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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

#91

Post by psunavy03 »

The fact that this person put a snarky (???) next to the concept of measuring airspeed in knots makes me wonder just how familiar they are with aerospace in general. A knot is a standard measurement in part because one nautical mile is equal to one minute of latitude. Which is useful until the day we decide to start measuring lat/long in radians.

I know it's fashionable in some circles to dump on everything non-metric, but these things are they way they are because of reasons, and airspeed is generally measured in either knots or Mach.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#92

Post by rprenger »

JunkDNA wrote: post #64
throw0101c wrote: post #34

When I was growing up computers were getting faster by leaps and bounds, and I remember a video game that was so 'sophisticated' that it needed a math (FP) co-processor (80387) to play some parts of it: > The program requires a minimum of a 12MHz 80286, 1MB RAM, DOS 5.0 or DR DOS, one 1.2MB 5 1⁄4" or 1.44MB 3 1⁄2" disk drive, hard drive with 11MB of free disk space, and VGA graphics. In addition, Falcon3.O supports a…

I have fond memories of playing the original Falcon on my Amiga 500. It felt like magic after years of playing F15 Strike Eagle on the Apple IIc. Hearing real sound effects kicking in the afterburner and getting too close to the ground ("Pull Up! Pull Up!") were all so satisfying. I remember being so excited when Falcon 3.0 came out. But it just felt like a let down. The graphics were amazing for the time and it seem…

I felt a similar way when I moved from Chuck Yeager's Air Combat to (I think) F15 Strike Eagle 3. Yeager was the perfect mix for me. I remember rarely even seeing the enemy planes I was firing at in newer games.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#93

Post by bumseltagbaerbi »

drewg123 wrote: post #47

My Mom was a FORTRAN programmer for a defense contractor from the late 50s to the mid 90s. She spent her career doing things like that F16 simulator. The last thing I remember her talking about was one of the B1 or B2 bombers. When I was elementary school age in the late 70s, I'd go into her office with her sometimes on school holidays that were not work holidays. She'd let me play Colossal Cave Adventure on a termin…

[flagged]

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#94

Post by LiamPowell »

IsTom wrote: post #49
LiamPowell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ada too, which is of course Pascal-based. Like many programming language features, it feels like it was lost simply because C didn't have it and everyone wanted to copy C.

In C can't you just offset pointer and then you'll be able to index with arbitrary starting value?

Technically no, a pointer pointing outside of its array (or similar) at any point is undefined behaviour. More importantly for this discussion, without support from the language it's not very ergonomic to work with. What happens when you need to call strlen, memcpy, or free?

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#96

Post by mrguyorama »

psunavy03 wrote: post #86
JunkDNA wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have fond memories of playing the original Falcon on my Amiga 500. It felt like magic after years of playing F15 Strike Eagle on the Apple IIc. Hearing real sound effects kicking in the afterburner and getting too close to the ground ("Pull Up! Pull Up!") were all so satisfying. I remember being so excited when Falcon 3.0 came out. But it just felt like a let down. The graphics were amazing for the time and it seem…

Having been the kid who loved to geek out over flight sims, and then the adult who was fortunate enough to have flown military jets, I find the trend for uber-realistic military sims like DCS and such kind of sad in a way. I mean, the software itself is impressive. But the idea of grown adults geeking out over old versions of the NATOPS and trying to develop tactics and such is frankly cringe. You're never going to g…

>I find the trend for uber-realistic military sims like DCS and such kind of sad in a way.

But things like Ace Combat, "H.A.W.X", War Thunder, Project Wingman, Nuclear Option, all those games are incredibly popular. The arcade combat genre is alive and well.

I do wish games like VTOL VR, DCS, and other more serious sims had a "maybe don't make me read 700 pages of manual to lock and fire a missile" option. Even something as simple as VTOL VR telling me exactly what machine my targeting pod is locked onto would be nice. Just give me a name and basic specs. It's a damn game, I shouldn't need to memorize target silhouettes unless I want to.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles actually does this well, with an entire page of "simplify things please" options.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#97

Post by matrix12 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #59
drewg123 wrote: post #47

My Mom was a FORTRAN programmer for a defense contractor from the late 50s to the mid 90s. She spent her career doing things like that F16 simulator. The last thing I remember her talking about was one of the B1 or B2 bombers. When I was elementary school age in the late 70s, I'd go into her office with her sometimes on school holidays that were not work holidays. She'd let me play Colossal Cave Adventure on a termin…

FWIW she probably wasn’t breaking any security protocols - basically as long as the kids can’t read well they are fine to be escorted without the red light. I used to take my daughter into the SCIF when she was about 2 when needed, and there was a week where I was took my son into work at the Pentagon. I working for Snake Clark at the time and people kept bringing him candies and treats. I think he was watching carto…

Until your kid reads off some classified terms off a burn bag...

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#98

Post by pklausler »

btrettel wrote: post #58
JSR_FDED wrote: 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!

Unfortunately, Fortran's implementation of this has some inconsistencies. Doing certain operations will convert from the custom indexing back to 1-based indexing. https://github.com/sourceryinstitute/fidbits/blob/master/src... https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/just-say-no-to-non-de...

Worse than the pitfalls that can arise with a correct compiler is the fact that most Fortran compilers have bugs with non-default lower bounds -- and they're not always the same bugs, so portability is a real problem. The feature is fine as it stood with Fortran '77 dummy arrays.

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#99

Post by fsckboy »

psunavy03 wrote: post #91

The fact that this person put a snarky (???) next to the concept of measuring airspeed in knots makes me wonder just how familiar they are with aerospace in general. A knot is a standard measurement in part because one nautical mile is equal to one minute of latitude. Which is useful until the day we decide to start measuring lat/long in radians. I know it's fashionable in some circles to dump on everything non-metri…

>airspeed is generally measured in either knots or Mach

boatspeed is also measure in knots... but only very rarely in Mach (and not even primarily because the speed of sound in water is substantially higher than in air)

Re: Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D

#100

Post by psunavy03 »

fsckboy wrote: post #99
psunavy03 wrote: post #91

The fact that this person put a snarky (???) next to the concept of measuring airspeed in knots makes me wonder just how familiar they are with aerospace in general. A knot is a standard measurement in part because one nautical mile is equal to one minute of latitude. Which is useful until the day we decide to start measuring lat/long in radians. I know it's fashionable in some circles to dump on everything non-metri…

> airspeed is generally measured in either knots or Mach boatspeed is also measure in knots... but only very rarely in Mach (and not even primarily because the speed of sound in water is substantially higher than in air)

Historically, I'm fairly certain airspeed was measured in knots because of boatspeed. In software terms, the problem of navigating over the Earth's surface was forked from boats to planes, and why re-invent the wheel?

It also tends to be more of a standard in professional aviation, whereas some small civilian bugsmashers in the US use MPH, presumably because it's easier for the doctors and lawyers of the world to understand after driving their cars, and if you're VFR, who really cares?

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