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'Gon Flying is a flight simulator written in Java. It has polygonal scenery and a graphical instrument panel. It is modular, meaning that it can load different airplanes and control panels on the fly.
It's not really complete, however. Most of the module infrastrucure is complete; however, there is not more than one module of each type, and there is only a single scene.
The control panel is rather primitive: just a some white lines, and no numbers. I had made some good looking instruments at one point, but alas, my hard drive crashed and I lost all the work. I haven't gotten around to redoing it.
You may click the button labeled "Fly!" below to try it out, if your browser has Java (enabled). You'll need Java API 1.1, so browsers like Netscape 4 won't work unless you have an appropriate plugin.
The airplane being simulated is a Piper Cherokee, same as in SimpleSim. The scenery is the main campus of Penn State University.
Documentation
Since the simulator is far from complete, so is the documentation.
The flight controls are the same as for SimpleSim, except that the number keypad and letter keys don't work. Hitting Control-C closes the window.
The instrument panel is, for now, so primitive I won't bother to explain it in detail. The layout is the typical instrument layout of light aircraft. On the right, there is a control flower, similar to the one found in Microsoft Flight Simulator, giving the positions of the controls.
Future Plans
The code for 'Gon Flying was lost when my hard disk crashed some time ago. Fortunately, there was a working applet on one of my web pages, which I was able to decompile to recover the source code, more or less. I've tidied up and reorganized the code, but haven't improved the simulator much since the crash.
I expect the first major step when I resume serious work on this is to redo the instrument panel, remaking the nice-looking instruments. I'll also try to finish the module infrastructure.
Downloads
Version 0.1:
Feedback
Comments, questions?
My current address is gonflying-23@aerojockey.com.
Copyright (c) 2001-2008 Carl Banks. All Rights Reserved.