Crew Prototype

Fuzzy Logic Navigation Improvements

I'm half way there to (re) building a working 3D Fuzzy navigation system.
Just implemented a new feature to help user-observation - a 3D blue line shows where a vehicle's current 'nearest obstruction' is located.

The distance to and angle to the nearest obstruction are used as fuzzy input variables for the navigation system.

Having the indicator line there helps the observer understand how the system is working, and also helps the designer tune the system (for instance if it is suspected that the nearest obstruction could be better chosen).

Aiming the cannon (pivot) and crew ballistic calculation

I've managed to get a prototype of the cannon-aiming mechanism to work properly.
This was a major technical and mathematical challenge that has been bugging me since the very beginning (because the cannon pivots on a turret that traverses on a hull that rolls and pitches on terrain). So far I am only aiming for situations where the tank is on completely level terrain and I have disabled gravity. But for this situation it seems to be working even more accurately than expected, which is great.

To overcome the aiming from uneven terrain issue I have a much improved system in place so it will probably be up and running within the week.
Aiming with gravity should be easy to do - just calculating the end-points of a parabolic trajectory.
Eventually I will increase the simulated physical phenomenon such as wind and drag on projectiles, which will require some additional crew-aiming simulation.

I also want to be able to traverse the cannon itself to tweak aiming. Historically, when the turrets of WWII tank traversed the cannon fell out of position (until the advent of gyro-stabilisation devices) so I might simulate this as well. I also want to be able to tell the AI that it can't shoot from terrain that is too uneven - which should be an interesting intelligent agent planning challenge.

The screenshots display how I'm processing all this:
* The crew does a calculation (with some error simulated) of the distance to the target, and other details, and actually works out the angle to pitch the cannon (in mills of course, but I'm representing it in radians here).

As for links to future ideas for simulation there are some nice topic summaries on Wikipedia:
* Ballistics in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistics
* External ballistics (projectile motion) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_ballistics
* Terminal ballistics (armour penetration): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_ballistics
* Anti-tank warfare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank

Other things to reference:
* Physics text books for parabolic motion and dented parabolic motion
* Endpoint calculation for parabolic trajectories