Flight sim questions

Hi everybody,

Blitz3D lies unused on my harddisk for some years now and it seems to be time to finally use it again. Shortly after buying Blitz3D (only remember some tests, simple lens flare effect and developing a simple space shooter and a single surface particle system, source lost *grrml*) I switched over to Linux, now I'm (partly) back to WindowsXP and thinking of developing a small game which was the reason I bought B3D.

The idea: Developing a small flight simulator with playable, old planes like Spitfire, Hurricane, Bf109 or even older tri-planes, first simple version one-player-only, later on maybe multiplayer with HUD-like chat (anyone remembers AirAttack or Warbirds?).
The game should be playable on older hardware, too (developing on Thinkpad A31p, 2Ghz P4m, 2Gb RAM, ATI FireGL 7800 64Mb RAM).

- Simple terrain, should be usable for great-height view, planes and buildings should cast shadows
- Physics should be unique according to the real world physics (but not perfectly correct, this is a fun project)
- Small airports to take ammunition and fuel
- Clouds (should be usable to 'hide', maybe textured cloud layers), maybe rain,sun/lense flares and daytime changing

Right now I'm searching through various forums for initial ideas, mainly about the terrain system: What kind of terrain is suitable for a project like this, B3D-terrain (tiled for great size/great height view and with towel-shadows for the planes), mesh terrain, or something like the infinite terrain engines I found here in this forums (BITE) which seems to be too much detailed... any help on this question would be greatly appreciated.

I would use tiled Blitz native terrains since LOD is built in and you are going to be far up from them. L3DT would be a good app to generate your terrain heightmaps and it makes great looking texture maps that would be perfect for a flight sim.

hi, I used to play IL2 sturmovik a few years ago, allways flying german bombers in an argentine clan of pilots..

i hope you can finish your project soon!, sounds like a good project!..

count on me for advices or comments.

Thank you for the motivating words but I do not think this project will be finished soon. As I've written I've been working on Linux for some years now, right now I'm trying to get used to Windows again and to make the first steps with Blitz3D (again).

Besides I'm doing a lot of research on terrains and lod systems as this project will be developed (and should be playable, at leas at low detail settings) on a 1Ghz celeron - no way I can use brute force terrains. B3D terrains seem to be kind of slow (but faster than brute force terrains because of blitz doing realtime LOD), too, as i read in various threads here in this forums.

Current idea:
- Quad tree LOD terrain with a single surface mesh (does B3D do clipping based on entities or surfaces? I'll test this...), based on a heightmap, covering the whole terrain. The terrain will be subdivided to smaller chunks (quads) close to the players camera so we get more detail/smoother terrain and low poly terrain far away.

Right now I have no clue about how to use 'one unit', my first idea about using 1px in the heightmap as one km in terrain resulted in a bad terrain because of the max. camera range of 1000 units. Scaling the terrain by 10 (1px=100m) results in a usable terrain but I'd have to use very small values for roll/pitch/yaw/acceleration speeds... this project is fun, but there's a lon, long way to go...

hi again..

what kind of scenario you want to do? Montani, plains, lakes, ocean?

maibe you can use the concept of the google earth... using procedurals equations to create the terrain mesh... the old Falcon f16 game for pc have that kind of scenary creator...

general map = heighmap ¿how many kilometers?
your game go to have streets and rivers?

another question, which physic engine are you going to use?