Week 2: Basic Flight Controls

GitHub

This week is all dedicated to getting the basic flight controls down. These include:

• Elevators

• Ailerons

• Rudder

The Basic Flight Control Systems work is that they all modify a rotator which is then added to the actual local rotation of the actor. Now technically this isn’t how an actual plane would work, but for the moment, this is the implementation I want to move forward with. Later in the post I’ll discuss another version that I attempted.

The controls still need some polish because the plane can easily spiral out of control right now. So, for the rest of the week, my main goal will be refining the working controls (Elevators and Ailerons) and implementing the Rudder.

The Elevators were the first thing that I implemented technically last week to control the pitch of the plane. You'll see them working throughout the videos in this post.

The Ailerons are currently in a sort of half working state at the moment, it can make the plane bank. But it isn’t as good as I’d like it to be. Originally, I was using the planes local down Vector to apply gravity in that direction, which won’t really work if the plane is upside down. So, I ended up switching to the World Vector, which will always be down no matter the orientation of the plane. That dramatically improved the feel of the plane, but overall is still way too slippery and unpredictable to be considered done yet.

Last but not least is the Rudder. My main focus for this week has been the Elevators and the Aileron, so like I said earlier, the rest of the week will be dedicated to the Ailerons and Rudder. I already have the animations and the basic logic implemented, I just have to apply them to the plane.

Misc. stuff that I also did this week:

• Switched over to a spring arm Camera System so that the Camera won’t rotate with the plane anymore.

• Implemented some of the animations for the flight controls (I need to double check that they’re going in the correct way)

• As mentioned in my last Blog Post, I tired to do an implementation I nicknamed The Dual Lift Version, which is a more real to life implementation of lift. But I ran into a number of issue when trying to implement it, mainly being that it seemed to not be able to generate a local lift direction correctly. If I’m able to get all of the flight controls in a good state I might try this implementation again, but there’s a likely possibility that I won’t be able to. Which is a real shame since I really like the concept of this version.

Anyway, that’s all I have for this Blog post!! This week was a bit less complicated and more just fine-tuning stuff, and next week will most likely be the same. Again, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out!!