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Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

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Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#3
post #2

The "UNITS" part is wonderful. I had no idea slugs even existed. You want to measure how much air mass is in a given volume? That’s gonna be slugs/ft3.

The whole imperial/British side has tons of ugly and weird units of measure. Reading old engineering documentation will give you headaches and nightmares from all the inconsistent systems of units.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#4

    A nautical mile is ~6,076 feet or exactly 1,852 meters (???).
That is actually defined by distances on Earth (which is of course an approximation, but still ...). So, 1 nautical mile equals to one minute in the 90 degrees hemisphere arc. It's approximately 10k km from equator to the pole, so 10,000km/90/60 equals 1.852km.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#5
post #2

The "UNITS" part is wonderful. I had no idea slugs even existed. You want to measure how much air mass is in a given volume? That’s gonna be slugs/ft3.

The whole imperial/British side has tons of ugly and weird units of measure. Reading old engineering documentation will give you headaches and nightmares from all the inconsistent systems of units.

My favourite one was when I learned about the existence of US survey feet.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#6
> Note that Fortran supports arrays with an arbitrary starting index, in this case -2. So this table supports indices in the range [-2, 9].

That is such a useful feature! Surprised I haven’t seen that more often. So much fiddly code exists that’s just fixing offsets to conform to 0 (or 1 for Lua) -based indexing!

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#7
post #6

> Note that Fortran supports arrays with an arbitrary starting index, in this case -2. So this table supports indices in the range [-2, 9]. That is such a useful feature! Surprised I haven’t seen that more often. So much fiddly code exists that’s just fixing offsets to conform to 0 (or 1 for Lua) -based indexing!

Pascal (and Modula if I'm not mistaken) supports this too.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#8
post #2

The "UNITS" part is wonderful. I had no idea slugs even existed. You want to measure how much air mass is in a given volume? That’s gonna be slugs/ft3.

My favorite "strange unit" is poronkusema:

"A Sami measurement of distance; the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to stop to urinate. Today used to describe something that is at a very obscure distance away" (approximately 7.5 km)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_Finnish_units_of_meas...

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#9
This seems like a really reasonable implementation looking at the actual physics loop. From a game design perspective, lookup tables can be a very powerful way for artists to interact with the physics. For example, it makes balancing 2 different vehicles a lot easier in conversation. You could say things like "I think we need to reduce the performance of XYZ between 1000 and 8000 feet to balance with ABC". Inserting a new band into the table is an obvious exercise in Microsoft excel.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#10
post #2

The "UNITS" part is wonderful. I had no idea slugs even existed. You want to measure how much air mass is in a given volume? That’s gonna be slugs/ft3.

My favorite "strange unit" is poronkusema: "A Sami measurement of distance; the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to stop to urinate. Today used to describe something that is at a very obscure distance away" (approximately 7.5 km) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_Finnish_units_of_meas...

There's no reason for this to obsolete, I have to factor this into route planning for myself so I vote we bring this one back.
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