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Aquila Bird Flight Simulator - Supporting CV1, DK2 and Oculus Touch

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Updated 19th January 2018

Aquila can be found on Oculus Home and a SteamVR version is on Steam. Having one, then contacting me with proof of ownership will get you the other. For Oculus owners with Touch I'd recommend the Oculus version. Please see the post at the end of the thread for latest changes. Oculus Home version is currently 0.97, while Steam is one behind at the moment on 0.96. I need more hours in the day!
Thank you for reading. 🙂

Graeme

---------------

This is very much an early work in progress, although I started it originally in September 2015! Thank you for taking a look. Website at http://www.aquila-bfs.com ... demo at http://www.aquila-bfs.com/download/

I have been writing a soaring bird flight simulator for the Oculus Rift, where you embody one of three species of eagle in three different terrains. You have full control of the bird in all axis using either Oculus Touch, headset steering, or an Xbox360/One controller. For headset steering, no controller is required, you just need the Oculus Remote, keyboard or gamepad to select menu options. More details in the demo release notes. Please note the downloadable demo has the Scotland terrain only, a 10 minute flight time limit, but all three birds.

This is a pretty intense VR app in development. It has been demonstrated at three events last summer, including at RIAT 2016, and 4 felt nauseous out of nearly 200. If you think you may be affected, keep the flying gentle and cruise the ridges, and keep your sessions short to start with. I'm working on ways to make it more gentle. The touch support is challenging; gliding is simple enough, but flapping flight is pretty exhausting after a few minutes. The game looks at the area you cover and frequency while flapping your arms in a circular motion to define your flapping power, while you're still steering with your hands.

The videos below are running on a Windows 10 system with an i7 6700K processor, 16gb ram and a GF980 GTX. I believe any VR ready system should run it, but that's why I'm posting here.

Features:
- Dude you're a freakin' eagle! There are three species, the white tailed sea eagle, the bald eagle and the harpy eagle.
- You have thermals and ridge lift to make flying easier. Thermic lift is marked with coloured markers (red for down, yellow for neutral and green for up). Wind direction and speed can be set on the main menu.
- The white tailed eagle model has been rewired to be animated by code script in C 'hash'. The wing flapping is controlled by sine curves (and for Oculus Touch, your arm positions), while the control surfaces move by reading the Xbox controller axis, or the equivalent from your chosen control method. The other two eagles are animated using normal Unity animations.
- Free looking in VR, and movements are reflected in your shadow. At the moment, if you look behind you it will let you look through yourself and it's not pretty!
- Fairly accurate flight dynamics, but I wanted it to feel right for anyone. The aircraft toolkit is configured to be an equivalent aircraft size and mass with the correct wing area. All I'll say is keep your speed up, as stalls create a large wing drop.
- You can land and take off, and walk around on the ground. No you can't land in trees (yet).
- Very high detail 13km x 13km for Northwest Scotland (plus an extra 13km lower detail each side for extra horizon). There are two additional terrains in Columbia and British Columbia, of equivalent size. The additional terrains are not in this demo for size constraints.
- Day/Night cycle using UniStorm. Very pretty!!
- Wind particles that show you where the wind is coming from.
- Two demo courses on the Scotland terrain, simply there to show a good way to soar the main ridge, and give a start and finish goal challenge. They're not to be taken seriously.
- Observer mode is now selectable from the in-flight menu, and displays on your main pc screen while you're in VR. It does, of course, have a performance hit when enabled.

Tools used so far:
- Unity personal edition 5.5.0b11, with Oculus SDK 1.10.
- World Composer, and Terrain Composer.
- Aircraft Flight Physics Toolkit. Awesome piece of kit.
- UniStorm for the day/night cycle.
- the eagle model is under Birds_Eagle_Anim on the asset store.
- 3D Animated Clouds by MPixels. Very tweakable.

Issues:
- Currently ugly if you look behind you, if you don't move your own head up, as you'll look through yourself!
- (GRRRR) If you fly too fast, you pitch down. It's controllable, and rare now thankfully, but it will do it.
- If you get too slow on a loop, you waste lots of height recovering. That's possibly not a bug.
- You can't currently 'trim' in pitch, although you can fly just fine without.
- The flapping doesn't look quite right for the white tailed sea eagle, but it's a sine curve what am I supposed to do?
- The white tailed sea eagle does not have a ground walking animation. Please see the release notes for the demo.
- UniStorm sometimes goes overboard with the contrast after the latest Unity update.

- Oculus Touch... if you bring both wings in to stoop, you may need to pitch down to keep your dive going.
- Oculus Touch... if the wing controls don't seem to be working, check that your headset and Touch controllers are within your sensor range, then press X on the left-hand touch controller to reset the headset orientation and the arm positions. It should then recalculate everything from where you are.

