Simple Soaring Sim

Simple soaring flight simulator, take control of a glider / sailplane and soar around or challenge other players in real multiplayer environment for a race. 

 Key commands

A - D or Left - Right	Steer left or right
W-S or Up - Down	Change speed
Space	Air-Brake
ESC	In Game menu
C	Chase camera

How to play

Use thermal (a column of rising air) under the clouds to gain altitude. Thermals are also moving with the wind and have a lifecycle before they burst and a new one spawn somewhere else. 

In addition if there is a wind, ridges also produce lift if you fly close enough.

Race "start" spawns at certain time and players have an opportunity to  fly trough a set of waypoints, competing with each other (or for personal best).  

You can also customize glider to find optimal configuration for you play style. Make it faster or turn tighter to utilize more lift. 

How it works

Game implements socket.io and communicate to a node.js server hosted on a Heroku platform  server. Server handles communication between clients and share position, customization data and messages.  There is no limit implemented on amount of players that can be connected, however I have put a minor limit in frequency data is send by each client to prevent flooding the server, after all its a free account that hosts a server.  This was a first time I tried to implement such thing (and to make a multiplayer game in general) so things will probably be polished later on for the next jam.  

If server is inactive for a longer time, it takes few sec to boot it up on first connection. Simply refresh browser if you see the offline message. 

So far what has been done 

26/04/21 Multiplayer works  

• simple flight physics
• glider configuration 
• wing flex in thermals 
• landing 
• thermals synced in multiplayer 
• glider config synced in multiplayer

29/04/21 I have opened a server for testing, a demo race is created to test basic functionality, wind that moves clouds need to be corrected for network sync

• Basic race and notifications
• Moving icons on the screen

• Final phase will be to draw more flight area and to create a correct  mesh colliders for mountains. will see how far can I make it till jam deadline as am doing all this alone, all assets have been created in Blender, icons in Xara

5/02/21 Bug fixes 

• Added chase camera
• Race notifications and basic total time
• Minigame - landing at airfield closest to a point 
• Chase camera 

I had couple of more ideas to implement, unfortunately I couldn't free more for a jam.   

Audio effects are royalty free sounds