Flight Log #1: Weather in Deadstick

People often ask what the motivation was behind making Deadstick and with that I have to recall my own flight training. One of the biggest surprises was how little of the course was dedicated to physically learning to fly an aircraft, and how much focus was placed on procedures and the discipline involved to operate one safely.

There are many sims that do an incredible job of simulating aircraft, but I always found that the experience of simulating the pilot and airmanship was somewhat lacking. To that end, the concept of Deadstick was born, to give players the experience of what it’s like to be the pilot.

Those that have been lucky enough to fly in a light aircraft, will also likely have experienced the sheer disappointment of having your trip or lesson cancelled at the last minute due to poor, unforecast or, in my case, British weather! And with good reason.

The weather presents one of the biggest risks to general aviation pilots and continues to catch pilots out. Gasco (The General Aviation Safety Council) here in the UK have identified that weather related accidents, be that loss of control in poor weather or controlled flight into terrain, often as a result of hitting rising terrain whilst in cloud, accounted for 20% of all aircraft accidents between 1980 to 2006, with the figures remaining much the same to this day, and similarly echoed around the world.

The dangers are numerous -

• Clouds can quickly lead to spatial disorientation and rapid loss of control.

• Icing can quickly lead to loss of aerodynamic lift and the ability to maintain altitude/flight.

• Fog and poor visibility can entirely obscure a runway, leaving you trapped in the air.

• Wind can wreak havoc on take off and landings, as well as ground speed and fuel planning.

• Combine wind with mountains, and dangerous downdraughts on the leeward side can pull you down into the terrain.

• Not to mention the implications of flying into storms.

Is Deadstick a game or a simulator? I’ll leave that to the community to debate but, if it is a game, then the weather is certainly the enemy!

For Deadstick to provide a compelling pilot experience, it is essential for us to create a dynamic and realistic weather model with which the player can interact with, plan around and hopefully avoid. This created its own unique challenges. As other simulators have increasingly turned to grabbing live weather data or giving the user a choice of fixed scenarios, the former isn’t an option for us in our fictional world, and the latter doesn’t give us the challenging unpredictability that we want the player to experience.

We have therefore set about creating a plausible dynamic weather model which can create an environment in which the player can experience all of the hazards described above.

Those that have had the opportunity to play Deadstick will have encountered some of these before - Thick overcast layers of cloud making it difficult to let down for an approach amongst mountainous terrain, strong crosswinds presenting challenging approaches and dangerous topographic effects when trying to fly over mountains in strong winds.

It isn’t just enough to randomly select from various weather parameters and change them throughout a given playthrough. Whilst weather can be chaotic, over time, pilots can often learn how to interpret or predict how the weather will change based on current conditions. What’s more, certain locations will often have their own region specific weather conditions or micro-climates - be that prevailing winds, a predictable