About this game Flight Earth
Development notes
Scoring a landing like an instructor
Sink rate carries the most weight because the airframe has to absorb it, and the touchdown-point item targets the habit of floating down the runway. Every target is derived from the aircraft’s approach speed and touchdown limits, so nothing is tuned per aircraft. My automated landing test crashed the A320 every time, so that stage sits last, with nothing locked behind it.
The gentlest landings went missing
The shared physics ignores ground contact slower than 0.3 m/s (about 60 ft/min) so rolling bumps are not counted as touchdowns. The best landings therefore showed no result and were logged as ended early. Rather than change the physics, the game now adds the touchdown itself after more than a second airborne, and off-runway touchdowns are scored with zero stars instead of stalling.
Physics on a round Earth
The flight model runs in Earth-centred coordinates, so no error builds up however far you fly; the renderer keeps a local origin near the camera and moves it after 8 km. Terrain drawing and wheel contact read the same height function.
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