Real Flight Simulator PC Games - Your pilot dreams - Games - Aeroplane

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Featuring Highly detailed models...

Lockheed F-5B Lightning (P-38 variant)

Eurocopter EC-135

Sopwith Camel

Vought F4U Corsair

Grumman A-6E Intruder

Fairchild A-10 "Warthog"

Main Hangar, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake

Fully Functional 3d Cockpits...

Grumman A-6E Intruder

Fairchild A-10 "Warthog"

Beechcraft 1900-D

English Electric Lightning

Boeing 787

Cessna 150

Complex 3D Model Animations and Shadows...

V-22 Osprey on an aircraft carrier elevator

V-22 Osprey on the ground

V-22 Osprey airborne

Time of Day, Weather, and Seasonal Effects...

F4U, sunny, scattered clouds

787 in rain

A-10 at sunset

DHC-2F Beaver greets the morning

de Havilland Sea Vixen at altitude

A-10 in twilight

Sopwith Camel in winter

Many Aircraft Include Unexpected Gems...

SR-71 Blackbird deceleration chute

Another view of SR-71 and chute

Sikorsky S-51, rotor blades folded

A-10 releasing ordinance

Air to Air Refueling, Banner Towing, Multiplayer Glider Towing, Parachute Drops ...

SR-71 refuelling in mid-air

A view from below

Schleicher ASK 21 glider

Paratroopers jumping from Nord Noratlas

Moyes Dragonfly ultralight with banner in tow

Carrier Ops...

Blackburn B-103 Buccaneer ready for catapult launch

F4U on final

F4U on elevator from the hangar deck

Hawker Sea Hawk visiting aboard the French carrier Foch.

Another view, with the Sea Hawk ready for launch.

A Sea Hawk and Sea Vixen on catapults

A Sea Vixen ready for launch aboard the USS Nimitz

Authentic Helicopter Flight Dynamics...

Westland WG.13 Lynx at sea.

Piasecki CH-21 Shawnee on rescue ops

The view from inside the Aerospatiale Alouette II

A Wide Variety of Civilian and Military Aircraft are Available...

Boeing 787

Sopwith Camel

Cessna 150

Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

Piper PA-34-200T Seneca II

SZD-9 Bocian 1E sailplane

Aerostar Super 700

A Variety of Realistic Aircraft Operate Autonomously at Many Airports...

Piper Comanche PA-24-250 over Paris-Orly airport

Hangar activity at Orly

Another view of Orly

 

Fly with others by connecting to the one of the free multiplayer servers...

Multiplayer map/web server showing current locations and velocities of aircraft

Realistic Failures and Faults...

Seneca on final for a single-engine landing, with several gauges reflecting left engine failure

Paris...

Piper Comanche over paris, with Notre Dame in the foreground, and the Montparnasse Tower and the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

Looking north towards Montmartre

Looking east, with the Champ de Mars stretching between the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire, with Les Invalides in the background at the center.

Looking along Avenue Foch towards the Arc de Triomphe

Paris at night

La Defense District, Paris...

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Los Angeles, CA...

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Hardware Requirements

Real Flight Simulator is a fairly typical OpenGL application in terms of it's performance and hardware requirements. It requires a reasonable hardware accelerated 3D card with OpenGL drivers to achieve smooth frame rates. Software only rendering typically yields frame rates in the neighborhood of several seconds per frame. But, with a 3d accelerated card you can expect much higher. On a 2-3Ghz class CPU with a GeForce card, frame rates in excess of 60 fps are reasonable to expect in most situations. The actual frame rate varies of course with scene complexity (which changes from area to area and changes as your view direction changes) and the specific details of your hardware.

OpenGL Drivers for Win32 and Mac

Most modern computers these days ship with hardware accelerated 3D cards. If you are having trouble running Real Flight Simulator, visit your card manufacturer's web site and download and install the latest drivers for your card.

OpenGL Drivers for Linux, FreeBSD, etc.

Nvidia and ATI cards are all pretty well supported by the PC Unixen. Depending on your video card, your distribution, and your sys-admin experience, getting accelerated drivers running can be more or less of a challenge.

The Big Picture

Here is a bit of general background information on OpenGL and 3D hardware acceleration.

When you are drawing graphics in 3D, there are generally a hierarchy of things to do:

1. Stuff you do per-frame (like reading the mouse, doing flight dynamics)


2. Stuff you do per-object (like coarse culling, level-of-detail)


3. Stuff you do per-polygon or per-vertex (like rotate/translate/clip/illuminate)


4. Stuff you do per-pixel (shading, texturing, Z-buffering, alpha-blend)

On a $1M full-scale flight simulator visual system, you do step (1) in the main CPU, and the hardware takes care of (2), (3) and (4)

On a $100k SGI workstation, you do (1) and (2) and the hardware takes care of (3) and (4)

On a $100 PC 3D card, you (or your OpenGL library software - which runs on the main CPU) do (1), (2) and (3) and the hardware takes care of (4).

On a machine without 3D hardware, the main CPU has to do everything.

The amount of work to do each of these operations goes up by one or two orders of magnitude at each step. One eye point, perhaps a hundred objects, tens of polygons per object, hundreds of pixels per polygon.

Hence, putting step (4) into hardware is vital - you could easily need to draw a million pixels for each time you read the mouse. Putting step (3) into hardware is also very nice - cards like the nVidia GeForce are now doing this.

So, if you put a cheap accelerated 3D card onto a slow-ish PC, you still get all the benefits of not doing the per-pixel math in software - so your frame rate will speed up. But since that per-pixel stuff now goes very fast, you are probably limited by the speed that your old clunker can do step (3) - the per-vertex math.

A card like the GeForce which can do step (3) will bring you even greater performance benefits on a slow-ish PC.

It has been suggested that even a 400MHz Pentium II couldn't feed vertices to a Voodoo-2 card faster than it could process them. That was for a 'typical' scene though. If your polygons are very large (in terms of screen area) then the amount of per-pixel math will increase up to the point where even a slow PC would end up waiting for the 3D card to complete the rendering of one polygon before it can accept the next.

If your polygons are very small then the 3D card may not give you much benefit. There is a certain amount of overhead in sending each polygon to the hardware from the main CPU - and that cost could ultimately be more than the cost of drawing the pixels in software if the polygons only cover a few pixels each.

If your 3D card doesn't provide a speedup then make sure you have a proper OpenGL driver installed for that card - some cards only support Direct3D which FGFS is unable to interface to. Some 3D cards can't function if you set the display resolution too large or the pixel depth to something that card won't support. Some OpenGL drivers silently drop back to software-only rendering under those circumstances.

In summary: Will a 3D card speed up FGFS on a standard PC? Yes - immensely.

Packages

Real Flight Simulator CDROM for Win32 v1.0.0: RM39 (NEW!) - You are buying this. Includes everything you need to run Real Flight Simulator. Features a standard windows install shield and an easy scenery installer. Includes all available aircraft, documentation, and source code for the entire project.

3-DVD Real Flight Simulator World Scenery Set: RM79 World Scenery set for Real Flight Simulator v1.0.0. Updated March, 2008. This is a set of 3-DVD's (about 13Gb of data) that includes the entire world scenery database for Real Flight Simulator. Scenery is based on SRTM terrain, vmap0 roads, rivers, railroads, lakes, cities, land cover, etc.

Real Flight Simulator CDROM for Windows v1.0.0 plus 3-DVD World Scenery Set: RM99 (save RM19.00) Includes both the Real Flight Simulator program CD for Windows and the 3-DVD World Scenery set in one combination package for a discounted price.

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