Volo, a flight simulator written in V

Volo is a multi-platform flight simulator I’m writing in V.

This is pre-alpha software and at this point supports:

• loading and rendering 3D aircraft models
• loading global scenery and rendering it in false colors (yuck!)

Why?

I find flight simulators particularly interesting because they combine two passions of mine, software engineering and flight.

And writing a flight simulator from scratch, while it sounds crazy, gives the opportunity to learn hands-on about interesting topics:

• 3D math
• real-time graphics
• physics
• geodesy
• metereology
• and many more

Now, you might ask, why not contribute to an existing open source flight sim instead of writing one from scratch?

It’a valid question.

I did in fact contribute to FlightGear and, informed by that, I decided there is value in taking a slightly different path and trying:

• a more modern programming language
• and a more modern graphics stack

In any case, the main value of this project for me is educational and there’s no substitute for learning-by-doing.

Internals

Aircraft

AC3D

https://wiki.flightgear.org/AC3D_file_format

XML

• Use brand-new XML support in stdlib?
• Convert to JSON first? https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-convert-xml-to-json-on-the-command-line/

Terrain

https://wiki.flightgear.org/BTG_file_format

Multiplayer

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1014

Platform APIs

Multi-platform graphics

Sokol graphics library

Keyboard input and sound

GG for platform input and sound abstractions:

• https://github.com/vlang/v/tree/master/vlib/gg

See also

• 3D file formats