Volo Airsport - Wingsuit Skydiving Simulator

Can't wait for you to release this!

 

Very nice, one question how did you get this "terminal velocity very speedy" shadder effect?

 

@Bigkahuna: Thanks, again! Once the suit is in all the basics are in place and some testing rounds can begin.

@leonardoaraujo.santos: By giving this man some dollah. I think he abandoned the project though, pointing to some similar work that looked very promising.

 

I have dreams where I jump/float/fly/land and I was thinking of making a game about it. Very similar to this. Excellent work, I really like what you have gotten done so far.

 

Your last vids are amazing. And I love the SPEED of this tech demo. It looks absolutely realistic to me. Very nice!

 

Can I play? I want to!

 

Should this motionBlur script still be able to work with the current latest version of Unity (3.3)? I couldn't get it to work. The 'standard' (Pro) post effect is IMHO not as good as the one that's used here, in Volo.

 

I'm very impressed with this, hows development of terrain going?

 

Tinus, I can't tell you how awesome I think this is. Please, please, please keep going. I want to play this so bad. Really. I can't wait.

 

Oh hey, comments! I guess I should post a little update.

At the end of Januari I had kind of gotten stuck in a rut. The aerodynamics code needed an overhaul to improve performance, handling and ease of editing, but I didn't really see how to do it. I kept staring at the same problems for weeks on end without much improvement, and eventually decided to just let go of the project for a while to clear my head. I'm doing some contract work now, which is earning me some money (another concern that needed to be addressed), giving me some much-needed practice, and is very enjoyable to do since I'm making measurable progress every day. I hope to soon bring this new-found skill and enthusiasm back to Volo. </storyofmylife>

@thedaemon: Hah, I recognize that! Man's dream of flying is what got me into this.

@Ilikescifi: Thanks, I put a lot of effort into the visceral feel of both the character movement and camera behaviour.

@duartel: 'Done when it's done'

@zappapa: I had some problems getting it to work as well, and I've turned it off for now. I'm getting into shader writing a bit, so perhaps I'll be able to fix it soon.

@redmacmanz: I'm playing around with World Machine, which is perfect for generating natural-looking terrain. I'm also doing some freelance work which consists of a chuncked terrain importing/streaming tool, which could help with managing larger terrains. I still need to research how big I can make things without sacrificing performance, though.

@DNA: Thanks, I'll get on it again.

 

I want to play this game! Looks awesome, keep up the good work!

 

I did a new video to show everyone that the game's not dead.

 

The new camera is looking awesome man! Loved the flips and rolls, your physics are really nice!

 

I like what you are doing a lot.

 

Hi Tinus
I am trying to implement a Glider, but I am totally failing. I would like to know, if you would have a look at a few code snippets, if I post them here.

 

PLEASE let us play this
Give us that version!!!

 

Is there any way that this could be used in iOS? Would this be compatible out of the box, or would I have to alter it. Does this still require graphics card hardware and software.

 

@Duartel: I'm looking into getting a playable prototype onto IndieCity when it launches.

@racer161: I don't think it's quite possible to port the game to mobile platforms in its current form. The physics are quite expensive to run (a detailed ragdoll for each player), and you have to deal with very large draw distances in this type of game. Still, with the right kind of decisions and feature cuts it could happen. The biggest problem right now is that I appear to not be skilled enough to build this thing into a full game.

@Dantus: Sorry for the late response, I only just now figured out I could subscribe to threads for updates. Anyway, which part are you stuck on? As far as the aerodynamics go, I got started using this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#Methods_to_determine_lift_on_an_airfoil. The true airspeed is the body's velocity relative to the wind it's flying though. The air density you can just leave as a constant, like we often do with gravity. 'A' is the surface area of the wing. Finally, I used a hand drawn curve (AnimationCurve, standard Unity class) to specify the lift coefficient for different angles of attack, kind of mimicking the curve you can see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_coefficient, and just tweaking from there.

Measuring the angle of attack (vertical; or pitch) took me some figuring out. You want to measure the angle between two vectors (the wing's pointing direction, and the relative velocity through the wind), but you want to know whether the angle is positive or negative. Vector3.Angle() doesn't give you that information, so I cobbled together my own AngleSigned(Vector3 v1, Vector3 v2, Vector3 axis) method that gives me the angle between two vectors around an axis. Evaluating the hand drawn curve with the found angle yields the lift coefficient needed to complete the equation.

I added several additional features later on, such as the effects of wing sweep (horizontal angle of attack; or yaw), but really, it's all up to how complicated you want to get. I'm not very happy with my approach yet. It has a lot of edge cases in which it doesn't work well, and it's expensive in how it has to calculate a lot of dot/cross products for each surface (of which I have many). It also doesn't model deflection of flow at all, so it's not like a tail-plane of an aircraft would be affected by the downwash of the wings in the middle of the fuselage. But ah well, to do anything more sophisticated I'd probably have to take some advanced physics/aerodynamics courses, something I'm not quite ready to do.

Anyway, does that help?

 

Thanks for the very detailed answer. That is very much the same I did. I need to tweak the curves. But it is good to know it can work like that. Thank you very much again!

 

After getting burned out on this for a while, I'm starting to get back into it.

