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Path: utzoo!watmath!water!watcgl!onfcanim!dave
From: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: net.aviation,net.graphics
Subject: Re: Flight Simulators
Message-ID: <14683@onfcanim.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Sep-85 02:24:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: onfcanim.14683
Posted: Thu Sep  5 02:24:22 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Sep-85 10:34:01 EDT
References: <1112@mhuxt.UUCP> <6758@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Organization: ONF, Montreal
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Xref: watmath net.aviation:1961 net.graphics:1077

The IRIS is indeed a nice graphics engine.  SGI supplies a flight simulator
demo program with it; it's pretty awful trying to use a mouse as a stick
and mouse buttons as rudder. (Particularly when the rudder is simulated
wrong).

You can buy 24 bits/pixel for the IRIS, giving lots of colours per
image even in double-buffered mode.  The 6-bit limitation referred to
by another other can be overcome simply by giving SGI more money.

There is also a "dogfight" version of the simulator, where several people
"fly" on several workstations, and they each broadcast their positions
many times per second to the other stations.  You can see, and shoot at,
the other planes.  Lots more fun than video games.

The current hardware does about 15 or 16 updates per second of the
flight simulator, dropping to about 12 for the dogfight.  But SGI was
showing a 68020 processor upgrade at SIGGRAPH that would do 20 updates/second.
Very nice.  Since the drawing is double-buffered, you don't see incomplete
images being drawn.  And since the screen is 60Hz refresh non-interlaced,
there is no flicker.