The future of the 'aviator' flight simulator
Steve Hayman
Thought others might be interested in this.
At the inaugural meeting of our Indiana sun users group last night ,
the local Sun systems engineer revealed a bit about the future of Sun's
"Aviator" flight simulator demo program, which, up until now, you've
been able to get if you pestered your Sun rep long enough. (It's a lot
of fun, by the way, but you need the GX board to use it.)
Anyway, Ed mentioned that the two authors of Aviator are forming a
spinoff company to market this program. It's going to be released
this summer, will cost something like $150, will be distributed
on a CD-ROM with a much larger terrain database. In the current
version you can fly around the Grand Canyon or Hawaii and the
terrain data for those two areas occupies about 80 Meg of disk space;
the new CDROM version will also include the Persian Gulf, among other things.
Maybe they'll have the whole world on there. actually I guess there
wouldn't quite be room for that. Anyway ...
Not to mention an airport so you can land, the ability for players to
group themselves into teams, you can be the ground-based
anti-aircraft-gun player, etc etc.
Sounds like this will be a lot of fun. I can't wait to try it out!
Steve Hayman
--
Steve Hayman Workstation Manager Computer Science Department Indiana U.
saha...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (812) 855-6984
NeXT Mail: saha...@spurge.bloomington.in.us
Jim Hickstein
back, and I had a look at an updated version in its pre-release
incarnation. It uses a floating license, each concurrent seat costing
$150, which is way cheap after you see it run: it's breathtaking! The
licensing aspect is original: it gives you a magic number to give to
Artificial Horizons, along with your dough, and they give you back
another magic number (in the form of three 4-character chunks, given in
the phonetic alphabet!), and you're off! You can also fly for 60
seconds in "demo mode" without a license, which is enough for you to
appreciate what an amazing experience it is to fly this thing, but
annoying enough to make you spend the money. If you've got a GX on your
desk, you will buy this program; it's that nifty.
This version also had an 8-bit color mode (it's normally 4 bits deep,
encoding ground elevation as shades of green), with data for the San
Francisco Bay area scanned from a Landsat image, approximating true
color (albeit as seen from space, which is weird when you're only 500
feet over it). It isn't as fast in 8-bit mode, obviously, but it's fun
to fly home over the road that one will shortly drive. I could
*almost* make out I-680 up through Sunol (California).
Dogfighting is limited to hosts on the same physical Ethernet, because
it uses the multicast feature to report your position to other
aircraft. (I may have to make myself a multicast bridge.) One day
soon, I hope to visit some folks at LSI Logic, said to be the best
bunch of Aviator pilots around, for a friendly dogfighting match. I
expect they will wipe the sky with me and my partner: the LSI Logic
guys are working on canopy-to-canopy formation flying, and we're still
trying to get in the same square mile without colliding! What fun!
Bruce tells me that some *real* FA-18A pilots have played with this
thing, and were *impressed*. That impressed the Hell out of *me*, I
can tell you!
The dynamics of flight are much improved in the commercial version, and
some of the games we played by "customizing" the aircraftcap file
(i.e. give the 727 a million pounds of thrust and see how far into
outer space it can go) have been toned down a bit. We can't fly *over
the sun* any more, but it does appear as an ellipse if you're good at
it, about the time the sky turns black, at a little over Flight Level
5000 (that's 500,000 feet MSL, guys!). Of course, you won't be able to
dogfight with mortals when in this rarefied condition; at least it is
to be hoped not. But "formation" flying can still be accomplished by
mounting, instead of Sidewinders, more FA-18A's on your hardpoints.
Launch them, and watch them respond to your controls! Then bump into
them! Bruce didn't believe that we had flown over the sun, but I swear
I saw a very thin ellipse down around 4,000,000 feet one day, due West;
it just goes to show how much a computer program can surprise the
programmer when put into the hands of some truly original abusers of
other people's software. :-)
I hadn't heard about an airport or an anti-aircraft battery; I can't
wait!
--
"Neither can His Mind be thought to be in Tune whose Words do Jarre;
Nor His Reason in Frame whose Sentence is Preposterous."
Jim Hickstein, Teradyne/Attain, San Jose CA, (408) 434-0822 FAX -0252
j...@attain.teradyne.com ...!{decwrl!teda,apple}!attain!jxh