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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

Bilbosmeggins
Heroic Explorer
Really looking forward to taking to the Skye at some point.  Great work Graeme  🙂

Anonymous
Not applicable
Wow this is really awesome looking! Nice work!!!

jake_carvey
Honored Guest
Very intrigued by this - just found it - very anxious to try it out.

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Ok I have no idea if it'll work, but I've uploaded a demo to Mediafire.  The interface isn't finished, but I'm curious how and if it'll run standalone.  It seems to be Unistorm that screws up, if anything.  That's the system that does the sky.

Instructions:
- I've used Oculus 1.7.0, so even with a DK2 I guess you'll need that now.
- Run the executable.  If you have Norton, or similar, mine springs up saying that it's an unknown file.  Well duh!!!  It also is net enabled, so I guess that gets Norton's hackles up.  Please allow it. 🙂
- It's setup to use an Xbox360 wired controller.  Left analogue stick does pitch and roll.  Right analogue stick does flapping with Up, and rudder with left/right.  If you need to reconfigure the axes, check the input options.  In the list, Horizontal_RH and Vertical_RH are the named axes for flapping and rudder.  Redefine as you wish. 🙂
- I can run with graphics set to fantastic, but try whatever you feel is right.  My system specs are at the top.
- Run the game.  The current Oculus software makes the game stick on the Unity splash screen until you've looked at the warning acknowledgement in the headset.
- It should go to the game start screen.  Press A to start, well A on the Xbox controller.
- I'll keep the next bit really simple.  Sit comfortably, pick your headset centre position, press blue X to centre the view.  You are sat on the ground.
- In fairly prompt succession, press yellow Y to jump then green A to fly.  That's just how it is.  Wait and let yourself glide forwards over the ridge.  The wind direction is from straight in front of you, so slopes facing that way generate lift.
- Enjoy the view, then when you're ready try steering along the ridge gaining height.  Flapping makes you pitch as you gain speed, so try it when you're happy controlling the bird.  If you fly fast, you pitch down.  It's a bug, just do something about it. 🙂
- Thermals are the puffy clouds that generate after a couple of minutes, fly circles under them to climb.  The best lift is towards the middle, and you'll find sink towards the edge.  There's no way to 'trim', so you'll find yourself holding the pitch back to fly as slow as possible to climb best.  Try it... it can be challenging but works!  You'll see coloured markers in a trail behind you to see how you're doing.  If you have a thermal over a ridge facing away from the wind, at lower altitudes the ridge sink will win.  Well away from the ground you'll climb.  Thermals have a finite life of about 10 minutes, but this is a 7 minute demo so don't worry about it.
- The sky day/night cycle is sped up to encourage more bugs to show.  You'll go through most of a day and part of a night in 7 minutes!
- If you land, to take off again face into the wind, jump and fly as before.  Hold flapping hard up and pitch up fully until you climb away to then build airspeed.  If you don't pitch, you'll probably land again on flat ground.

Important!
- You have seven minutes before you'll be dumped back to the title screen.  You can restart of course!
- If you feel sick, remove your headset and press keyboard X to quit.  Be gentle to start, flying games on the Oculus can be strong on the senses.
- You can use the Observer mode used in the videos above.  However you need to run the game on a second pc without the Oculus connected, and press O from the title screen to enable observer mode.  You'll get a panning mode around the landscape.  When you start the game on your Oculus system, if on the same home network, it should automatically connect on the observer pc.
- Alt-f4 closes the game application.

Here is the file:
https://www.mediafire.com/?z45brghal39heu2

This is unfinished software.  It is nowhere near what I want it to be.  I'm more curious about whether it works on your pc, and what spec that is.  I suspect any vr ready pc will be ok.  I find it a very relaxing experience to use.  I hope you do too!

Graeme



Sammaza
Protege
Very cool demo!
No frames dropped on "Fantastic setting"

My spec is -
i5-6600 not overclocked
GTX 970 overclocked +185gpu +500memory
16GB DDR4
MSI b150i gaming pro Mini-ITX mobo

xSTONEMANx
Expert Protege
That's quite a big of an OC for a 970. 😉

blanes
Rising Star
Just tried it and sorry but I instantly felt dizzy & bit sick   :s - looks like it will be fantastic for those lucky people who can endure such extreme motion.  Probably if there was a view where I could see the eagle from behind or like a "bonnet / hood" view like in racing games, I may have been able to play. Without a point of reference for my body I am totally sick in these type of VR experiences.  Good luck with it though as the scenery was nice in my brief fly!  🙂

RakkuAmiya
Protege

blanes said:

Just tried it and sorry but I instantly felt dizzy & bit sick   :s - looks like it will be fantastic for those lucky people who can endure such extreme motion.  Probably if there was a view where I could see the eagle from behind or like a "bonnet / hood" view like in racing games, I may have been able to play. Without a point of reference for my body I am totally sick in these type of VR experiences.  Good luck with it though as the scenery was nice in my brief fly!  🙂


Ok got that! Sorry to hear that. You're not the first I had a few people feel ill when I presented it st Fairford! Great feedback though. I'm sure a third person view is possible. There is already a 'hood' view in the observer mode, so that wouldn't be too hard to move over to the game.

All the best;

Graeme

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Ok my bad I don't think the observer mode is working. I'd updated Unity to the latest version, and I think it's screws up as soon as it tries to start the listening service. Unfortunately I cannot check this until tomorrow night at the earliest. If the listen works correctly, you get a panning camera view, but on my PC the menu screen vanishes, while the camera remains where it was. Never mind! Anyway it seems the game works at least...

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Just received the CV1 through the post, and as I'd hoped my sim worked straight away. Really missing the B set of lenses though. I didn't need to wear my glasses for dk2, but I have to for CV1 and it's extremely uncomfortable. My frames aren't even that big! Very disappointed... Any advice welcomed. The image is amazing with my glasses, but my frames get pushed on to my face. 😞

Graeme