Flight Sim Game Engine

[Sashelas]

Quest 3D lite edition $89 + the network add-on $799 would possibly make a nice flight sim. Not cheap but the demo of a multi monitor flight simulator looked wild:
http://www.quest3d.com/images3/addons/network.jpg

Truevision at $150 would work. The A08 and B10 tutorials show potential for a nice flight engine. It is easier to compile a project make a working demo than Quest 3D in my experience. I plan to buy TV3D 6.5 when it comes out and have had fun with the 6.2 demo.

Dark Basic would work for small confined flight sims. The Room Wars game would be worth a look. Dark Basic customer service and licensing is horrible however. I've had two bad experiences with them. The time you invest in learning to use DBPro's language might be inefficient. Truevision has an edge by using industry standard languages. The price for the DBPro online license was around $50 I believe but I still haven't received my activation key after a week :(.

There is also a large amount of open source code out there for older flight sims. Truevision would be your best bet for a quick and easy project.

Which features are you looking for? For example, do you want long flights, flights through caverns and cityscapes, or physical simulation flights with realistic break-aparts?

You should also check out Microsoft SDK for flight sim 2004. It is comprehensive would give you a few ideas on which features you might want in your engine:
http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/fs2004_downloads_sdk.asp

[Sashelas]

For flight simulations, I've always like the way that you can see reflections off of your surroundings. You'll notice in many action films, reflection or shadow adds to the perception of speed and thrill to a sequence. Mixed with multiple camera montage and a little thumping bass mp3, you can really add to the thrill of simulated flying.

I haven't found an engine yet that does moving reflections and shadows with great performance. They may be out there, but I haven't seen aside from a few demos that take place in a small confined area. I think it is due to the timing of DirectX releases and the development time of consumer targeted engines.

A technique that looks nice for this sort of thing is the use of a stencil buffer. In the DirectX9 SDK, there is an example called StencilMirror that shows a chopper flying over water and mountains. The reflection of the chopper appears on the water. Neat effect and fantastic performance. On an older machine at 1600x1200 resolution, I get 60 fps with an ATI 8500 card running the demo. You should check it out sometime.

[Sashelas]

Blitz3d also has a flight demo which you might want to try. It is amazing. It is a two page program that runs a nice landscape, biplane simulation. On my machine it is smooth at 1600x1200.

The engine is simple and wild. It reminds me of writing turbo pascal games in the early 90's.

The demo is xfighter.bb at http://www.blitzbasic.com/Products/_index_.php

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