Download flight-stability-tcl-p.hqx (112,832 KB)
From: Patrick C Hew
Subject: FlightStability
by Patrick Hew
phew@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Flight Stability is a THINK Pascal project, using
the THINK Class Library 1.1.2. It demonstrates that
it is indeed possible to write an arcade-type game
using TCL, albeit one that will only execute well on
machines with a 68030 or better.
Flight Stability was developed for the 1995 Faculty
of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Open Day,
at the University of Western Australia. It shows how
stability is a design objective. The aircraft is
flown with the mouse, in various modes of stability.
Flight Stability is not a full flight simulator, and
in fact the control response is patently wrong in
some respects.
For flicker free animation, Flight Stability uses
the CBitmapWindow class. For completeness, this is
included in this project archive.
Flight Stability was produced quite rapidly during
my mid-year break, when I was supposed to be working
on my Honours project. As such, it is a hack, though
hopefully a well-engineered one. The aircraft is not
represented as an object; instead I developed a pane
to draw the aircraft from a certain viewpoint, the
pane storing the aircraft as an array of points.
I only developed enough 3-d graphics to make it
work, and didn¹t have the time and effort to use
FixMath. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well
it executed on a PowerMac. A week after I finished
writing Flight Stability, I started seeing all these
announcements about the availability of 3-d graphics
engines, and I'¹m sure that one of these will yield
a better product.
Feel free to inspect and use the code, and adopt
whatever lessons you feel are appropriate. Please do
not distribute modified copies of this archive.