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Submitted by , posted on 23 February 2005
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I've been a flight simulation enthusiast from the first day I got my hands on a
copy of flight simulator 5.1 back in 1995. I started coding one or two years
after but my experience in this area never allowed me to even start to think of
doing such a thing as a flight simulator.
Things have changed since then and with the help of stuff like C#, Managed
DirectX and ODE, it has become easier to do things like flight simulator games!
Last year, with a lot of time ahead, I decided I would try to write my own
flight sim. The result 9 months later is far beyond what I thought I could do.
The flight model is not the most accurate ever, but the feeling of a flying
aircraft is there. So far, the aircraft can roll, take off, land, stall …
The physics are based on ODE, used through a simple Managed C++ wrapper.
An ATC system has also been implemented, it’s very basic now, but AI Aircrafts
talk on the radio and do actions according to whatever they are told by the ATC
controllers.
For the terrain, I have written a shader that allows for more realistic ground
rendering especially with the fog effect.
The sky rendering technique is also based on a shader that calculates at runtime
the color shades to apply based on the position of the sun and the haze level.
This project is far from being finished and a lot of work remains to be done.
If you want more information about the making of this project, I’ve written a
bunch of articles on my
blog in the Flight Simulator Project section. They
cover various aspects of the project and the problems I’ve been facing along the
way.
Several videos are available as well as loads of screenshots.
Matthieu Laban
http://msdn.labtech.epitech.net/Blogs/matt/
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