Flight Club

cloudwalker

About this game

Flight Club is a soaring simulation game.

It has thermal triggers, clouds forming and decaying in cycles above them, wind drift, hills with ridge lift, and three type of soaring vehicles: sailplanes, hanggliders and paragliders.

Rather than classic simulations, it's more of an 'arcade' type - everything happens much faster than in reality. Other than that it tries to simulate real soaring conditions as much as possible:
- each trigger has it's own cycle
- thermals differ by strength
- lift strength falls off from core center
- thermals are sloped in the wind
- clouds drift across ground
- cloud shadows are realistic with respect to sun position (option to have them directly bellow)
- variable cloudbase height on the same task
- blue thermals (no cloud above)
- invisible triggers (no indication of a trigger on the ground)
- birds that fly around and mark thermals for you
- hills that produce ridge lift to a certain height
- each glider type has typical speed, glide, sink, turn radius and polars with several points


Try to reach the goal as fast as possible or fly further and save your score to Google Leaderboards!


There are 11 tasks to choose from, with changing conditions:
- short (50km) or long (160km) tasks
- number of turnpoints
- cloudbase height
- wind strength and direction
- clouds or blue thermals
- hills
- visible or invisible triggers
- time based or free distance (max distance possible: 1000km+ on sailplane)
- different triggers every day for the same task


You have several onscreen buttons:
+/- - zooming in/out
p - pause button (using it will invalidate your score for uploading to Google Leaderboards)
x - for immediate landing (in multiplayer mode replaces p button)
1 - view player from behind with focus on next turn-point (glider in view)
2 - cycle through other players/AI gliders
3 - view current 'node' from above (task is divided into nodes to facilitate loading and activating their triggers and clouds as player approaches them)
4 - view current node from side at distance, at half cloudbase height
5 - view complete task from above (use sparingly on big tasks because all nodes and their triggers wake up - may lessen performance)
6 - view from cockpit (glider not in view)


Glider is controlled by tapping certain part's of screen: please study the control overlay screen on task start.


You can play solo game against several AI gliders or you can play with your friends in local Multiplayer mode!

For multiplayer mode all players must be connected to the same WIFI access point. First start Multiplayer game on first device and only after choosing glider type and task and you should start multiplayer on other devices. If game server was not detected on client devices you can manually enter server IP address. Server IP is shown in info section of the screen on the device that is acting as a Game Server.

Online Multiplayer mode is in test phase, please don't expect it to work seamlessly. Notably, movement of other players will not be smooth....
Important thing to note is that once all players that joined particular race (glider type + task) tap 'Start' race starts and although other players can enter they cannot join the race until all racers are on the ground again. Anyway, they can watch the race from perspective of other players (tap number 2 to move camera between racers).


This is still early release so have patience with possible bugs (especially in multiplayer mode) or missing features.
It will improve, even more with your suggestions!



CREDITS: Original Java Applet game 'Flight Club' was written by late Dan Burton. Source from: http://www.glider-pilot.co.uk/Flight%20club/hg.htm.

Ratings and reviews

I love this so much. All you have to do is relax, find the thermals, and fly. Very fun to play on WiFi with friends-- a little clunky to set up, but a great time once you get it working.

Update 17/11/22: Great. Issue fixed. Many thanks. Amended to 5* where it rightfully should be! :) Relaxing game to play from time to time but today's update has effectively deleted it, with no reason given. Error message 'app is not installed'. Why?

Very simple graphics, easy control (takes a little time to adapt). It has some GUI problems but I believe they will be solved in short time.

What's new

Fixed launch issue in previous update.
Previous release was to satisfy Play Store requirements.