Surrender

[gwellman]

After hours of researching Dick Baldwin’s tutorial (a treasure trove of valuable info for those not familiar with it – Google “baldwin alice tutorial”) looking at some other flight sims posted on this forum and banging my head against a brick wall, I’ve decided to surrender and ask for a little help. I’m working on a simple little program that does nothing more than have a plane take off, fly one loop around the traffic pattern and then land – all under program control, not interactively. I’ve succeeded to the point that it does take off down the runway (two road objects placed end-to-end,) execute a 180 degree turn, fly back parallel to the runway, do another 180 and then line up with the runway again. In plan view from on high, this looks just fine.

A side, ground level view looks terrible. My problem is executing realistic looking climbing (or descending) banking turns. I’ve tinkered with many a combination of ROLL, TURN, and MOVE but haven’t come close to getting it anywhere near right. If anyone could take a look at my code and nudge this aspiring Alice aviator in the right direction, I’d be most grateful. I deleted my pitiful attempts at banking and just left in the turns so it would get around the pattern.

George

[DickBaldwin]

After hours of researching Dick Baldwin’s tutorial (a treasure trove of valuable info for those not familiar with it – Google “baldwin alice tutorial”) looking at some other flight sims posted on this forum and banging my head against a brick wall, I’ve decided to surrender and ask for a little help. I’m working on a simple little program that does nothing more than have a plane take off, fly one loop around the traffic pattern and then land – all under program control, not interactively. I’ve succeeded to the point that it does take off down the runway (two road objects placed end-to-end,) execute a 180 degree turn, fly back parallel to the runway, do another 180 and then line up with the runway again. In plan view from on high, this looks just fine.

A side, ground level view looks terrible. My problem is executing realistic looking climbing (or descending) banking turns. I’ve tinkered with many a combination of ROLL, TURN, and MOVE but haven’t come close to getting it anywhere near right. If anyone could take a look at my code and nudge this aspiring Alice aviator in the right direction, I’d be most grateful. I deleted my pitiful attempts at banking and just left in the turns so it would get around the pattern.

George

I have never tried to do banking turns and don't have a solution to the problem. However, I did notice in the recently-published world named War Zone, that the first person view from the cockpit looks pretty good in that program. Don't know what it would look like from a side view but it might be worth taking a look at.

Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free programming tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm

[groucho]

Without having a full solution, I think you need to place an (invisible) dummy object to the left or right of your plane, roll your plane to the left or right and then turn around that dummy object using the "asSeenBy" option of the plane's turn method.

The radius of curvature can be chosen by the distance between your plane and the dummy object.

[DrJim]

You might also want to look at some of the posts in the thread
http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?t=580&highlight=roll .

[gwellman]

Many thanks to DickBaldwin, grouch, and DrJim. I appreciate your response and your help.


Sorry, groucho. Bad case if fat fingers here today.