Developing Flight Lab
February 20th, 2008 by Patrick Juchli
At the beginning it’s always simple. “Everybody draw crazy airplanes and then fly them.” We wanted a fun experience, no boring modeling session, no nerdy flight simulation.
Just draw an outline, booom!, airplane wing
Flight Lab uses Papervision3D to show 3-D models and these models have to be created in a very specific way. Drawing an arbitrary free hand line is the opposite of that, you can draw everything, in any way. That’s why the Flight Lab builder has to do a lot of interpretations. Did you just draw a correction to an existing outline? Are there intersections? Can we simplify the outline while preserving its characteristic look so the Flash Player has less stuff to compute? Next, Flight Lab has to break up the shape into triangles because Papervision3D only understands models made out of triangles. At the end, we add thickness and create the final model by extruding the outline. We’re done! Now let’s head over to the game.
Fly like birds do and crash like airplanes
Flight Lab gives you the real thing: It’s a 6DOF (degrees of freedom) flight simulator modeled by a physics engine in 3D using rigid body dynamics. Real airplane wings can be described by specific lift and drag coefficients, depending on how quickly and from which angle the air flows over a wing section. That’s what Flight Lab does.
On the other hand you’re flying by flapping wings. The flying experience had to be as physical as possible using as few buttons as possible. So we put a bird into the simulator, added additional forces and offered the user the same control a bird has over its body – if it’s not a chicken. 4 keys, 2 optional keys and one space bar (hint!) oughta be enough for everyone.
Flying Pigs
The flight behaviour depends on the material you choose and the shape of the airplane. But to be honest, we ended up limiting this influence a little bit. As an aviation engineer you just have to design some things exactly the right way or the airplane won’t fly at all. Crazy airplanes can quickly become impossible to handle in a real flight simulator. However, we wanted people to create imaginative planes and fly them in our simulator even though they may never take off in the real world. So we decided on a compromise. Huge wings for example will do what you expect them to do but they can have any shape and any position. In the end though, a well engineered aircraft will still fly better and bring you more score points.
Hand-crafted, with a lot of love
The game itself has a lot of elements running at the same time and a lot of effort went into making this possible. Flight Lab is using Papervision3D 1.5 and builds on the efforts of a vivid open-source community. Nevertheless, there are limits when it comes to creating a game experience of this scale. Nearly every element you see in the game posed a significant problem of its own. Be it quality of graphics, a panorama, a water surface, airplane shadow, clouds, wind or general depth-sorting problems. And often something feasible turned out to be too slow in context. Game logic, stunt analysis, sound and physics simulation quickly add up.
Guest Star
PaperDude! Of course you know him and he’s back big time. He will be acting as your avatar so treat him with respect. His body follows motion capture data from Lord of the Rings and Saturday Night Fever. Real time, baby!
Plus everything else
Next to all this fancy game and 3D stuff, Flight Lab is also a website which offers saving, browsing and sharing airplanes. It’s a Rich Internet Application in the true sense of the word and a site that supports deep linking and browser history. If you want your friend to play the game directly using a specific airplane, just send him the link in the browser address bar.
Flight Lab is a prominent example of what you can do today with Flash Player 9. It was a fun ride and we learned a lot. Let’s see what the future holds, the flying pigs are here to stay.
February 20th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
amazing! what was the development time?
February 20th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
[…] E se quiser saber como foi desenvolvido o site, acessa aqui! […]
February 20th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Congratulations on a job incredibly well done guys!
I came here to ask the same question Matt asked.
What was the development time on this project?
February 20th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
GUY YOU WENT BEYOND!, INCREDIBLE!!!
Congratz, this is groundbreaking.
February 20th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Same question as Matt. How Long does it take to build something like this?
6-8 months, a year, more?
February 21st, 2008 at 3:55 am
It’s a bit difficult to answer your question about development time.
The original idea dates back as far as winter 2006, and we started prototyping a proof of concept in spring 2007. This was just a very early version of the builder, and also included evaluating flight simulator software.
Full scale development started October 2007. Development slowed down a bit over the Christmas period, and the last month we’ve only been trying to tie loose ends together.
I hope this sort of answers your question. To give you an exact number of month is impossible, since we’ve also been busy with other projects running in parallel.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Guys,
This is amazing…
I already know what the site of the year should be
If you don’t mind, I have a couple of more questions:
Anyway, very very nice work. It’s nice to see people pushing flash to the edge and succeeding
Cheers!
