Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 7, 2015
Flight Unlimited is a 1995 flight simulator video game developed by a team under Seamus Blackley (pictured) for Looking Glass Technologies. It allows the player to pilot reproductions of five aircraft and to perform aerobatic stunts. A virtual instructor teaches basic and advanced flight techniques, such as Immelmann turns and Lomcevak tumbles. The first self-published game released by Looking Glass, Flight Unlimited was intended to establish the company as a major video game publisher and to compete with the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise. Blackley, a particle physicist formerly of Fermilab, used real-time computational fluid dynamics calculations to code a simulated atmosphere for Flight Unlimited. Previous flight simulators had often used wind tunnel data to determine a plane's motion, which precluded complex maneuvers. The game was a commercial and critical success that spawned three sequels: Flight Unlimited II (1997), Flight Unlimited III (1999) and Jane's Attack Squadron (2002). Soon after Flight Unlimited's completion, Blackley was fired from Looking Glass; he went on to design Jurassic Park: Trespasser for DreamWorks Interactive, and later spearheaded development of the Xbox at Microsoft. (Full article...)
Part of the Looking Glass Studios video games featured topic.