Aviation is a free flight simulator game meant to be somewhere in-between accurate but complicated simulators and simple toy simulators that don't provide any level of realism. Currently Aviation allows you to fly around in an area of around 600 square kilometers centered around the Columbia river.
Aviation
Aviation (or rather Techne, the platform Aviation runs on) implements a continuous level-of-detail terrain triangulation engine capable of handling very large datasets, a configurable atmosphere model and a non-linear flight model. The default geographic dataset spans about 600 square kilometers and the currently defined flight model is that of a light aerobatic aircraft, to be used for Airrace. Adding more datasets or flight models is easy enough. Aviation doesn't do much by itself, you can only fly around. It is meant to be used as a base for other applications or games. One such example is Airrace, described in the next section but much more is possible.
Airrace
Please read this regarding my next project: a free, multiplayer, combat flight simulator.
Airrace is a proof-of-concept Application written on top of Aviation implementing an air race game where the player has to pilot a light-weight aircraft through a track consisting of pylons or air gates. Although its written as a test of Aviation and in order to promote its development, it's still a full-fledged game. Currently there are 7 training courses and 5 race-tracks but adding more is a piece of cake.
The game features a flight model calculated through JSBSim's aeromatic to represent a light-weight aerobatic aircraft. This means that if we disregard a couple of points of no interest to our application like Mach-induced drag which only becomes significant at higher speeds or ground effect which becomes prominent when close to the ground etc. the flight-model is pretty realistic and accurate although not modelled after any particular plane but as a generic light, agile aircraft. In fact a couple of tests showed that the characteristics seems to agree with todays prominent race aircraft. At high speeds wings stall at about 12 G and above and the roll rate is about 400+ degrees per second. The top speed is a little higher. Maybe the engine needs a few hp of output less. All this makes the plane harder to handle and get the hang of but it also makes the whole game a lot more challenging.
Apart from that there's a graphical interface allowing you to select tracks save replays and export them for sharing with your friends and to keep track of your times and race results. The only thing missing is perhaps a central point for keeping times where pilots all over the world can compete.
Requirements:
- Techne 0.2
- The Lua 5.1 stand-alone compiler
Comments not found