Defender Patrol, but there will still be some improvements like having sun and better shaped clouds on the sky, some more use of textures on grounds, more colorful asset of buildings and props, improved Human models with proper hands and fingers for the player pilot, and some partial texture jobs for units to make camos that changes along with the choice of scenery.
I only have had less than an hour in Defender Patrol, and haven’t tried it out in VR. Even then it’s been fun, and a nice homage to the earlier generation of flight sims. As a lover of the AH-1, I can’t wait to try it out!
My work in this weekend was fixing bunch of issues related to cobra flight model and auto pilot and helicopter unit AIs.
Still not perfect but I can say it’s improved.
The guy who is making the trailer of LLH is currently sick and the trailer will likely be delayed. So instead of preparing for announcement trailer, I’ll start working on the dynamic air density based on the sea altitude and temperature, and Winds that will create fun flight dynamics.
I’m planning to make forest, desert, and arctic worlds, they will all have varied temperature and wind settings.
Today I’m implementing The wind after making more accurate air density based on temperature and altitude.
There’s an anemometer at the base indicating the current wind direction and velocity.
In this video the wind has overly exaggerated speed of 25 m/s but in actual game the wind direction will be varied between 0 to 10.
Making the aircraft to be affected by wind is done and I will also make projectiles to be affected as well, by making virtual omni directional airfoil for every projectiles. I can’t guarantee the accurate ballistics wind drift but it should work good enough.
Today I fixed a flaw in blade flapping. The blade flapping had been bugged since defender patrol but I only noticed it recently because it worked somewhat fine for Defender but not for Cobra.
also the tail rotor blade of Defender was upsided down which made rotors much less efficient.
Having 2 aircraft helps to notice issues in my flight model. if it worked for one but not for others something is not right.
