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Aquila Bird Flight Simulator - Supporting CV1, DK2 and Oculus Touch

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Updated 19th January 2018

Aquila can be found on Oculus Home and a SteamVR version is on Steam. Having one, then contacting me with proof of ownership will get you the other. For Oculus owners with Touch I'd recommend the Oculus version. Please see the post at the end of the thread for latest changes. Oculus Home version is currently 0.97, while Steam is one behind at the moment on 0.96. I need more hours in the day!
Thank you for reading. 🙂

Graeme

---------------

This is very much an early work in progress, although I started it originally in September 2015! Thank you for taking a look. Website at http://www.aquila-bfs.com ... demo at http://www.aquila-bfs.com/download/

I have been writing a soaring bird flight simulator for the Oculus Rift, where you embody one of three species of eagle in three different terrains. You have full control of the bird in all axis using either Oculus Touch, headset steering, or an Xbox360/One controller. For headset steering, no controller is required, you just need the Oculus Remote, keyboard or gamepad to select menu options. More details in the demo release notes. Please note the downloadable demo has the Scotland terrain only, a 10 minute flight time limit, but all three birds.

This is a pretty intense VR app in development. It has been demonstrated at three events last summer, including at RIAT 2016, and 4 felt nauseous out of nearly 200. If you think you may be affected, keep the flying gentle and cruise the ridges, and keep your sessions short to start with. I'm working on ways to make it more gentle. The touch support is challenging; gliding is simple enough, but flapping flight is pretty exhausting after a few minutes. The game looks at the area you cover and frequency while flapping your arms in a circular motion to define your flapping power, while you're still steering with your hands.

The videos below are running on a Windows 10 system with an i7 6700K processor, 16gb ram and a GF980 GTX. I believe any VR ready system should run it, but that's why I'm posting here.

Features:
- Dude you're a freakin' eagle! There are three species, the white tailed sea eagle, the bald eagle and the harpy eagle.
- You have thermals and ridge lift to make flying easier. Thermic lift is marked with coloured markers (red for down, yellow for neutral and green for up). Wind direction and speed can be set on the main menu.
- The white tailed eagle model has been rewired to be animated by code script in C 'hash'. The wing flapping is controlled by sine curves (and for Oculus Touch, your arm positions), while the control surfaces move by reading the Xbox controller axis, or the equivalent from your chosen control method. The other two eagles are animated using normal Unity animations.
- Free looking in VR, and movements are reflected in your shadow. At the moment, if you look behind you it will let you look through yourself and it's not pretty!
- Fairly accurate flight dynamics, but I wanted it to feel right for anyone. The aircraft toolkit is configured to be an equivalent aircraft size and mass with the correct wing area. All I'll say is keep your speed up, as stalls create a large wing drop.
- You can land and take off, and walk around on the ground. No you can't land in trees (yet).
- Very high detail 13km x 13km for Northwest Scotland (plus an extra 13km lower detail each side for extra horizon). There are two additional terrains in Columbia and British Columbia, of equivalent size. The additional terrains are not in this demo for size constraints.
- Day/Night cycle using UniStorm. Very pretty!!
- Wind particles that show you where the wind is coming from.
- Two demo courses on the Scotland terrain, simply there to show a good way to soar the main ridge, and give a start and finish goal challenge. They're not to be taken seriously.
- Observer mode is now selectable from the in-flight menu, and displays on your main pc screen while you're in VR. It does, of course, have a performance hit when enabled.

Tools used so far:
- Unity personal edition 5.5.0b11, with Oculus SDK 1.10.
- World Composer, and Terrain Composer.
- Aircraft Flight Physics Toolkit. Awesome piece of kit.
- UniStorm for the day/night cycle.
- the eagle model is under Birds_Eagle_Anim on the asset store.
- 3D Animated Clouds by MPixels. Very tweakable.

Issues:
- Currently ugly if you look behind you, if you don't move your own head up, as you'll look through yourself!
- (GRRRR) If you fly too fast, you pitch down. It's controllable, and rare now thankfully, but it will do it.
- If you get too slow on a loop, you waste lots of height recovering. That's possibly not a bug.
- You can't currently 'trim' in pitch, although you can fly just fine without.
- The flapping doesn't look quite right for the white tailed sea eagle, but it's a sine curve what am I supposed to do?
- The white tailed sea eagle does not have a ground walking animation. Please see the release notes for the demo.
- UniStorm sometimes goes overboard with the contrast after the latest Unity update.

- Oculus Touch... if you bring both wings in to stoop, you may need to pitch down to keep your dive going.
- Oculus Touch... if the wing controls don't seem to be working, check that your headset and Touch controllers are within your sensor range, then press X on the left-hand touch controller to reset the headset orientation and the arm positions. It should then recalculate everything from where you are.

