Category: creations

My latest plane, Terra Atom, has reached the beta testing stage, which means that a release date announcement is imminent. What is it, exactly?

Terra Atom is an agile and powerful single-seat plane designed with a mid-century feel. Its flowing lines are inspired by the Supermarine S.6B, P-51 Mustang, and Bugatti 100p. Even parked on the tarmac, it looks fast.

Here’s what’s under the hood:

• Mesh design
• A paint menu that lets you choose from several paint schemes
• The instrument panel in the cockpit shows real flight data if you fly in first-person (“mouselook”) view.
• The HUD attachment includes speed indicator, altimeter, artificial horizon, compass, vertical speed indicator, fuel and temperature indicators, and several switches and buttons to control your plane.
• The pop-up options menu lets you configure Atom:
  • Optional hovertext display on the tail.
  • Optional collision damage: prop strike, wing strike, tail strike, water landing.
  • Optional overspeed wing shear.
  • Optional engine damage and fuel use.
• Terra Atom’s handling can be modified to your preferences: adjust roll, pitch, and thrust.
• Flip a switch for a smoke trail.
• The product updater gets the latest available version.

Keep an eye on this blog or join the SL Aviation group in Second Life for the latest news in group notices.

As I bring my next Second Life airplane closer to its completion, I’m focusing more on the finer details of the experience. It’s not enough to fly well. There have to be elements of danger and grit to round out the experience — optionally of course.

Flying a real plane is dangerous business, which is why I’ve put considerable time into creating ways for an unwary virtual pilot to have a very bad ending to their flight. A prop strike — touching your spinning propeller to a solid object — results in catastrophic damage to both the propeller and the engine. If your wing clips another plane or a skybox, it shears off and falls to the ground followed shortly by the rest of the plane. Similarly, try to avoid diving too quickly, letting your engine overheat, running out of fuel, or flying straight into the water. Bam. Flights over.

Of course, for the novice aviator, this might be too much to handle, so I’m including an optional “Safe” mode, in which you can fly into anything and otherwise abuse your plane as much as you like without consequence.

If gritty realism is your thing, I’m adding optional paint themes that include surface wear and dirt. Pick one of several themes from the menu, or if you’re talented with Photoshop or another image editor, I’ll supply the templates for you to customize your Atom.

All of these new features take time and testing, so if you see me crashing through the treeline, wingless and burning, you’ll know why.

What’s new in the development of my latest Second Life plane, the Terra Atom? Primarily, I’ve been working on the instrumentation. These are the cryptic dials and controls that festoon the control panel inside the cockpit. The Atom will have ALL of them — well, all of the ones that make sense in Second Life.

For those of you who prefer to fly in the third-person view, use the attachable heads-up display; if you prefer the first-person view from the cockpit, the panel will be fully-functional. That’s the plan, anyway.

The instruments in the control panel include the following:

• Speed in knots
• Altitude in meters and kilometers (SL uses the Metric system)
• Artificial horizon showing pitch and roll
• Compass
• Fuel indicator
• Temperature indicator
• Throttle indicator

Plus there are several buttons and switches: engine, flaps, brakes, camera view, menu, acrobatic smoke, and eject.

This is possibly the most complex HUD I’ve made for Second Life. Interestingly, it produces the lowest script load. Whereas my previous HUDs required a script in each needle and digit, which is a lot, this HUD has only one script. One script operates every control and moving part.

Next, I install the instruments in the cockpit.

 

I’m calling it the Terra Atom. That has a kind of mid-century feel that matches my design.

For several days now, I’ve been pretty focused on texturing the new plane I designed for Second Life — that is, creating the surface detail for each and every part in an image editor. Without textures, the plane would look flat and grey, as it did in my previous blog posts.

The quagmire I have to avoid here is getting too concerned with textural detail. It’s possible to keep working on these textures, adding more and more detail, and never finish. Since I’m a little impatient to move this project forward, I’m setting aside the paints and instead focusing on the scripts. Scripts in SL are how you program the detailed behaviour of a vehicle, the user interface, and generally all the functionality that one expects from an airplane.

It’s not a small task, but I have a head-start. With each plane I create, I take my previous flight scripts, menus, visual effects, and more and adapt and improve on them. Every  iteration of the flight script that I started in 2005 and carried forward through a dozen or so planes improves the user experience and adds or refines features.

How long does it take to develop a plane from beginning to end? I can’t give you an exact number, since I haven’t tracked my hours, but it seems like an eternity. This particular eternity started in late November (or maybe early December), and will likely continue until March 2015.

The next couple of weeks, however, will be all about coding and testing. Making changes, saving and compiling, and testing the result immediately. If you see Cubey Terra in SL doing a lot of take-offs and landings in a half-finished plane, now you know why.