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Makes me wonder, ho does one start to build a serious flight simulator? Is there any publicly available resources about implementation techniques and pitfalls s
by w0utert 6y ago
Makes me wonder, ho does one start to build a serious flight simulator? Is there any publicly available resources about implementation techniques and pitfalls specific to flight simulators, like there are for so many other topics, so you don't have to learn everything the hard way, make all the obvious mistakes, etc? Or is this a topic where you can really work from first principles, using just basic physics and incrementally adding simulation of more advanced effects?
- amelius 6y agoI have no experience here, but starting from physics sounds like a very difficult approach since the equations that govern aerodynamics aren't that simple. So I would look for some results that simplify these equations. Like how Maxwell's equations aren't used for designing most electronic circuits, but instead people use simplifications like circuit theory. I suspect a similar simplifying approach would exist in aerospace design (but again I have no experience here). Perhaps the best idea is to take some introductory courses here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/
- pastrami_panda 6y agoFloating origin is a nice algorithm for dealing with floating point imprecision. Essentially just translating the camera to origin regularly. Regarding terrain there are many techniques of varying difficulties to implement. Streaming terrain data and stitching LOD seams (both normal and vertex blending) are basically the gist of it, but the implementation details regarding uniform vs non-uniform grids, tesselation vs chunking etc. needs to be considered.
- 13415 6y agoLook up blade element theory, that's how Laminar started with X-Plane, and they incrementally refined their model over the past 20 years. I bet the physics will take the least and the graphics will take most of development time, though.
- mhh__ 6y agoThe graphics are why an increasing number of projects are just using Unreal these days. Not sure how well it would work (level size) but it looks fantastic in racing games which also have fancy physics.
- meheleventyone 6y agoJSBSim is a nice modular example: https://github.com/JSBSim-Team/jsbsim https://github.com/JSBSim-Team/jsbsim But yes it’s something you can approach in a layered manner adding in more detail.
- fmakunbound 6y agoWhen I was a kid in the 90s, I worked through a very fun book called “Build your own Flight Sim in C++”. It was for DOS, so it also covered the 3D graphics algorithms and techniques you needed. Fun times.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- orbital-decay 6y agoPhysics, software and aircraft engineering expertise are only going to help you so much. It's enough to build a general purpose sim, but to simulate real aircraft you also need real data, which is often a trade or a military secret, as DCS developers learned the hard way when one of them got arrested for alleged smuggling of F-16 manuals. For a serious sim, you need a lot of communication with the aircraft developer, and a lot of money for licensing fees.
- wsc981 6y agoI am not sure if it would count like a "serious" flight simulator, but the (pretty old) Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming [0] book has a pretty decent introduction I believe and I'm guessing most of the C++ code could be useful regardless of platform. --- [0]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/black-art-of-macintosh-game-programming https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/black-art-of-macintosh-game...