Schappi Studios

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Schappi’s Flight Simulator

Fly a light aircraft over terrain that is generated as you go. Dawn, midday or dusk, and a different world every time.

Play in your browser

Runs in the page — nothing to install. Needs a keyboard and WebGL.

W/S pitch · A/D roll · Q/E yaw · Shift/Ctrl throttle · F flaps · C view · T time of day · M sound

Fullscreen Open on its own

Today’s challenge

Play the challenge See the board

    How it works

    The world is not stored anywhere. The ground height at any point comes out of a sum of sine waves, so the terrain is worked out as you reach it and the same seed always gives the same world. Every wave is tuned to fit a whole number of times across the map, which is what lets the land repeat seamlessly instead of ending at an edge.

    Flight is a real model rather than an arcade one: lift comes from angle of attack and airspeed, drag rises with both, and if you pull too hard and too slow the wing stalls and stops holding you up. Flaps buy lift at the cost of drag.

    The aircraft, the terrain, the trees, the water and the sky are all drawn with WebGL from a single file with no build step. Seven thousand trees are drawn in two calls rather than seven thousand.

    Things to try

    • Land it. Touch down under 50 knots with the wings level and the aircraft settles instead of exploding. Harder than it sounds.
    • Find a trench. The dark patches under the water are genuinely deeper. The deepest are rare.
    • Fly a named world. Add ?seed=7 to the address to get the same terrain every time, and share the number.
    • Change the light. T cycles dawn, midday, dusk and night. Night is only reachable with T.
    • Sit in the cockpit. C switches between chase, cockpit and wing views. The instruments are live.