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[Lazlow]

Hi to all!

Seeing the beautiful landscapes outerra is capable of rendering, my first thought was it's almost real. Paragliding and hanggliding features a lot of close to the ground proximity flying, sometimes nearly above the treeline. I think Outerra would be the perfect platform for such a sim. What do you think?

Ps.: grass in the videos are too "green"

[cameni]

Yeah, my brother did those sports, and he said the same thing like you when he saw Outerra. He then showed me how it looks in FSX
Feeling of height and of "being there" is many times greater in Outerra.

[radman]

Hi Guys,

I see this is an older thread but since the topic is very relevant I decided to chime in.
First of all - you have an AWESOME PRODUCT! I'm also a paragliding pilot and I was able to visit in outerra few places where I have flown in the Alps and they looks really phenomenal.

I'm looking to build myself paragliding simulator – including hardware. There are already few of those like:
http://www.ppgsimulator.com/ (Vehicle Simulator (VSF) used).
https://www.facebook.com/Oodara (custom Unity 3D environment)

I noticed that good a hardware simulator needs:
-   Great paragliding wing simulation (something like http://www.parafly-sim.co.uk),
-   Sensors to register motion (handles and weight shift),
-   Force feedback – response to control, turbulence etc,
-   Immersive 3D – oculus rift,
-   Awesome and breathtaking 3D world (outerra?  )

I can handle the hardware part – I’m software developer and robotics eng. The software part can be tricky though and I do not want to reinvent the wheel. I discovered your software yesterday and there is nothing comparable right now I can think of. It is very difficult to create a convincing and beautiful simulation without great visuals.
Do you plan to provide some basic soaring support in the environment like:
-   Wind simulation – or at least its effects, wind-terrain effects  - for example turbulence, coastal soaring when the wind hits the coastal cliffs, venturi effect,
-   Raising air – thermals,
-   Paraglider support – ability to mod the software to add the aerial vehicle.

In case it is still far out – is there anything I could do myself to get the needed features faster? Any hooks or tools available already so I could help getting there?

Keep up this brilliant effort!
Radek

[PytonPago]

The air-flow visualization idea is interesting and i like it.



 Sadly, no wind/colwds and similar environmental stuff is available for any deeper simulation at time. Theyr working on it, but is hard to say when they hit the Alpha. But i could imagine some simplified model based on basics of turbulence ... letting the glider fall with some braking force, working on opposite direction ( it could be based even on height as the air gets thicker to ground ). Also, to make some up-lift flows, you could add in script a few option of forces as addition to the braking force, strong enough to take the glider higher. Lets say some of the now possible vehicle controls having some max force, but also a function on witch it will slowly or sharply rise to that value depending on the time you hold the corresponding button. (maybe some direction based version could be made too, like four of the controls having S,W,E,N direction additions to the force so you could speculate a little more). Adding some noise into all those functions would be good to not have them too much predictable.  ( or just a force generator, witch will make some winds and turbulence not depending on any controls - but dont know if any terrain data could be a part of it now (like specific kinds of winds around mountains) )  ...  The basic physics in script will come in handy anyway when wind features finally get into the OTs Alpha, and this kind of alternative substitution for them could have an interesting outcome ...

 Also, found some interesting vid. :

 

Also, did anyone try simulate some more problematic situations, like rope-tangling or similar :



 Would be interesting to take some incremental wing surface dynamic model in mind to be able to simulate partial wing damage or other problems reducing the braking surface ... (sorry if using bad words, dont know how those are named in Eng)

[HiFlyer]

Aerofly has an interesting way of depicting Thermals. (you can turn the visual aids off for more realism)