This airport is 2.5 miles long and 1.6 miles wide, visible from space this manmade island had jets first land in 1994. The biggest threat to this airport could be sea level rise.
Flight Sim World
Guess The Airport
This airport is 2.5 miles long and 1.6 miles wide, visible from space this manmade island had jets first land in 1994. The biggest threat to this airport could be sea level rise.
What Gaining My PPL(A) Means As A Developer Of FSW
Gaining my private pilot's license has enabled me to see another side of this beautiful, complex, daunting world of aviation. Through the eyes of a licensed pilot.
During early development of FSW I was spending every waking moment hoovering up every bit of information I could. There is so much to learn, perhaps too much to ever completely understand and appreciate. Making a flight simulator is nothing like a sports game. Sports have a rule-book, you can dissect them and figure out what is required in order to portray that sport. You can spend some time in the field and pick up on what's hot and what's not. In aviation it's so huge, so complex, you can't pick up a single book and figure out what's going on after a few hours study. You need to jump right into it and forget everything you thought you knew. I gave up other interests, spent less time with family and friends, stopped playing videogames and simply consumed everything flight.
Overnight I became that guy at the dinner party that turns the conversation, relentlessly, to aviation. But it wasn't enough. So I buried my fear of flying (yes, really) and signed up to pilot training at my local airfield. I studied the real material, learnt to fly an aircraft, went solo, visited other airports as part of my cross country and passed all nine of the exams ahead of the 'big day'. The skill test. I suffered countless false starts due to weather until, eventually, it went ahead and I nailed the biggest challenge I've ever faced. I'm just a normal guy that didn't know anything about aviation, let alone flying aircraft. I've always had an interest in making a flight simulator, but now I'm armed with the knowledge to understand what it takes to capture the feeling of being a pilot up there, in the sky. I mean, I am a pilot and I've got a license to prove it.
Over twenty years I've worked on a number of games. I've travelled the world under guise of 'business expense and research' and had some wonderful times. But none of that compares to what it felt like to gain my pilots license. It will always stay with me and the experience it has provided continues to be fed back into FSW. I've met so many people on this journey and can now better piece together the 'puzzle' as we continue to develop what I hope will become the go-to flight simulator for years to come. I also realise just how much more there is to develop if we're to cover all bases. I'm more determined than ever to play my part, alongside a wonderful team, in pushing ahead with realising this dream.
Gaining my PPL(A) allowed me to appreciate Air Law, Meteorology, Aircraft General Knowledge, Navigation and Radio Navigation, Human Performance, Flight Planning and Performance, Communications, Operational Procedures and Principles of Flight. It's incredibly important to have undertaken and completed this journey for it allows me to appreciate what is and isn't important if we're to replicate the experience of being a pilot. It's what drives a lot of our thinking on wanting to upgrade features like the ATC system. You don't get a sense of being in a busy sky full of aircraft. That's a big miss, in my opinion. We need to tackle more of what it means to be a pilot in today's world and we need to appreciate the point and reason of flight.
Flight Sim World benefits from our determination to learn all we can. This is our story.
Weekly Challenge #2 - Kahului Air Start-Up
The challenge this week involved the Kahului Air mission pack. We want you to clear the first two missions, show us a screenshot proving you've done it to be in with a chance to win a copy of Epic Approaches.
You can leave a screenshot here.
Dynamic Weather (1.3.24095) – Now Available In Flight Sim World
How do I enable Dynamic Weather?
Go into the Free Flight menu, you will find Dynamic Weather under the weather settings tab.
Is Dynamic Weather finished?
No, with version 1.0 of Dynamic Weather, the conditions develop around you and are not visible from a distance. You can see the weather developing, but there are no weather fronts. V1 has been about preparing the FSW engine and our Advanced Weather engine powers by trueSKY for the implementation of Live Weather. Our goal is to visualize multiple weather types in the same session, so we can have foreboding weather fronts for you to try to avoid.
Let us know what you think about the implementation of Dynamic Weather in Flight Sim World.
What is Dynamic Weather Anyway?
Here at DTG towers, we are getting pretty excited about Dynamic Weather v1 coming to Flight Sim World tomorrow.
