I love aviation and flying so I guess it should be no surprise that I have always wanted to make a flight simulator. Of the modern aircrafts, the F-16 is a definite favorite and that is what this project is about. An F-16 fighter flight simulator. A high flying goal? Maybe. A flight simulator of any kind is not a trivial project but it is doable.

I can say a flight simulator has a very different set of problems and challenges compared to your typical game and the terrain is probably the trickiest of them. If you take a typical FPS game for example, a level might be about the size of your local neighborhood. This is overall pretty easy to deal with from different viewpoints. Modeling a game level of this size is not too difficult, neither is texturing it or adding details, etc. It also works well from a pure technical viewpoint. Floating point precision is not an issue at these relatively small areas.

Compare this to a flight simulator where the terrain can be the size of a country or even the whole earth. Manually modeling a country sized terrain or building the whole earth quickly becomes impractical and simply impossible. Sure, you don’t model every strand of grass or shrub as you might do for an FPS game but the amount of data for even a half decent looking flight sim terrain is just staggering. In a flight simulator you are also usually looking for realism and this includes a realistic terrain to fly over so it’s a different problem that requires different solutions.

The only way to really tackle the terrain creation is by trying to automate as much as possible. If we go back to the FPS again, there you can fire up your 3D modeling software and start blocking out a game level and after a little while you might have a basic rough draft of a level that you can try out. With a flight sim you might have giga bytes of elevation data that will form the base for your terrain. The problem is how to transform this data into a practical workable realistic looking terrain that the computer will actually be able to render.

So what I’m trying to say with all this is that the challenges of making a flight sim are very different from other typical games and there isn’t much out there you can start from and use. Since you want as much as possible automated the ideal would be to dump all the data into a piece of software and out comes a great ready made terrain. That doesn’t happen by itself though. Especially in the beginning a lot of time is spent on research and testing various methods and ideas to see what is doable and what works and if it can produce the results you are looking for.

With all that said, the work continues on the simulator project and hopefully I will eventually be able to show you some real results. Until then, please keep reading the updates on this project.

Someone familiar with programming might quickly conclude it’s an uninitialized variable bug. At first I thought so too but I could never find anything that supported that theory. I made sure everything was zeroed out, memory freed, etc, before it would be run but nothing made any difference. For this tool to do what I need it to do, this had to be resolved.

The crash was happening in some free third party code that was written many years ago and it’s quite complex. Today I really started to dig deeper since the crash was happening at the same place in the code every time and was easily reproduced. That’s a good thing for debugging code. So after digging into what was going on in the code I finally realized what the problem was. To give you a hint. Everything was working fine when compiled as a 32 bit app. Ha!

Because of the huge amount of data fed to this tool it needs to be built as a 64 bit app. You can see where this is going. As it turns out, the code is using some pointer bit modification trickery via some macros and this was working just fine with 32 bit pointers. When going to 64 bits it was just pure luck that it worked at all. Only modifying and restoring 32 bits of a 64 bit pointer will not end well. After fixing this it now works like a charm. Interesting bugs can turn up sometimes when old code meets modern realities.

Back in those early days I had one of these loaded into my ZX Spectrum and although there wasn’t a lot more than just green and blue on the screen, it was amazing. I was hooked. Green, by the way, was the ground and blue the sky. Since then I have always wanted to make my own.

For those of you whose interest don’t quite line up with this sort of stuff and don’t have a clue what in the world I’m talking about, I unfortunately will have to let you be in the dark for the time being.

Although one goal with this project is very clear, it’s still an open question were it will fit in the bigger picture. We will have to see how things go.

Early stages

That’s all for this time. More will follow.

What does it all mean? Well, for now it means a fresh look and what it may or may not mean looking forward I can’t speculate about at this point. Only time will tell. Hopefully it will mean some new stuff here from time to time. Until then, bask in the new shiny pixels on our site!

DeepTrouble 2 was also the first game where we included some easter eggs. It’s always interesting to see if players will find that kind of stuff and as a player it’s fun to find easter eggs.

Some of the many models created for DeepTrouble 2

It can be interesting to compare the original DeepTrouble and DeepTrouble 2 to see how much the graphics features and level of detail increased within just a few years. It also took much longer to develop and it’s a trend that continues. As hardware gets faster and more advanced the technology in games becomes more and more complex and they take longer to develop.

Driving is exciting, pure and simple. Applying power or brakes at the right amount at the right time, finding that perfect line through a turn, take the jump just right so you won’t spin off the road when you land. Then add the AI cars to the mix and it can get pretty exciting before you cross the finish line.

A rally car posing in Rally Shift

Grab the wheel and race!

There are plenty of alien machines and robots, both on ground and in air, trying to stop you. Staying alive will require both great piloting skills and good use of available resources.

Alien machines attacking

That Epsilon Tahari has a varying gravitational pull in different areas makes your missions even more dangerous. But ultimately it’s the robot machines you need to watch out for.

DeepTrouble was designed to run on, even at that time, some pretty low-end systems and in order to achieve that goal the graphics details had to be kept very low. But despite all that it had, and still has, a certain charm and it definitely has an underwater feel to it in how things move and behave.

Alien ship model in DeepTrouble

DeepTrouble was a fun game to make and the development time was amazingly short compared to later games and games today.