We’ve been working through our new plane specs for AH2 trying different things to come up with the best balance of visuals, functionality, performance overhead, download size, and production time. This is especially tricky in the area of cockpits since we rely on them to be more than just a fancy looking foreground. There’s a lot of information that our cockpits need to convey. The challenge is to fold that in while preserving the inherent look of the individual cockpit and keep the other factors mentioned above under check as well. What we’ve ended up with is still familiar but greatly expanded and less generic. We're still working on a few more details but here are some screenshots showing some different things.
Just a few more external shots. The new models have cleaner lines and display shading much better. There is now a Japanese pilot. Landing gear and wheel wells are now fully functional 3D models.
Not discernible from the screenshots is the new texture format. We've gone to a much more efficient format that textures everything and mirrors nothing. This will remove the headaches involved in skinning many of the current planes.
In these cockpits shots you can see more interior details have been included. We decided to put in the flight controls and just work around them as needed. The control stick, throttle, prop control, rudder pedals, flap and gear levers all move in concert with your control inputs. Instruments were redone to match or closely mimic the originals where applicable. The instuments are no longer 2D images sitting flush on the panel. They are now raised where applicable to give the instrument panel a more natural looking depth and shading. The instruments are also covered with a glass alpha that looks nice and also gives a nice lighting effect as seen in the contrasting last two screenshots.
We've taken longer than desired building the first new AH2 planes, but that's not a huge surprise as it's taken some trial and error to determine what new standard was going to work the best going forward. We expect further plane production and overhauls of current planes to go much quicker. New shots of the bomber should be appearing soon.
