Intro to Flight Physics

In it's current state this is a "Demo", it is not wrapped in a game shell with a menu, control config, or extended from the tutorial, as of yet.

Intro to Flight Physics in Unity 3D is a Udemy course by IndiePixel that I completed recently and it's a cut above other courses I've done in terms of walking you through a minimalist planning process to produce modular code through light use of inheritance and interfaces. 

Intro to Flight Physics - Udemy

If you want to build this yourself and learn how these systems work, please support IndiePixel and buy the course.

About the course

Intro to Flight Physics is a hands on intermediate Unity course that walks you through the process of building physics based aircraft and simulating a set of real world instruments.  

By the end of this course you'll have a configurable system that allows you to customize a wide variety of an aircrafts flight characteristics that you could apply to any number of projects and adapt to any number of real world or fantasy aircraft.  

I enjoyed this course and want to give IndiePixel a huge shout out for having the cleanest architecture I've seen on a Udemy project, and for showing their minimalist planning process. This course is more than just making a project. It's about learning how to make life easier for yourself as a developer and I can't recommend it enough.

How to play

It is highly recommended to have a basic understanding of how airplanes fly before trying this.  

To expand on this video, a real aircraft generates lift differently based on its speed, and its angle of attack.  

It's control surfaces (elevator, rudder, ailerons, flaps) efficiency varies based on forward velocity relative to the direction their pointing.  

Too steep an angle and you can stall the airflow over the wing.  

For beginners, make short movements with your controls, feel the response, then add more input. Except to fail many times at tighter turns, etc.  

Efficiency of controls can decrease with too little OR too much speed.  

The aircraft modeled in the current version of this tutorial has a sweet spot of around 70-90 knots. Exceeding its max rated airspeed of 110 knots may result in less responsive controls. This is expected behaviour. This is a simulation. A basic one.  

Manage your speed with flaps and by climbing or diving and watching your throttle.  

Plan your turns. More on that below...

There's no damage or death logic in this project at this time.  Crash all you need.

Flying the course

There is a simple track of rings to fly through.  

Fly through the rings and LAND to complete the course.  

Developer tips: 

- flying directly at a ring may not be the best choice

- try visualizing a gently curved highway in the sky between the rings

- lower your speed around "corners" just like you would on a highway

- when going down lower your throttle just like you would take your foot off the gas in a car

- if your speed gets too high, your turning radius will get wider making it more difficult to reach the rings, additionally your controls may lose efficiency

- lead the turns

- sometimes you may want to turn slightly in the opposite direction first to 'change the road' similar to widening your turning radius in a car

- continued steep turns lose lift

- recovering altitude and control authority after a bad move is slow, you need a lot of altitude to pull that off, but the current course is very low altitude and thus, unforgiving to new players

- throttle is not linear, engine power in this simulation is based on a mixture of engine RPM's and the engine's power curve, half throttle is not necessarily "half power"

- Flaps have settings of 0, 30, or 60 degrees

- Flaps create lift, but also drag. They can help as airbrakes to an extent but will also push you higher

Controls

A dual stick xbox style controller is currently required. There is no controller rebind.

- Left Stick

  - Horizontal Axis - Roll - Ailerons (bank left/right)

  - Vertical Axis - Pitch - Elevator (down to pitch down, up to pitch up)

- Right Stick

  - Horizontal Axis - Yaw - Rudder (yaw left/right), on ground also controls the steerable tail wheel  

  - Vertical Axis - Throttle - (up to increase, down to decrease)

- Right Shoulder - Flaps Down (Increase flaps)

- Left Shoulder - Flaps Up (Decrease flaps)

- Y - Switch Camera View

- Right Trigger - Wheel Brakes - CURRENTLY BROKEN

Known issues

- Wheel brakes are broken

- The tutorials shader code does not work in Unity 2022 as it was intended for 2017-2018

- Audio won't start playing until you toggle the cockpit view

- Current aircraft flight characteristics are very touchy in terms of throttle and speed management