Icarus Flight Simulator

Hi

I'd been working on an Android based flight simulator for past one year. It is based on JSBSIM flight dynamics engine used by FlightGear. Check it out here.
Tell me how you like it.

Thanks

 

Installing now.

I've been wondering if anyone has been able to use JSBsim. Good news. Are you willing to share your port/wrapper? thank you.

 

It was pretty fun. I did have one major issue. The altimeter was not reading correctly. This caused multiple crashes, as the altimeter was telling me I was 2,000 feet off the ground and I would smack right into the ground and crash. Also second issue was, once I crashed I could find no way to reset my plane, or go back to a menu to start over.

 

@gl33mer
I have basically compiled JSBSIM and my wrapper into a library. Wrapper exposes FDMExec functions as externs and provides mechanism to get/set fdm properties. On Unity side, data is pulled in every FixedUpdate to C# models that represent different aircraft systems.
One very difficult thing was implementing ground callbacks that provide terrain data to JSBSIM. Another thing was running it on Android since JSBSIM needed to access xml files from native code using native AAssetManager from within the apk. phew. My C++ wrapper is pretty simple but things are very ugly on Unity C# side and is not marketable at all. I wil continue to clean it up though and put it up on asset store some day.

@James
Thanks for playing. The altimeter is not wrong but the whole world is setup in high mountaineous region where ground is that much above sea level.
When you crash you can press back button to show menu. But I think its not that obvious and I should correct that.

 

@devin8
An altimeter actually shows the altitude (height above the Earths surface at your position). Your altimeter is showing the elevation.

 

I think you're right. Will correct that in next version. Thanks for pointing it out guys.

 

Thanks for replying @devin8. I some how missed it.

I appreciate you taking the time to point out the gist of it with possible pitfalls.

I'm waiting for a good flight model to appear on the asset store though the features I'm most interested will probably need to be added (environmental effects, winds, thermals, ridge/wave soaring, dynamic soaring, etc.)

I may give up on this prototype for now.

Take smaller bites.

 

actually its above sealevel.

 

Hi gl33mer

You're welcome. Yes it would be great to see environmental effects, winds, thermals and soaring. But I think JSBSIM has some support for wind effects. It would depend on the implementation as how far it can push it.
See the reference class for Wind Gusts
http://jsbsim.sourceforge.net/JSBSim/classJSBSim_1_1FGWinds.html

I don't have support for wind effects in Icarus. But I think implementing it can be quite involved, especially ridge/wave soaring because it would have to be integrated with terrain data.

Cheers

 

Thanks gigolo,

I searched a bit and found that altimeters work on atmospheric pressure. So they would have nothing to do with terrain height and are purely based on elevation.
But having "above ground level" is also necessary. So I will implement a separate digital AGL meter.

Thanks again guys.

 

No worries that it's not marketable - it would still save people lots of time. Could you please share it?

 

Hi All

I've managed to create an ultra simple wrapper for JSBSIM that I'll put in the asset store soon. It uses dynamic code generation and complex native calls and callbacks, but the end product is very simple to use.
For more details checkout this forum post

 

Nice game. Again, don't have my droid on me, so can't test it right now. However, I do have an idea...

Also, which version of OpenGL ES?

 

I think GLES 2.0. Actually, whatever version Unity can run on. Graphics are all Unity 3D, the flight physics is done in JSBSIM.
The game available on Google Play is an older version, I've since rewritten the whole core which is much faster and clean.
I will upgrade the game with the new core soon.

 

Unity can run on 3.0, but my tab can't... that's why i asked.