any other sims

[capt_dale1]

Hey people is there any other free sims instead of pre flight and fms or if they are payware post the cheapest please
Thanks in advance

[Daniel G]

Slope Soaring Simulator http://www.rowlhouse.co.uk/sss/

[Mr Rowl]

RCFSim
http://manuelguillen.tripod.com/pcair2/air.htm

Crrcsim
http://crrcsim.sourceforge.net/

[capt_dale1]

Hey thanks how do i download that crrc sim?

[Mr Rowl]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/crrcsim/

Edit: Also, I put a slightly updated version of SSS here:

http://www.rowlhouse.co.uk/sss/sss-2.16.9.zip

since I know having to register with yahoo puts people off (though for the sake of my bandwidth allowance please prefer the yahoo link if you can!).

[skirtz]

ClearView RC:

http://rcflightsim.com

http://rcflightsim.com/images/lama4.jpg

[capt_dale1]

Ok a BIG THANKS to every one that gave me these links i apperciate it

[Mr Rowl]

skirtz - you ought to add that video from here:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3156556#post3156556
onto your website, because it looks pretty good :)

[skirtz]

Thanks Mr Rowl. I am adding plane support now and I will have some pretty hot 3d planes soon (in about a month).

[Mr Rowl]

Incidently, I had a quick play with your demo version last night. I've never flown a real-life heli before (OK, apart from a real full-size EH101 sim :), but the following things I noticed were missing:

1. Ground effect - my understanding is that at low altitude you get a substantial cushion of air which lakes the effective lift increase substantially close to the ground

2. Translational lift - when hovering the circulation of air decreases the lift. However, if you drift horizontally you move into air which doesn't have that circulation, so the effective lift increases.

3. As you move forwards the effective airspeed of the rotor blade increase on one side (left/right, depending on the rotor direction), and decreases on the other. Because the whole beast is a gyroscope, this results in a pitch-up in whichever direction you're going.

4. Your simulation doesn't seem to treat the helicopter as a gyroscope (doing so can make the physics simulation rather unstable) : (1) ground friction behaves really wierdly in such conditions, and (2) if you apply a pitch to your heli, then release it, the heli seems to keep rotating (a gyroscope stabilises very quickly).

5. air turbulence - I would have guessed you'd always get this near the ground because of the backwash from the rotor wash reflected off the ground, as well as normal wind gusts.

As I say - I don't know how important these effects are in real-life. Maybe they don't matter if you're doing aerobatic stuff (though for training I would have thought they're important since they would affect hovering/landing). I put them all into my sim, but my inexperience means their contributions aren't set up correctly. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about them.

---

Skirtz:

Incidently, I've thought for a while that the way forward for photo-realistic graphics isn't to use real photos of flying fields, because of the limitations of not being able to move the viewpoint and of setting up collision etc. Instead, allow yourself, say, 5 seconds (instead of the normal 1/60th of a second or whatever!) to pre-render the scene in a conventional way onto a skybox, _including_ per-pixel depth information. Because you've got, say, 300x more time to render than normal, you could really go overboard with procedural grass, nice full-polygon trees etc (imagine what a game engine like that used in FarCry could do if it had 300x the time to render).

A little while ago I started experimenting with this (http://www.rowlhouse.co.uk/terrain/ you need the nvidiia cg toolkit installed to run it. Also, I just discovered it doesn't work on this ATI card I have now (well, it works but only slowly if you press 's' to bypass using the NV-specific pixel shader...) - I wrote it using a nvidia one... etc etc When it works you should see a dynamic object moving and getting occluded by a pre-rendered background) and got the method basically working. It needs more work to improve performance, memory use, and compatability with older gfx cards though. The three advantages are:

1. You could pause the simulation at any point, click somewhere on the terrain and reposition the pilot there (after a few seconds to re-render the scenery)

2. You could have the renderer run in a simple/real-time mode to allow the pilot to follow the aircraft.

3. You're not dependant on external equipment/techniques to try to build up a collision model of the surroundings that matches the graphics - it can be done using standard editors (together with procedural stuff like vegetation).

Anyway, sorry for going on - but since you're actively working on your sim, if you wanted to follow this up let me know.

[skirtz]

Mr Rowl,

I have flown rc helis for 15 years and I know what is realistic simulation. I would like to say very politelly that it is hard for me to take your feedback because you have no rc heli experience whatsoever.

[Mr Rowl]

Mr Rowl,
I have flown rc helis for 15 years and I know what is realistic simulation. I would like to say very politelly that it is hard for me to take your feedback because you have no rc heli experience whatsoever.

My comments honestly weren't meant as criticism. Each one of the 5 things I mentioned is a real effect in helicopter flight - but as I said I don't know how significant each is in practice when it comes down to small lightweight RC helis. I was just genuinely interested in your opinion (privately or publicly), as one of the few people who's not only flown helis but also thought enough about them to implement a simulator.

[skirtz]

All five items you mentioned are implemented and can be felt. The simulator behavior is very close to what you get from properly set rc heli.