A very long time in the past I made a decision to attempt making a easy flight sim, and I did. Then I misplaced the venture information and forgot about it. But not too long ago I’ve been having that itch once more so I made a decision to take it a bit extra critically this time! This will not be a full recreation, only a proof of idea, a prototype. But I felt like logging the progress so right here it’s the devlog.

Pitch:

Flight simulators are nice. Even non pilots love to fireplace one up, load no matter default aircraft out there, take off, do some loops, and crash making an attempt to land. Then most individuals cease taking part in as a result of actual life is kinda boring. I imply critically, the world is principally flat! you may have 6 levels of freedom and no obstacles forward. That’s why everyone seems to be drawn to buildings and bridges to fly shut or underneath. So I made a decision I wished to make a flight simulator, as convincing as doable, however in one other world, the place flying is difficult and fascinating as a result of cities occupy massive 3D volumes you must fly inside. In this recreation you play as sort of a truck driver, however a pilot. You fly inside cities, decide up contracts to move packing containers, take them to their vacation spot and many others. The cash is used to pay for gasoline.

it isn’t one big metropolis however a big world. And whereas flying inside cities is likely to be difficult, you must fly between cities, which is straightforward. This is when it can save you the sport. You put up the autopilot to take care of altitude and pace and go to mattress to save lots of.

Anticipating the technical challenges of creating open world video games I made my life less complicated with some backstory. This planet is the results of a failed terraforming course of and the inhabitants is the cussed remaining of the colonization efforts, who have been born and constructed a life there. THEREFORE the planet is roofed in fog  

Isn’t fog nice? I would like completely different ranges of fog. I would like the fog to be a variable to take into accounts when planning your routes. So the densest fog is the place massive flying predators cover. Making the fog considerably dynamic ought to present for good pressure. You begin the journey with a trajectory that’s shut by a big dense fog quantity and go to mattress hoping you do not unintentionally enter it. Maybe you determine to land someplace to attend within the much less dense however nonetheless harmful fog. Maybe that backfires and you end up having to cross a bit of harmful fog! Maybe the load of your present load is an excessive amount of to fly over it and also you determine to flush your cargo out to outlive. Yeah, I can see alternatives for juicy gameplay dramas to naturally happen.

So, to sum it up, on this recreation you: fly a aircraft, load the ship, handle cargo area, refuel, handle cash, make lengthy journeys the place you sleep to save lots of, keep away from monsters in dense fog.

Execution plan
Obviously I’m not going to make a AAA recreation with real looking graphics. But even so that does not restrict a lot the world of potentialities, and no matter’s left can nonetheless be an excessive amount of work for single dev prototype.

Idea 1: The immersive sim philosophy. First particular person view and freedom to maneuver contained in the ship. Want to maneuver that crate to the facet? go there and transfer that crate to the facet.
I could make the prototype with easy boxy graphics, no downside. But that also leaves some challenges to beat, like physics scale. The flight dynamics makes use of the physics system, the FPS view may even be physics pushed, however the two scales should be stored separate… most likely. The aircraft is huge and flies quick. To make that easy it requires scale to be set with small numbers and a system that resets the foundation of the rework earlier than massive numbers begin to mess the simulation up. My instinct is screaming to go away the FPS half separate from the aircraft physics. A participant collider with 0.01 models of peak shall be problematic, the inside of the ship stuffed with tiny packing containers inside a aircraft flying at 200 un/s will certainly not work.
So that is the problem there. Separating scales.

The scale downside could be current in different features of the sport if I hadn’t made the planet foggy. Because the planet is big compared to any metropolis, a metropolis is big compared to a single block and many others. Since it is all foggy I can simply have two scales: one planet large scale that tracks the participant’s place and the close to neighborhood is loaded with easy procedural technology. The separation of the aircraft and the FPS and aircraft components will not be solved that simply.

Idea 2: I actually love the immersive sim strategy however I really feel it is likely to be too bold. Another chance is to go in a very completely different (and probably authentic) path; a top-down isometric view with 2D artwork. The transition from 3D cockpit view to inner 2D view shall be completely jarring. I by no means noticed anybody do that, with good purpose. But I’ll be damned if it does not spike my curiosity.

That could be loads simpler to implement and I’ll be capable of deal with the extra summary features of the sport.

I’m curious to listen to ideas. Next submit can have some gifs.