I just wanted to introduce you to a quick little project I have been working on in my spare time.
Attached is a video of a flight sim I have been putting together. The flight model uses the correct lift drag equations to simulate flight and is entirely data driven. That is to say you can simply drag and drop your aerofoils over the 3d model set the correct cg position and weight and with some tweaking it will be have vaguely like the real thing
Animated control surfaces, virtual cockpit dials and switches have all been coded also and again are set up entirely through data with no bespoke coding written for each part. Just drop in a script set some parameters and it all works nicely.
This means that in theory new aircraft can be drag and dropped together within 10-15mins.
I am starting to love unity!
The hardest part is balancing out all the forces so that it actually flies!
For those interested there is quite a bit more stuff to do:
Environment- not even started on this yet but have some cunning plans.
Aerodynamics - Torque/PFactor, Prop wash, Fueslage aerodynamics.
Panel - Gmeter, rpm guage
Engine - Correct engine simulation and blade aerodynamics.
Joystick/Mouse flight support.
Sound!
Good start. Made me wonder if would be possible to use Google maps (through the API) as ground texture, I think it would been a killer on smart phones. Fly over your neighborhood or your current location. For all I know perhaps this has been done a gazillion times already
Thanks guys!
Linus, already on it just got my head around mercator projections. Sadly however this is against the google static map api’s terms, so it may well just have to be something I can play around with locally, rather than something I can distribute to people. Have a source for elevation data also so the two combined should give pretty good results.
I will be sure to put a video up if I get it working
Not really thought about the asset store to be honest. This really has been a learning excersize for myself but if there is enough demand for it then I may consider getting it to a level others could use. It is already pretty modular, other aircraft can already be modelled without having to write any lines of code…it does however require some understanding of lift/center of gravity coupling to get something that flies reasonably well.
How about having a free version with just the flight stuff, and a pro version with more advanced options (biplanes, gunner position, etc). Basically the free version is just stuff for non-offensive (like passenger) planes that take off, fly and land, and the paid version would be for warplanes and uncommon designs.
I’d love to see a decent flight model available for Unity. I started porting one I wrote a looooooong time ago and never finished. Yours looks like it handles a lot better!