Future plans:
- (PARTWAY THERE) More dynamic landscape with things to do of course (challenges).
- (DONE) Thermals and ridge lift.
- (PARTWAY THERE) Maybe one large landscape, or many smaller ones. I'd love to be able to add more trees!
- (Plan in motion!) Perhaps multiplayer, or motion platform support a la Birdly.
- Survival simulation? Weather etc.

Comments and suggestions welcomed. Thank you again! Please see the videos below.

Graeme

Headset control:



A longer flight using the observer mode on another pc:



An older video showing a brief bit of soaring and a sunset:



Original video from a year ago:

63 REPLIES 63

RakkuAmiya
Protege
"jmorris142" wrote:
Hey Great news, glad that worked:) 45 mins woah thats a lot of play time, maybe you should change the cycle to 5 to 10 mins so people will really notice it. Just an idea. Let me know if you want a hand with the feathers on the bird I can do that. Send me a PM if you want me to get that working for you.


Yeah I'd be interested in seeing what you could do with it. I guess more joints would be needed, so I could animate those in script too. At the moment I animate the tail and wings with script, both the flapping and a bit of casual movement with the wings and tail so they're not static. I plan to move the toes, legs and beak too.

If I use the 3ds animations, it overrides my code and doesn't work for me. If I could script it, then I could link the feathers movement to airspeed.

Remember I first ran Unity in September, prior to that the last coding I did was 2005 with c++. I did the rollerball and space shooter tutorials, had a brainwave and jumped straight in! There is loads more for me to learn. 🙂

Thank you again. 🙂

Graeme

Anonymous
Not applicable
Looking good! I love flight games! If you need some beta tester, please contact me. I tested a lot of vr games, also i have a small youtube channel, in spanish. Keep the good work!

https://www.youtube.com/user/ktoloco123/videos

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Ridge lift is on the way! The wind direction is configurable and calculated on first run. I've attached a screenshot of the areas of lift the sim has marked after looking at the terrain with a west wind. Sink is also dealt with, but not marked on the screenshot. You don't see the markers in-game of course.

I'll follow-up with a video later.

Graeme

RakkuAmiya
Protege
"ktoloco" wrote:
Looking good! I love flight games! If you need some beta tester, please contact me. I tested a lot of vr games, also i have a small youtube channel, in spanish. Keep the good work!

https://www.youtube.com/user/ktoloco123/videos


Thank you for the offer! If I get it to any decent stage I'd release something, but at the moment I can't make a standalone work properly without giving away the whole project. 😞

I've made a new video showing ridge lift. Here are the latest changes to the software:

- So yes Ridge lift - It's not finished yet, but it works ok so far. Basically it looks at a given wind direction at start, then an algorithm looks at the terrain and works out where lift and sink it according to the slope. It doesn't allow for wind shadows or any rotor effect, so for off-wind slopes it'll just pull you down at the moment.

- Clouds now drift with the wind, and have between a 7 and 15 minute period between formation and decay. At the moment, when they decay they move themselves and start over.

- The program deals with putting the general wind, any thermic wind and ridge wind, then puts it all together for the flight model to deal with. I kept everything as Vectors so I could combine them together.

Sorry I missed the sunset, but thanks for looking! 🙂

Graeme


RakkuAmiya
Protege
Here is the latest development video for my bird flight simulator. It's been a while since the last one, but I've been busy trying to learn more about how Unity ticks.

Changes since the last video:
- The intention is to have more than one bird species. As such I've added a golden eagle model with a complete set of animations and implemented a few, such as the idle animation, walking, flying and gliding. I have masked the head animation so that I can still move the head with the headset position and rotation. The intention is to do the same with the tail when gliding/flying, and the wings and tail when gliding. I had extreme heartache trying to get the head angle to behave itself consistently.

- transitions between flying and landed animations. It detects when you're on the ground with no speed, then deactivates the flight model and activates Unity's FirstPersonController. You start flying and it does the reverse. When on the ground you can walk using the controller.

I uploaded the video from the Unity editor so you can see the view from the headset, along with an external view so you can see what's going on with the animations and the head position mapping to the Rift.

That's it for now. I have a bug list longer than an eagles wings to deal with, but not tonight. 🙂

Thanks for looking.

Graeme


RakkuAmiya
Protege
No video this time. To be honest you wouldn't see much difference unless you were to play the sim yourself. I'm going to update the top post, as it's rather out of date!

Well the changes are all to do with wind. Up until now the ridge lift calculated had nothing to do with your height above the ridge. This is now a little more realistic ... you get the best lift until about 1/2 again the height of the ground beneath you, then it tapers away to nothing when you're twice the height (and higher) of the ground underneath.