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:45 pm
[…] du kan læse lidt om udfordringer i forbindelse med udviklingen af spillet her: Developing Flight Lab Tags: Papervision, Red Bull Del:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can […]
February 26th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Very very impressive ! great job !
How did you manage the flash developpers working on the project (i e division of the differents tasks) ? Were there one or more on 3d-papervision effect, others on usual developping ?
Or was is all programmed by one amazing flash guru ??? :o)
Anyway, I hope to see more and more amazing flash sites from you.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Generally, work was split between the Tokyo and the Berlin office. In Tokyo we developed the components for modeling the airplanes, i.e. drawing outlines and transforming them into actual 3D models, texture mapping, etc., and the Papervision parts, the 3D preview and the actual game (which is not based on the WOW engine, btw).
The project was then put together by the Berlin team, who took care of building the actual site and integrating the building tool and the game. Here, work was split into separate modules - creating overall structure and main navigation, channel navigation, painter, hangar, highscore table, and the registration forms. These parts where developed half simultaneously, half sequentially.
Our partner Signal7 developed database, back-end, and user administration, and Luis added the PaperDude(TM) pilot avatars and mo-cap parsing.
February 27th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
[…] If you’re interested in more details, they have an article about the whole development process here. […]
February 28th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Awesome work guys! I love it!!! I did some PV3D work and can imagine these “looks simple - is very hard work” - issues! Congratulation!
March 4th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
i just checked out the highscore list and found that
the top scores are crab designs
how it possible those airplanes fly they look like strings
the flying engine should fall them
it is really creative website
but those top higscore airplanes agrrrrrrrrrh
March 5th, 2008 at 9:07 am
We’re aware of the stick planes flooding the highscores, and working on a fix. The aim was to allow flying almost any creation, not just those that look like actual planes.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:56 am
[…] you’ve had a play, you might want to check out LESS RAIN, or the lessrain blog article about developing the Flugtag site. Share […]
March 8th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
this game totally blew my socks off. I’ve been playing it long into the night.
to fix the thin planes issue, you could make sure the 3 parts of the plane have to intersect. It’s gonna banish a few of the creative ones, but it wall also drastically reduce the flight time on the G-String planes.
March 8th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Guys, this is amazing! What a pity Flash isn’t going to be on the iPhone soon, I can’t even imagine what we, the Flash community, would develop for it.
I’m blown away by this product!
March 9th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Great work. Being partial to a bit of an Actionscript myself, I can begin to imagine how much thought, planning and technical know-how went into making this a success. And making it a solid app too.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Remove the people with the string planes. Give them there own category (planes that do not fly). What a great game. Amazing game I’m addicted.
Amazing how far we have come. I remember playing Flight Simulator from SubLOGIC (1980’s).
Keep up the Great work
March 28th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Great work. I want to learn this too
April 6th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Can only imagine the co-ordination that went into this. As well as an A-Grade flash dev team, your project management peeps are now the envy of every other ad agency out there! Well done!
August 10th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
My son and I have enjoyed many hours of designing and flying planes together with Flugtag. I only wish that there was some way for pilots/designers to leave comments on each other’s work. Few people seem to take the time to vote.
Any plans to make a version 2.0 of this program? I’d buy it! Beyond leaving comments, how cool would it be to be able to network and play with other users? Imagine the airshows we could stage? Or the dog fights (lol!) Other ideas: being able to get into the cockpit (i.e., change the view while flying so you are not limited to a spot-plane view) would be awesome. I also have to wonder about offering alternate means of propulsion besides flapping wings. I’ll also add my 2 cents about getting rid of the stick planes
Finally, do you realize that the FaceBook application no longer works? I wonder if you can fix that?
Again, thanks for making such a great game,
Monkeyboy & Pickle
August 21st, 2009 at 12:10 pm
@Bob thanks so much, we’re happy you enjoy the game! Comments would be a great addition we’ll keep it in mind if we’re commissioned to extend Flight Lab.
Sorry for the inconvenience with the widget, it should be working again.
In the meantime you might want to put your building skills to our follow-up project called Red Bull Soapbox Racer: http://www.redbullsoapboxracer.com/