Nostalgia: Commanche 3

Commanche 3 is a helicopter sim by Novalogic, which uses 'voxels' for rendering the landscape, which created a really awesome landscape for flying for its time.

Some of the voxels are, for the lack of a better word to described it - 'puffy' and sort of clip a bit so when you land on the ground and they dig in a bit, creating a visual effect just like tall grass does to a helicopter landing gear.

Although it wasn't exactly realistic and based on a non-existant helicopter (the Commanche project was stopped I believe), it was the most fun I had with a helicopter simulator, and just have many days going through it imagining I'm driving Airwolf, flying low over the landscape, hovering in place to observe the enemy and calling for artillery or unleashing the chopper's firepower on them.

The landscape loops; that means if you see a rice field below you and keep continuing in that direction, then you will see it again. There are sceneries like trees. It was a very nice game/sim that balances play,simulation and fun quite well. I love the espionage / intelligence gathering missions - it's basically Airwolf.


Quite a lot of thought went into the game as well, as there are even auto rotations in the event of an engine failure (although the engine takes damage, it doesn't really just fail completely - you can limp the aircraft home) the manual states that you can actually turn off the engine mid air, autorotate to the ground, gear down and flare slightly on landing, and do it right you could actually get away with some gear and frame damage.

Trying to describe the game with words I can only do so much, the experience for Commanche 3 was so vivid and great that I cannot fully describe this into words.

I no longer have the sim, and I miss it much.

Novalogic ruined the 4th version (Commanche 4) with a stupid mouse-driven shoot-em-up-helicopter-simulator that just doesn't work, it was too time demanding, and most of the time I just don't know what was happening.

A (Very) Brief Overview of X-Plane 10

 I have downloaded the X-Plane 10 demo lately.

All I can say is -- WOW! The dynamic lighting makes flying the night scenes so realistic! This, combined with the cars moving about on roads, it looks just like when I'm on a real plane, looking down towards the ground. Austin Meyer, founder of Laminar Research and maker of X-Plane says in an interview that the roads are based on OpenStreet Map, and based on that street map data they auto-generate the buildings and roadways in the sim. The effect is wonderful - even though the city we're flying over won't be exactly the same, the the sim loads up buildings in what it thinks are suburban areas and cities and place buildings accordingly. That means roads near a waterfront will have waterfront houses, densely packed areas will have tall buildings, etc. It is a wonderful result.

The dynamic lighting also makes the sim realistic, how the lighting looks depends on time of day, and it is dawn or dusk that is especially interesting, especially when all the light on the aircraft comes on, and all the city lights and cars went on.

The clouds are even better, never have I seen so convincing clouds in a sim yet - like in real life, you can have cloudy areas in one direction and clear areas in another direction.

The sim does have some problems though - if you treat it like a game, then it will be like a toy. For example, most obstacles and buildings don't have collision detection, you just fly through them. Landing on water, you will just float like a child's bath toy. You can even take off again from water....

But ultimately, we don't get simulations to do things such as those, we use simulations to fly, and the planes provided that I tried so far have been great.

Needless to say there are a lot more things to write about X-Plane 10 which I don't have time to (I'm working as I type this!) and it is my latest interest so far- other than Kerbal Space Program, and FlightGear of course.

The simulation runs quite smoothly in default settings on my late-2012 Mac mini. The demo will disable joystick input after 15 minutes.


X-Plane 10 Demo can be downloaded here

Helicopter Scoops Water from Private Pool

Helicopter Scoops Water from Private Pool. Insane piloting skills! Very dangerous. I certainly could not do this when playing with Flight Simulator a few years back.
Helicopter Steals Water From Pool by Jokeroo

Been Playing Kerbal Space Program

Interesting game as hell. After initial false launches and falling back onto Earth, I figured out the proper launch maneuvers and finally put barely a capsule into orbit (after spending too much fuel). Subsequent flights I got better and got more efficient.

It's an awesome simulation - check it out. I would not call it realistic simulator but I did learn a lot about space flight trajectories, orbiting manuevers, etc from it. You can actually get to the "Mun" and other planets in that solar system, however. I never actually got there, yet.

Download the demo version: http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com

Real Helicopter Pilot Retreives a Crashed R/C Plane from Treetops.

This helicopter pilot sees an R/C plane get stuck in the trees, and swoops down to retrieve it for them. If I were that boy I would be jumping up and down in excitement and would not be able to sleep out of excitement for at least a week!

AWESOME Approach

Check this video out.

In just under 4 minutes, the pilots of this Dornier went from cruise to taxiing on the ground. They even beat the skydivers to the ground. The moment the last skydiver jumped out the pilots put the plane into an inverted dive straight downwards, flew just above treetop level, and did a really FAST APPROACH, SWEEPING TURN at nearly 90degree and set the plane down onto the runway without missing a beat (or overshoot, or crashing).

THAT IS AMAZING. And also, very dangerous. BUT AMAZING.

They dove straight after the last skydiver jumped but I found it scary that it looked like they were diving straight into those sky divers.



Another angle:

It's been a while... but a new computer coming!

It's been a while. Over 2 years in fact. I finally am getting a new computer to run FlightGear! I know it is loooooooooong overdue, but due to circumstances I am not able to get my hands on a computer powerful enough to run FlightGear, instead using my old 2003 computer just barely getting onto the Internet and running basic stuff, let alone run FlightGear after my computer broke.... (see previous posts)

But now, the wait is over! I am getting a new computer, I just ordered it yesterday, and will be shipped to me in about a week! Very pleased with myself about this. It outputs directly to HDMI and all.

Looking forward to running the new version of FlightGear (smoothly, I hope) and logging more flight time! Hopefully, it would be powerful enough to both run FlightGear and then do some video recording of my flights!

Some of the screenshots I am looking forward to seeing on my computer screen..