The ST X1 is a new user-made airplane in Sinespace (a proud sponsoring partner to New World Notes) that’s attracted quite a lot of buzz within the user community. Created by Carsten Stark, co-creator of the equally impressive Localhost Connection Cafe, the ST XI is fully physics-enabled and comes with a cockpit HUD with real time displays.
“The Sinespace vehicle system uses a physics model in Unity and this is built upon that as a base and extended as needed for the aircraft bits that I added,” Carsten tells me. “The movement is all done by applying directional force and rotational torque.”
Top airspeed: 394 knots. As you can see from the video, the plane comes with quite a lot of detail.
“The wheels in the landing gear have springs and tension and will bounce or smooth bumps a bit…. the instruments are all tied to the physical model and indicate real values. Airspeed is in knots, climb rate is in feet per second, altitude is in feet, pitch, roll, compass directions are all in degrees."
Getting the visuals to look right was a challenge at first, but Sinespace’s partnership with Unity’s Asset Store helped speed things up:
“I'm more of a programmer than a modeler or texture artist and I really haven't done all that much in Blender before,” as Carsten puts it. “I was going to do the textures for the HUD/instruments from scratch too, but ended up grabbing a nice looking asset pack from the Unity Asset Store for the instrument textures... probably shaved a week or two off of development time.”
The plane itself is just a small part of a larger project Carsten is planning, a kind of World of Vehicles mini-MMO:
“It's going to be an archipelago that is basically a playground for vehicles and exploring. Land, sea, and air. I'm working on the first island right now which is a little under 2km x 2km and it will have the first airport, a road system going around the island, and off road trails crossing it.” More on that soon.
Get it here, and watch the tutorial video above to get started.
Carsten also has a Discord page for technical support: Click here to join.
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