Title: The Wall

Hi Al,

I've been thinking about writing some sort of a flight simulator. In your and Stan Trujillo's bibliography in "C++ Games Programming" there's a mention of Taking Flight written by Christopher Watkins and Stephen Marenka, published by M & T Books in 1994. Is the subject matter reflected in the title?

There was also "Flights of Fantasy" by Christopher Lampton and The Waite Group Press in the list. I think that it may not be concerned with flight sims. Could you give me some help?

Thanking you in advance,

Colin Paul Gloster

Response from Al Stevens

Taking Flight is about how to write a flight simulator. The one that the authors implement is primitive. I believe there was a later edition that addressed C++.

Flights of Fantasy includes a chapter on flight simulators, but it's a small chapter.

Al Stevens

From Colin to Al Stevens and Francis Glassborow

Thank you for your reply Al. Perhaps the coverage in these books is too basic for my needs, but in so far as they are computer game books with coverage of flight sims do they utilise any worthwhile versions of aviation textbook formulae which aren't obvious but suit computer hardware better? Some examples of re-forming of mathematical formulae for computer hardware I would be talking about would include that guy who had a paper published probably less than eighteen months ago in Dr. Dobb's Journal who had to have a rotatable weather map scan embedded in aeroplanes. When using affine transformations from the original to the rotated version he'd get unassigned pixels because of rounding of source pixels to merely one destination pixel when they partially should have taken up a few. A friend suggested that instead each destination pixel should be determined by the source pixels (so that each destination pixel was looked at and then worked out whereas beforehand each source pixel was looked at and one destination pixel worked out).

Another from DDJ, possibly in the July 1998 issue, where Andre LaMothe was busy drawing sloped lines. Usually expressed with y alone on one side, it made sense to reorganise it since monitors work by changing one horizontal line at a time. I remember of some way to work out the two real values of the variable in a quadratic equation, which uses some flourish on the usual x = (-b +/-(b^2 - 4ac)^1/2) / (2a) formula.

Also, if these books are worth my while because of these, are the flourishes language specific because more than C I'm interested in writing a flight sim in Ada (and may add a Fortran or Forth port too).

Colin Paul Gloster