I just had my own crack at a serious-ish flight simulator for the cockpit competition:
Venus Patrol. I didn't manage to finish it.
I like the ribbons and the feeling of the earth and sky revolving around you. But it's tough to control with keys; you have to keep tapping the down key to stop the nose dropping, and you have to press 3 to know what you have padlocked. Did you experiment with mouse control? That was one of the things I wanted to do in my game, and I think it came out okay. I love the cockpit sounds.
Is there any way to change the colour of the HUD, so that it's easier to see against the horizon? And what kind of flight model are you guys using? I see you've got data on roll rates for the different aircraft; is that directly built into the model, or does it come out of the physics?
Thanks for your feedback,
And yes, the text is one of the downsides of using blended texture openGL text, against bright backgrounds it's harder to see. However, this is actually realistic, as a real HUD is just cullimated laser, and sometimes is harder to see against bright areas than against dark.
Yes, it is a bit hard to fly with the keyboard, and the flight dynamics aren't 500% perfect at all. The pitching and rolling physics relies quite heavily on accurate graphs, so each plane's roll and pitch speed is actually very accurate. Thrust is most accurate for F-16, also graphed from H-F-F-M manual. The other planes thrust are estimated off the F-16 thrust graph. Lift and Drag coefficients are estimated using simple estimation theories and calculated, without graphing.
So to answer your question short, roll/pitch rate is directly built into model, as making those come out of physics is to say the least, very difficult.
I've tried using mouse on flight simulators back when I didn't have a flightstick, in fact my first proper introduction to flight simulators was using a virtual joystick that gets input from a mouse
. I personally quickly found keyboard controls work much better than mouse. Yes you have to tap here and there, but it's very hard to balance the need for quick, hard max G pulls with the need for minor adjustments (while landing, CCIP bombing.etc). On a keyboard, you can simply hold for high G stuff, tap for minor adjustments while landing.
Community
