Game:

Flight Unlimited (1995)

Duration: 6:24

41 views

2

It's more likely than you might think...
In all seriousness though, it baffles me how I managed to miss this one even though I was very well aware of it and managed to get a sample of what it flies like back in the day... Maybe it was a lack of joystick?

I knew Looking Glass was THE game developing studio to turn to for really interesting projects (like Terra Nova, System Shock or Ultima Underworld), but I never imagined they would attempt something quite like this. Real time Navier-Stokes CFD based flight dynamics engine that runs of a damn 486... Is that even physically possible?
Still, when you put it through some rigorous testing, you realize that it's not quite high fidelity enough (and I'm still not fully convinced this is not a tables approach): the planes don't seem susceptible to autorotation and all, stalling is basically absent from this flight model and there is the tendency to just nose dive all the time regardless of speed... But where it works, it works in spades. Just take a look at the gyro maneuvers. Also, I really like the knife edge - it looks very much like what you can see at displays (even though the joystick curves are pretty extreme).

It's an indescribable pity that this sim never received a proper continuation (FU2 and FU3 were made by different people). But at least now there is a lot of hope that on GPUs we could really push real time fluid dynamics to its limits and indeed create a truly next get flight simulator finally.

Other Statistics