Chapter 13. Vehicle Simulations

Vehicle simulations try to create the feeling of driving or flying a vehicle, real or imaginary. In simulations of real vehicles, one of the chief goals is verisimilitude, an (apparently!) close relationship to reality. You can expect your players to know a lot about these machines and to want an experience that is at least visually similar to that of really controlling one. The machine's gross performance characteristics (speed and maneuverability) should also be similar to reality, although its finer details probably can't be, for reasons we'll discuss in this chapter.

If you're designing an imaginary vehicle, you're free to create any kind of driving experience that you like without being restricted by such things as gravity, G-forces, fuel capacity, and so on. Your game really needs to just create the feeling of movement; what limitations you place on that movement are up to you. In this chapter, we concentrate, for the most part, on simulating real vehicles because that's the bigger challenge. Also, because the vast majority of vehicle simulators are flight simulators and driving (usually car-racing) simulators, we devote most of our attention to those. A short section devoted to ships, tanks, and spacecraft is included at the end.