As it is now, you have a choice of static weather themes, and your flights are conducted in that theme for the entirety of your session - the wind, cloud type, cloud heights, visibility remains constant.
With dynamic weather, this is not the case. Once you enable DW, the engine reads from thousands of weather stations dotted around the world map and determines the conditions from METAR strings that we have created.
In order to ensure the conditions are not always the same, we have created multiple environments - through the inclusion of seasonal strings. Over time we will expand this data set to provide an incredibly rich and varied flight environment. It wouldn't make sense for the South East of the UK to continually shower the player with rain - there is a week of moderately warm weather to break it up. (For avoidance of doubt, this is a joke - there are actually two weeks of moderately warm weather in the UK – each year!)
With Dynamic Weather enabled, your flight from departure to destination will 'read in' the weather strings from nearby weather stations and determine the conditions. So if you were to travel, for example, from Coventry airport to Heathrow, you could take off in overcast conditions with light rain and arrive at Heathrow in sunny conditions with very few clouds.
En route, the engine will pickup other nearby weather stations and will, after a period of time, try to transition to the visible weather to those settings it has been fed. There is a cycle which waits before reading new conditions (so as not to be constantly transitioning as you fly within reach of lots of stations) and a transition time whenever a change is initiated. The conditions slowly unfold and do not 'jump' from one to another.
As this is version 1.0 of dynamic weather, the conditions develop around you and do not become visible off in the distance. You can see the weather developing, but it will be the same in every direction you look - essentially there are no weather fronts. This step is has been about preparing the FSW engine, and in particular our Advanced Weather engine powered by trueSKY, for Live Weather.
The aim is to eventually be able to visualize multiple weather types in the same session so we can have foreboding weather fronts for you to try and avoid! This, in what is arguably the most advanced visualization of weather in a flight simulation, is where we’re heading.
Live Stream On January 31st
Hello Everyone,
I hope you're excited for the launch of Dynamic Weather on February 1st.
We'll be streaming Flight Sim World tomorrow, where Aimee and Joeri will be on Twitch.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Weekly Challenge - #1 Flight Time
We're starting a series of weekly challenges, things we recommend you try out in Flight Sim World.
We're starting with making preparations for our in-sim LAPL. There are a number of steps to gettings your LAPL, in the UK it's 10 hours of supervised solo flight time.
In Flight Sim World you need 3 hours of flight time logged, this week we're challenging you to add an hour to your flight time. We need a before and after photo to prove you've done it, you can submit that here.
Explore the Piper PA-34 Seneca
We believe Flight Sim World has the finest GA aircraft models of any Simulator in the world right now, and to demonstrate that we’ve prepared a web browser way for you to get up close and technical with the exact Piper PA-34 Seneca model our development team created.
You can load the aircraft in by clicking into the viewer below, and then take a look around in numerous ways. Scroll in using your mouse wheel and drag the plane around in full 360 views. Holding down Shift and moving the model will change the lighting hues, and by using the multi-split icon in the viewer you can check out the polygons that make up the model and even more art layers that bring the aircraft fully to life.
You can find the Seneca here!
Flight Sim World - New Bundles Available
We've got some new bundles available for people looking to pick up Flight Sim World.
Flight Sim World + the PA-28R Arrow III - Save 30%
Flight Sim World + the Epic Approaches Mission Pack - 25% Off
Flight Sim World + P-40F Warhawk - 30% Off
Flight Sim World + Big Bear Airport - 20% Off
Flight Sim World Enters Phase 2 Of Development
With the release of Update 16 today, we’ve squashed more bugs, adjusted the avionics and made numerous alterations to mission difficulty, all based on what you’ve been telling us. You can read the full update notes here, but in this post I really want to talk about what’s next for Flight Sim World.
Flight Sim World has left Early Access and is now in Phase 2 of development!
Whilst in Early Access we’ve been extending the underlying technology and working with select partners on the SDK. This has been released not only to developers, but made available to you. Our intention was always to cement a stable platform and come out of Early Access. It’s been a great environment in which to develop but, if truth be told, can all too easily become a comfortable home you never want to leave! We don’t want to get too comfortable.
