Is Unity a good tool to make flight and or space sims?
I think the hardest part is the flight model and newtonian physics, but I can avoid this 
what do you think?
PD: waiting really anxious for the win version
I don’t see any reason why unity shouldn’t be able to handle a flight game. Ageia Physics are part of the engine already and everything else is dependant on the kind of game and degree of realism you want to achieve.
Since Unity isn’t some kind of game tool for any specific type of game (like the FPS creator for example) there’s not much you can’t do at all, I guess.
ps - I didn’t want to wait for the windows version and bought a mac two months ago. It was worth it ^^
Unity is capable of making a wide variety of game types and flight/space sims are most definitely a part of that.
Thank you guys!
I am also interested in creating a flight simulation. And the positive comments I read here about Unity’s capability encouraged me to ask this question.
Would a flight simulator in unity be able to have a large terrain such as that found in applications such as FSX and X-plane? From what I’ve seen so far unity seems to be scene based, and I doubt it could handle a single enormous scene which would allow me to fly from New York to LA, realistically.
Since the one scene would probably be too big, and Unity supports terrain streaming, I am assuming I would need multiple scenes.
Could it be done practically by creating lots of large scenes which would them be dynamically loaded and unloaded as the player flies around from point A to point B? I’ve read about the “load additive level” command to stream in levels/terrain, would that be the best approach? it seems based on the user’s position you might have to load several “level tiles” at once if the player is near a boundary of the current level, to cover views in all directions. If streaming in tiles works, could the “tile scenes” be generated completely with code, instead of the editor?
Or would it be possible/better to not use “Scene loading” at all and dynamically create the scenes “on the fly” as the user flies around the environment from an underlying terrain database that was stored in a separate app (say in C/C++ using Unity Pro to access it).
Is it possible to create scenes from scratch at runtime without the editor just scripting, while the user is playing? Or would there be missing elements API/calls that would be necessary to say, create new terrains on the fly, as the user is playing.
Or is the kind of flight simulation supported more like the battlefield series, where the player could fly around a map/scene of limited size such as the island demo, which could be created in the editor?
Just looking to see if such an idea is feasible in unity, and if so what the recommended approach would be to using the terrain streaming features to make it work. I do have a unity pro license, so I would have all the features available to me.
As a side note about streaming:
I took a look at Fusionfall, and although they do use terrain streaming for multiple scenes it appears they have laid out their levels in a block like manner connected by bridges. This would seem to make it easier to determine which is the next terrain block to stream in. The user really can’t freely roam from terrain to terrain in any direction, they have to use the bridges to cross from one terrain to the next. So it appears to avoid the problem of loading many tiles at the same time, as I’ve described above. (This is just my observation from playing the game) Is this a fusionfall limitation, or more of a unity limitation?
Thanks
Brian Carroll
Yes, that’s what I’d do, except I don’t see a reason to use a separate app or plugins.
Sure, that’s no problem.
–Eric
I was thinking a separate library in C/C++ to manage the scenery database because I was concerned about the speed of using Mono to access a very large embedded file based database in real time, containing scenery from elevation data, water boundaries, buildings, etc. Wasn’t sure how fast accessing a large scenery database using only mono would be.
I’m glad to hear that it’s possible. I was wondering because I was reading the forums, and some people had mentioned that items such as tree placement on terrain weren’t accessible from the scripting api, and that modifying/constructing heightmaps / splatmaps from terrain from scratch required using some undocumented API methods/structures. Generally that these items were only creatable/editable in the scene from the unity editor, and everything couldn’t be created from script.
(Although I have heard this may be changing in Unity 2.5, per the keynote notes saying that scripts can do everything the editor can do now, but I don’t have any specifics)
Thanks!
Brian
Well, it’s true that some of the terrain APIs (including tree placement) are still not public. However, they’re definitely accessible, and it’s not overly hard to figure them out and use them, as long as you accept that the next version could break non-public APIs.
Also, it’s not required to use the built-in terrain engine; you’re certainly free to build your own, and for a flight simulator I would even go so far as to recommend it. Mainly because the built-in terrain engine is geared toward ground-based first-person views, and the way the trees are handled in particular is not well suited to overhead viewing.
–Eric
If it’s even possible to create Flight Simulation in Flash, I don’t see why not in Unity, looking forward to look any progress in this matter.
It is completely possible.
Made in Unity.
Cheers
Maybe a “landing” 1st person simulator in Unity could be a nice start. Look at this flash version:
Hi,
How is your flight sim engine coming along?