Simple Soaring Sim
About
Simple soaring flight simulator, take control of a glider / sailplane and soar around or challenge other players in real multiplayer environment for a race.
Key commands
A - D or Left - RightSteer left or right W-S or Up - DownChange speed SpaceAir-BrakeESCIn Game menuHow to play
Use thermal (a column of rising air) under the clouds to gain altitude. Thermals are also moving with the wind and have a lifecycle before they burst and a new one spawn somewhere else.
In addition if there is a wind, ridges also produce lift if you fly close enough.
Race "start" spawns at certain time and players have an opportunity to fly trough a set of waypoints, competing with each other (or for personal best).
You can also customize glider to find optimal configuration for you play style. Make it faster or turn tighter to utilize more lift.
How it works
Game implements socket.io and communicate to a node.js server hosted on a Heroku platform server. Server handles communication between clients and share position, customization data and messages. There is no limit implemented on amount of players that can be connected, however I have put a minor limit in frequency data is send by each client to prevent flooding the server, after all its a free account that hosts a server. This was a first time I tried to implement such thing (and to make a multiplayer game in general) so things will probably be polished later on for the next jam.
If server is inactive for a longer time, it takes few sec to boot it up on first connection. Simply refresh browser if you see the offline message.
So far what has been done
26/04/21 Multiplayer works
- simple flight physics
- glider configuration
- wing flex in thermals
- landing
- thermals synced in multiplayer
- glider config synced in multiplayer
29/04/21 I have opened a server for testing, a demo race is created to test basic functionality, wind that moves clouds need to be corrected for network sync
- Basic race and notifications
- Moving icons on the screen
- Final phase will be to draw more flight area and to create a correct mesh colliders for mountains.
will see how far can I make it till jam deadline as am doing all this alone, all assets have been created in Blender, icons in Xara
Audio effects are royalty free sounds