Airborne - Notes on a Plane control system in Unity.

Notice my not-so-subtle use of context-specific keywords in my blog post headings?
Take THAT Google.

So as the videos allude to - I'm working fairly heavily on an air combat game.
Absolute no idea why, I just sort of - woke up and decided I wanted to do that.

For your interest - I originally attempted a physically-accurate representation of Plane control - using forces (Drag, Thrust, Lift, Gravity etc); but - along with being a tweaking nightmare, it felt unwieldy.

What I really want, is to make a responsive, tactile twitch-action game - in planes.

From a control perspective, think Crimson Skies - like a first-person shooter in the air.

So I've reverted a more simplified control model:

• Your plane with always move forward at a minimum speed (i.e it doesn't just drop out of the sky like a stone).
• Your plane can bank, roll and pitch up and down, as normal.
• Your plane will gradually right itself if your roll is close to flat (to avoid that annoying tweaking to achieve horizontal required otherwise).
• Your plane will gain speed if diving, and this speed will gradually decay when you pull out of the dive.

 I'm using a CharacterController here, and not a rigidbody. Whether this is a good call, I cannot speculate - but I made a choice to keep all Unity physics objects (CharacterController aside) out of the game - so as to not confuse the situation.

Good choice? Perhaps - it's a choice made in ignorance.
I'm not 100% familiar with the physics system of Unity.

Although I'm fairly glad to say that the intensive use of Unity over the last.... six months or so has definitely given me a very thorough working knowledge of the Unity engine - please, ask away if you have questions.