Search And Rescue For Linux

Search And Rescue project, a flight simulator that involves rescue missions, uses a simple flight dynamics engine. The player pilots rescue helicopters to rescue victims in various situations of distress.

Search and Rescue is a helicopter based air rescue flight simulator. It employs a simple flight dynamics engine that is targetted towards the "average" player. It is not designed to be a cutting-edge realistic simulator, but rather a flexable game that everyone can play and enjoy.

The history of the development of this game goes back to 1997, when Search and Rescue was created as an explorative to design for more complex 3D games using the OpenGL graphics library. Much of the effort in the development of this game came from Wolfpack Entertainment and many dedicated contributors (see credits below).

This game was ported to Windows early on in its development to ensure the portability of its graphics code. However the Win32 version lacked certain features due to differences in Windows' design of its graphic, sound, and controller implementation.

The flight dynamics engine (FDE) features helicopter, aircraft, and tilt-rotor aircraft flight dynamics models (FDMs). It uses source-centered (as opposed to world-centered) mathimatical equations to simulate movement which mimicks but does not fundimentally follow standard physics equations. This simplifies the "flyability" of the aircrafts at a slight cost of realisim and lightens processor load.

The 3D visual models of the aircrafts and objects were created by a program called Vertex 3D, an OpenGL modeller designed to create 3D visual models that are optimized for OpenGL.

Each scene is a finite sized flat world, separated vertically by cloud layer(s) and centered at the origin with an artificial longitude and latitude offset applied to displayed positions.