Here's a video showcasing a new level, some new camera effects, and the dire need for new physics.

Asset Store packages used:
- Nature Pack
- Cloud System

 

Awesome! Glad to hear you're still working on this =)

 

This is looking really great, can't wait to play it.

 

This project still amazes me! But dude, please put out a web player!!! I want to play this sooooo badly! I don't care if it's really buggy, just let me play!!!!!

 

Yaaaaay

 

I dunno, the physics look pretty darn good to me. Anymore realistic and you'll need to wear a helmet while you're playing it!

PS - Love the terrains, very realistic looking.

 

Amazing!

 

Thanks guys! And thanks for the cloud system, Dantus.

@Rush-Rage-Games: Working on it! This is the number one request, it seems.
@bigkahuna: Thanks! I finally put some effort into making a level that seems somewhat complete. Maybe not *finished* (it could use some non-heightmap geometry, buildings, etc.), but at least well away from a heightmap floating in a void.

 

The revised terrain looks great now, and the whole atmosphere of the game seems much better than the early stuff (sounds, music, feel of the camera). Looking forward to seeing it with a real character

 

Dude, seriously. Give us a way to play it. I don't care if the character looks like that I WANNA PLAY D:

 

Hi Tinus,

Great game concept, looks very fun.
If you need help with physics, PM me.

 

Can we get the game or not? D:

 

@Duartel: I don't care about the character model all that much yet either. I just need to finish some freelancing gigs so I can take a week to produce distributable demo.

@TiG: Thanks, I might do that!

 

Hello Tinus. What is the status of this game???

 

Amazing physic, good job !

 

Legendary Stuff! Excellent work! I'm truly inspired! Cannot wait to give it a bash with friends one day!

 

So after almost a full year of not working on this game I'm back at it. I'm currently working on a set of modules for easy aircraft creation.

Check out this post on the devblog to find out what's going on and why: Volo Airsport Blog - Shall we try this again?

Edit: Oh by the way, shouldn't this thread be moved to Work In Progress?

 

I skydived myself for several years. So I'm pretty happy to see something like this.
(Although I never had enough jumps to get into a wingsuit)

The terrain on some of the vids of this looks great.

Where is the skydiving element? I only see a wingsuiting element.
Are you going to implement canopy flight?

 

Regular skydiving will happen at a later point, the same goes for canopy flight.

 

Great, will be interesting to see how you implement the parachute opening mechanism.

 

I've spent many hours worrying about that question. It will probably end up half physical simulation (pilot chute that pulls out the main container) and animation (for the initial unfolding of the canopy mesh). The canopy simulation will hopefully feature a simplistic softbody-like system.

 

I was thinking of the animation route too for the initial deployment.
Are you going to be implementing malfunctions?

Rope physics could also work in this instance, as the canopy deploys you apply more upward force to it, which in turn pulls the rope out.

 

I might try rope physicss at some point, but certainly not at first. I'm going with the simplest possible implementation first, and then slowly exand with more in-depth simulation as needed. Primary focus will be on the mechanics of flight, and getting that to feel right. The canopy opening and malfunctions are relatively small aspects of regular flight, so they're lower priorities.

That said, if malfunctions turn out to be a significant addition to fun they'll have to go in at some point.

 

Looks like a nice relaxing game.. and it actually made me wanna do that in real life.. o.0

 

Can you tell how to write the code for the airplane? I really like this game

 

Hooray! Finally!

I've been checking this topic practically weekly for updates, and finally you kept working on it!

This has great potential, keep it up!

 

Spectacular! The game really feels like it captures the essence of the sport! I would LOVE to try this someday! It looks like such a thrill!

Excellent work on the air-physics stuff. You can definitely see the interaction of the character's body, control surfaces and the atmosphere. Is this going to be an advertisement-game for the company? Or a pure game-based-on-a-sport?

Nice job!

Oh, I especially like that tree trunks don't hinder your progress. That would definitely take a lot of the fun out of it. Dodging the ground is one thing. Dodging trees is another. I hope its a feature that you don't have to dodge the trees

 

How had you written the windphysics?

 

@ShadoX: Hah, me too.

@duartel: Apologies for leaving you hanging for all these months!

@MadRobot: This is purely a personal project, definitely not for advertising purposes. And regarding trees: They do have collision, but only for the trunk so you can clip through leaves just fine. You need to navigate around them, but they do not pose much of a threat this way. The treecount in most levels will be low though, since Unity's drawcall count shoots up radically when you view a bunch of them from great height.

@BusterBlader: My scripts are all based on this formula I got from wikipedia:



It relates the essential properties of the simulation (air density, surface area, velocity, lift coefficient, etc.) and gives you the lift force. It took me a bit of experimenting to take this into 3D. But now I can fit an aerodynamics module based on this to any rigidbody, define its surface area and lift/drag coeficients around all degrees of freedom, and the simulation is good to go. I'd like to say it isn't that complicated, but it actually took my quite an amount of time.

Oh, the actual wind? Right now it's a simple 3D Perlin noise field with multiple octaves. It's hardly realistic, but it's only there to introduce a bit of turbulence. Without that the simulation feels too clean.

 

Can you show or explain how it works with the perlin noise?

 

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