With that in mind, we’re switching our focus to some of our longer term goals, meaning there won’t be as many quick updates, but instead more impactful changes and big feature additions. We’ve got a lot planned for 2018, including IFR implementation, expanding the core fleet of aircraft, improving the look of the world, live weather and my own personal pet project, improvements to ATC, to name just a few.
I’ve said that I want to build a platform that will stand the test of time over the next 5 or 10 years. We’re not there yet, but the goal hasn’t changed and the journey we’re on together is far from over. This next stage of development is a necessary change of gear. So let me take a moment to answer a few questions I think you might have.
Have you finished developing?
No. We’ve got a suite of exciting updates planned for the sim and our entire small development team is in regular discussion about what we’d like to work on next. We’re eager to share that with you (and will discuss some of that below), but I just want to take a moment to stress how grateful myself and the team are for all your support thus far. The constructive feedback you’ve given us to date has been invaluable in helping to create this foundation for us to build upon, and will continue to be a building block as we further expand the core simulator. It’s the beginning of a new phase, with less small updates, instead the delivery of larger features.
About those features, what’s next?
One of the most exciting things for us is seeing you all sink your teeth into our meatier updates. We want to deliver larger updates into core Flight Sim World package. So what’s coming in Phase 2?
We’ve talked in the past about our work in Early Access as laying the foundations. If we take Advanced Weather as an example, the implementation of trueSKY was the foundation for where we want to take weather in Flight Sim World. It wasn’t easy, opting to integrate an altogether new system into FSW. We took that route because we believe the difference it makes is worth the challenge of implementation. It’s a disruptive approach, one designed to bring about necessary change. I hope you can already see, even at this early stage, the positive improvement it brings to the overall experience. What’s really important is where we take it next. Wouldn’t it be more exciting if you had to work around changing weather?
So our next release will be adding dynamic weather into the simulator on February 1st. This forms the basis of the technology that will power the future implementation of Live Weather.
Wait, did you just say dynamic weather?
Yes, and we can’t wait to see you what you think when the weather takes a turn for the worse or when the cloud breaks and you spot an opportunity to climb on top. The weather themes have been great, but it’ll be a whole lot more realistic as we mirror the unpredictability of the real world, complete with seasonal variation.
That’s not all! We want to give you more options about what you fly in Flight Sim World, starting with the addition of two new variants of the PA-18 Super Cub. We’ve added the amphibious and tundra tyres versions today! So, if you’re looking to take off and alight on water, or tackle rougher terrain, you’ll be able to do so. We appreciate this isn’t the type of aircraft you’ve been specifically asking for (more on that below), but we wanted to release this to you as a thank you for being part of this ambitious journey.
So what about the Long-Haul?
No great simulator was built in a day, and we’ve got ambitious development goals. I wanted to share some of those with you here.
One thing we’ve been working on a lot recently is bringing the first jet into Flight Sim World. This requires adding IFR functionality to the sim (something that’s been on our hitlist for a while). The first jet will have all the features necessary to allow novice as well as experienced simmers to get involved in instrument flight.
We’ll dive into more specifics on that in a separate post on Steam and the Flight Sim World website in the near future. We’ll also be adding another new aircraft into the simulator, something that’s quite unlike anything you’ll have seen in Flight Sim World thus far.
One of my personal long-term goals has always been to overhaul the ATC. I want to build an ATC that doesn’t take you out of the experience but rather gives you goosebumps. I’ve long felt that more complex aircraft, realistic weather, instrument flight and a modern ATC system would combine to provide that wow moment. In all honesty I find radio comms one of the crucial elements of flight, even in light aircraft, that simply isn’t portrayed well enough in any flight simulator. That’s just an example of some of the things we’re looking at from a developer perspective. What do you all think?
That’s all for now. 2018 is going to be an amazing year for Flight Sim World and we’re eager to share more with you as we continue our endeavour to push the boundaries of flight simulation. Welcome to Phase 2.
Oh, and one last thing. I previously mentioned two additions to the stock fleet of aircraft, starting with the jet and a ‘mystery’ aircraft. Of course we haven’t forgotten about those of you who want bigger airliners and will have more to share on that later in 2018.
Thank you for your support thus far, we want to deliver more for FSW in Phase 2 and beyond with larger updates, and we’ll keep you up to date here regularly.
Steve Hood & The Flight Sim World Dev Team