The code that examines the slopes to calculate potential ridge lift now accounts for the direction of the slope. I had been finding lift where I would expect none. This now uses trig to work out the relative direction of the slope to the wind direction. If the wind meets the slope head-on, you get the full whack ... it uses cosine to work that down to 1/2 the lift when you're 60 degrees off, then no lift at all if it's completely across at 90 degrees. I've added a comparison shot of the marked lift on the new method. It doesn't look that different at first glance, but what you can't see is that even the lift marked is of more sensible strength for the angle of slope. It feels more authentic to fly now. 🙂

Other changes are:

- I've begun to consolidate 'instruments' into their own gameobject. So far there's only a raycast to measure distance to ground, then altitude and whether you're flying or not. I want them to be more accessible than those in the aircraft physics toolkit.
- Some background work towards being able to choose your bird, but keeping the same script in the background.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

Graeme

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Wow it's been ages since I last posted an update on this, but that's not to say I've not been working on it.  I've been trying to get my head around Unity networking.  It's very clever and can do loads, but I've managed to get it to do what I was after.  Basically I wanted the ability to 'view' the flight from another pc and record the video for a corporate event coming up.  So this video is from a laptop connected to the game over a wireless network.  Both pc's are running the game, one as server and one as client.  The client laptop is watching the game, and recording the video linked below.  Using another pc keeps the game running smooth on the main pc running the Rift, and will allow me to copy the videos promptly on to usb drive, etc, without disturbing the main pc.

The biggest heartache was mirroring the bird actions on the mirror client.  That will give me nightmares for ages.  Unity stutters every now and then over the network.  The game continues to run at 60fps on the laptop, but the network traffic seems to stall a couple of times (albeit in 16 minutes of play time!).

Basically people attending the event will be able to try the simulator on the Oculus Rift in exchange for a small donation going to a bird of prey charity, and receive a video of their flight as a thank you. 🙂

Thank you for looking!

Graeme


https://youtu.be/v86UDZLkmQw

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Well that was a fun and interesting day!  Bug swatting until 0515 this morning, then encounter a stack more bugs prior to the event starting!  Probably the most stressful few days for ages.  Anyway got loads done.  The observer mode has more views, and cycles them, there is a wing flapping sound, the floating 'observer' has been removed, and numerous other bugs that were breaking the networking in Unity.  It's been a nightmare.

Had some really good feedback regarding the simulation, and a good amount of interest.  Really happy.  Anyway here is one of the guests observer video of their flight, showing the goings on.  Thank you for looking!  https://youtu.be/ZNRGTwP3Yng

Graeme

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Right!  A quick update to let you know that this is still ongoing.  The Wings event on the 29th was the first, then it went on to a falconry fair near York last weekend, after even more bug swatting.  It was well received, although I made a couple of people ill out of only about 20 who tried it.  I honestly expected a few more, but falconers' are an odd lot!

The good news is that it's going to the FutureZone at RAF Fairford for the Royal International Air Tatoo.  A little ironic since my pc is 4 years old.  Anyway it's going for definitely the Sunday and hopefully the Saturday.  Anyone reading this who is there, please come and say hello and give it a go!

Below is one of the flights from the show last weekend on YouTube.







Here is a poster used for the event.  It was chucked together in photoshop on the hop!  Eagle eyed spotters may notice that the eagle photographed isn't an Aquila species, but for Jo Bloggs on the street I'm sure they won't notice.  Anyway there's a golden eagle in the sim, and that is an Aquila.  The photo was sent by a friend, and it's awesome, so it'll do just nicely!  Below that is a photo from the event in York... a true nightmare of wires!  I had the sim running on one pc, then a laptop pushing the observer mode out to a 4k tv.  It looked lovely..... if only the Rift had that kind of definition!!  Maybe CV2?

Thanks for looking;

Graeme


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RakkuAmiya
Protege
A quick update to say this project is still active and in development.  Fairford RIAT was a very interesting experience.  I had a queue before I'd even connected the pc.  Initially they didn't know what they were queuing for, which I found rather curious!!  Over about 6 hours I had around 140 people try it, with some great feedback both as a game and a potential tool for school and special needs groups.  It was well worth the exhausting time I had putting it together.  Anyway I put a longer video together with a bit of a tour.  Occasionally the movement goes choppy over the wireless network, but it sorts itself out.  Oh and it gets dark.  I'd like it darker!

I had put a demo together, but on a standalone copy the sky is broken.  If I can resolve that, I'll release a demo.  I guess a file is missing somewhere.

One thing is for sure, I'm going to be busy with plenty more to do.

The youtube link is:https://youtu.be/SpBdU9J84Lg

I've only just uploaded it, so it may still be processing.

Thank you for reading. 🙂

Graeme