Each day, hundreds of visitors teleport to Abbotts Aerodrome to experience the thrill of being a virtual pilot. And while Second Life is not a proper flight simulator, like Microsoft FSX, Linden Lab has given us the tools to create aircraft that are both entertaining and capable of reasonably realistic flight. Part of the appeal of Second Life over FSX is that SL is a social environment: unlike FSX, you can sit your friend in the passenger seat and take them on a tour.
Flight in Second Life also has serious shortcomings — in particular, there’s the annoying absence of joystick support. This single failing has frustrated and confused many novice pilots who aren’t familiar with standard keyboard controls. I hear the question, “I’m pressing ‘up’… why isn’t the plane going up?” surprisingly often. It might seem counter-intuitive, but there is a good reason why the keyboard controls work the way they do. Even as long ago as the early ’80s, with subLOGIC’s popular flight simulator for the Apple II and TRS-80 , the basic controls for keyboard flight were clearly established. These controls are still the standard a quarter century later, in FSX.
Imagine your numeric keypad as an airplane’s control stick, with the stick planted in the centre on the “5” key. Left and right arrows control the aircraft’s ailerons, which make the plane roll left and right. Up and down keys control the elevators, and making the plane pitch down and up. This is actually the part that many people find confusing: You push the stick forward (up arrow) to make the elevators go down, which makes the plane’s nose go down; you pull the stick back (down arrow) to make the elevators go up, which makes the plane’s nose go up.
So that’s why pressing “up” definitely won’t make your plane go up, and hence your passenger’s screams of “PULL UP! PULL UP!” as you hurtle towards the end of the runway at take-off speed.
Part of the fun of flight in SL challenge of becoming a virtual pilot. Sure, it takes a little while to get used to the controls, but once you do, you’ll be surprised at the precision of control achievable, even without a joystick.