FSWeapons update

Since I released the film showing FSW in action I've got a lot of response. In some forums I was expecting more "You bastard, you've destroyed my civilian simulator". But except one or two comments about being shot down online by some random kid, most comments have been very positive or even downright ecstatic.

The number of visits to this blog has risen enormously, so I feel some responsibility to post more regular updates. I would like to start by explaining what I am doing right now.

At the moment FSW is in a stage were it might be called a technology demonstrator rather than anything close to a product. So the most important thing now is to clean up the code and address the flexibility issue. The final product will implement any type of weapons, air to air, air to surface, and even surface to air. New weapons is supposed to be easy for me to add, but that requires that I have a structure in the program to handle it. The version used in the first released film has a very hard connection to the sidewinder. My internal simulation of the weapon environment and connection to the simulator is directly connected to one sidewinder object. Once it is released and placed in the queue for released weapon another ready sidewinder object is created, hence giving the shooter an unlimited supply of sidewinders, and sidewinders only.

What I'm doing now is to create a structure with virtual pylons that can hold any type of weapon and handles the communication with the weapon. It will also keep track on what pylon is the active one. Further more, I will take some of the code from the sidewinder class and distribute it to more general classes that the weapons can inherit from. Rocket propulsion in one class, guidance in another, calculations of impact in yet another one and so on. This will make it easy to put together new weapons by inherit the proper base classes and then glue it all together with some code specific to that weapon.

While all this is very important for the stability and expandability of the program, it doesn't really give me anything to show. So you'll have to wait some time before I'll post any new films showing something being shot at.

That is all for this update. If there is anything specific you want me to write about next time, please leave a comment.