Hi all!! I would like to design a very simple Flight Simulator. I have a quite good understanding of C++ and a basic knowledge in OpenGL. Now! the question is what sould be the first step to design a flight simulator. I don''t have a clue how to start it. I thought about creating terrain first!? but I am sure its wrong! Can anyone give me some clues?. By the way does anyone know where I could find some good tutorials or sites on how to create Terrains from scratch with some code examples? or anyone have a source code taken from some book or something that has a very simple terrain that I could learn from. I just want to see how it works. I have the red book but surprisingly there is nothing about it. Thanks for any help!

For ''simple'' terrain, all you have to do is create a height field (a grayscale bitmap that represents the top view of the terrain, with white usually being the highest point, and black being the lowest). Once you have a height field created, you can just load it in, and give each point on the terrain a value based on the value of the same point on the height map. Hopefully I just didn''t confuse you. Also, you can go to the developer resources on this site, and check out General 3D, and check out the links to kewl terrain papers, articles, and tutorials.

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Trent (ShiningKnight)
E-mail me
ShiningKnight Games (I had to make one up, to fit in with the rest of you )
Project: Writing tutorials and code for my OpenGL Game Programming series
OpenGL Game Programming Tutorials

Check out my quad tree demo . It''s VERY Simple and it''s loading up heights from a text file. Easy to modify and store, but not compact ...


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Warrior of Great Darkness

Thx all! You helped me alot!
This forum is really cool thing!
Still working on it!

One more question if you don''t mind - Should I draw the wireframe for the whole area in one go? even if it is not visible? and then put the texture on the visible part?