Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Tatra T813 Video

Previous video with Cessna test flight apparently made some good (for most) waves in the flight sim scene. Here comes another video, this time with the Tatra T813 truck, focused on its independent swing suspension exercising on bumpy slopes somewhere in High Tatras mountains (it's not a coincidence, the truck got its name after the mountain range).

Suspension limits and parameters were set only approximately so the behavior may not be precise. But it's normal that an unloaded Tatra truck has its hind wheels in V shape.
Also the dynamically refined terrain has a higher resolution than the mesh used for physics, that may be slightly visible in closeups.



As a technical note, both videos were captured using GPU-based compression of video frames to reduce the bandwidth needed for sustained disk writes, while not imposing a noticeable performance penalty. Since the video frames are being compressed on GPU, GPU->CPU transfers are also smaller what is a good thing as well.
I also made a custom video codec for ffmpeg that can decode these videos so one can recompress the video directly with ffmpeg or any other tool that uses the libavcodec dll. There will be a separate blog entry with more technical description and the code to be usable for others.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Cessna Test Flight

Angrypig finally managed to implement collision detection for JSBSim planes along with the joystick support, so we created a short test flight video with Cessna plane.

Here it comes.