As you all may know, I have a bit of experience in 3D modelling and animation in the past. A few of my readers may also know that I was once in a club as a child called the Ansett Starship Crew. Being born in Northern Ireland and coming to Australia on a big plane, I think my parents signed me up to help my thirst for knowledge as I was curious how a big thing like a plane worked.
This club (Ansett Starship Crew) exposed me to a whole world about aviation and planes and a bit about aerospace, which later began a big passion for me as a child. We got to go on mystery flights all around Australia, tours of airports and even go on a few of the simulations. Since Ansett’s departure (pun intended), I have flown on so many planes and clocked up a lot of kilometres (over 30,000km). I also owned a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator on my Windows box and Space Shuttle Simulator on the Commodore 64, to fuel my interest and clocked up a lot hours on that too.
It dawned on me the other day, what ever happened to Microsoft Flight Simulator and the likes, with advancement of 3D graphics cards these days, the physics and realism would be so much better than what I vaguely remember in 1989. So, whilst researching the other day I came across that MS Flight Simulator is a HUGE thing nowadays. It seems that there is a number of websites are dedicated to providing users with add-on files (such as airplanes from actual airlines, airport utility cars, actual buildings located in specific cities, textures, and city files). The wide availability over the internet of freeware add-on files for the simulation package has encouraged the development of a large and diverse virtual community, linked up by design group and enthusiast message boards, online multiplayer flying, and ‘virtual airlines’.
So, seems like I have been out of the loop for a while and it has exploded. But it made me wonder, back to the Ansett Starship Crew days, I wonder what they use for their simulations. I doubt they would use Microsoft’s engine. So, after a bit of digging, I came across MultiGen’s OpenFlight and this awesome bit of software that would be so awesome to play around with. https://www.presagis.com/en/product/creator/
Well, maybe one day I will get back into this simulation stuff or maybe when I retire I will end up getting that helicopter licence or maybe Ella or Penelope will be an astronaut (that would be awesome).
Campbell Craig 