Future plans:
- (PARTWAY THERE) More dynamic landscape with things to do of course (challenges).
- (DONE) Thermals and ridge lift.
- (PARTWAY THERE) Maybe one large landscape, or many smaller ones. I'd love to be able to add more trees!
- (Plan in motion!) Perhaps multiplayer, or motion platform support a la Birdly.
- Survival simulation? Weather etc.

Comments and suggestions welcomed. Thank you again! Please see the videos below.

Graeme

Headset control:



A longer flight using the observer mode on another pc:



An older video showing a brief bit of soaring and a sunset:



Original video from a year ago:

63 REPLIES 63

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Another video showing how the headset position is mapped on to the eagle model. This video is captured from the Unity editor.

Thank you for looking .. 🙂

Graeme


RakkuAmiya
Protege
Latest video for my bird flight simulator. This time I've used another corner of Scotland, to see how high resolution I can get. If anyone knows a way of removing the lines in the terrain, please let me know. I think it's a lighting issue in either Unity, World Composer or Terrain Composer.

This video features randomly generated thermals. They're not finished yet, but they work. Also you can see your shadow reflecting your head and tail movements, just before I almost hit a mountain... Sorry it's 22 minutes long. I got carried away...

Thank you for looking!

Graeme


RakkuAmiya
Protege
Here's the latest video from my bird flight simulator... changes since the last are:

- Using UniStorm for the lighting and day/night cycle. What an awesome Unity add-on.
- thermals are more like real ones. You have sink on the outside, lift in the middle, and a puffy white cloud. When in a thermal, you leave temporary coloured markers behind you that are red/yellow/green depending on whether you're in lift or not.
- the weird tracks in the terrain are gone finally.
- I needed to optimise it to keep it going at 75fps. I'm new to Unity so that's going to be an ongoing trial...

Problems: When it gets dark, the scenery still has sun shadows on it. The clouds won't go dark, they stay white grrrrr.... My thermalling ability is crap, and I'm an (admittedly rusty) glider pilot, so I do a pretty naff job of soaring.

Anyway here's the video, and thank you for looking.

Graeme


Anonymous
Not applicable
@RakkuAmiya,its looks fantastic,you make a very good work,i like the isle of skye,i was there during a Mountainbike Trip,
the landscape is one of europe' s last wilderness!

RakkuAmiya
Protege
"Kmx" wrote:
@RakkuAmiya,its looks fantastic,you make a very good work,i like the isle of skye,i was there during a Mountainbike Trip,
the landscape is one of europe' s last wilderness!


Really glad you like it. In time I'd love to make a demo available online, but at the moment I don't even know how to do that! Is it even possible with unity personal edition?

I suspect, with my learning on the go, the required spec maybe quite high though.

Graeme

RakkuAmiya
Protege
Can't do a video from one end of the day without doing the other?

Here is a video of a sunrise, but also the horizon is correct now and the lighting seems to work better. The clouds in the sky are now white and not black. The white thermal clouds stay white as I've found that Unity will not ambient-light particles. Great.

Anyway still plenty to keep me busy!

Thanks for looking. 🙂


jmorris142
Explorer
Hey, this looks great! How long is your day night cycle? if you know exactly, you could fix your problem with the white clouds by animating the colour and/or opacity over time to react in just the way you would like. I am guessing they are not a part of a day night cycle package you are using. Another thing that would look cool is if you took a few of the feathers on the birds wings and used the cloth simulation to have them flapping in the breeze.
Look forward to trying this out.
j.j. morris - tekrok - https://share.oculus.com/app/tekrok

RakkuAmiya
Protege
"jmorris142" wrote:
Hey, this looks great! How long is your day night cycle? if you know exactly, you could fix your problem with the white clouds by animating the colour and/or opacity over time to react in just the way you would like. I am guessing they are not a part of a day night cycle package you are using. Another thing that would look cool is if you took a few of the feathers on the birds wings and used the cloth simulation to have them flapping in the breeze.
Look forward to trying this out.


Thank you for the reply. You're right I made the clouds as Unistorm doesn't do thermals. Mine develop, the cloud and thermal forms (using a WindZone), then the thermal dies and the cloud fades away. Your post made me think that I could read the Unistorm light dynamic clouds colour, which changes over the day, and apply it to my cloud. After much faffing with syntax it works. Thank you very much. 🙂 I just flew through a whole game day to see the changes, and now I'm very tired. I think the whole game day only took about 45 minutes or so. You can change Unistorm to whatever you like.

Love the idea about animating the feathers. Unfortunately I think it's part of the texture so I can't animate individual feathers. I'm not an artist at all I wouldn't know where to start editing the 3ds file.

Anyway it works, apart from a weird bug when the thermal is created, so I must get some sleep! 😕 Zzzzzz....

Graeme

jmorris142
Explorer
Hey Great news, glad that worked:) 45 mins woah thats a lot of play time, maybe you should change the cycle to 5 to 10 mins so people will really notice it. Just an idea. Let me know if you want a hand with the feathers on the bird I can do that. Send me a PM if you want me to get that working for you.
j.j. morris - tekrok - https://share.oculus.com/app/tekrok