I am simulation a combat simulation:

Where i would like to see an enemy aircraft at a good distance and I can feel my movement of aircraft. I have done the movement of the aircraft, How to get the environment, any free stuff? or plz help me if you got my need.

What are the best way to design it?

I have thought of sky box/sphere, is that the efficient way; any drawback? if so what to do?

Its best if I can find an evironment where the lower earth suface would be plane and the sky would be curved to feel the sky meeting the earth at infinity, better to get a sky semi-sphere I guess. Plz help me to find that as I m not that good with modeling.

or if there is any tutorial for developing such then u can help me in that way too.

not the clearest of questions but i'll try.

seems you want a fighter sim. well. you need ground and sky.

there are also 2 types. one where the area of play is limited and the other is expansive (you can continue on forever)

for expansive you need either a tile-able ground planer "heightmap" and texture. i'd suggest L3DT for this from bundysoft. horrendously cheap and pretty good. if you want good texture results you'd need to make your own (they may of improved since i last played with it.) if you deciede you want prettier landscapes theres an OK wiki explaining it from L3DT and i suggest Allegorithmic MaPZone.

or you can make your own algorithm to "invent" the landscape as you move.

you can use a skybox but i'd suggest using a blueish background and change the colour closer to black as altitude increases. then for clouds use particles so you can fly through them.

the horizon is a fog effect i believe again with particles.

there is a tutorial floating around about how to make a fleight sim in XNA also.

www.google.co.uk for that though

Dead.Rabit

sorry about the seemingly random change in font there...

http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/series2.php

dont know how in-depth that is or what it covers though

D.R

When you write "combat simulation" are you looking to make a true visualization/simulation package? If you are looking to create an actual 3D simulation engine the direction all depends on what you're doing to use in the simulation. For instance, the US & Canada (for instance) heavily use applications such as JCATS, MODSAF/OTBSAF, OneSAF etc... for the physical simulation platform. If you're looking down this road, then you'll need to first be able to add support for DIS and/or HLA protocols. Next, you'll need some custom content reader/writers for data formats such as DTED, ESRI Shape Files or VMAP data. Also adding support for reading GeoTIFF's would also be a good start - then you'll have an accurate representation of the environment (or theatre). If on the other hand, this for purely entertainment then you're not so "boxed in". You'd first have to have some terrain rendering capabilities (there are so many out there to choose from). Still, being able to import or otherwise convert DEM, DTED data would give you a huge head start since you would already have the geometric data for your world - you'd just have to build a rendering system for it. Using a program such as 3DS Max, Blender or even Daylon Graphic's Leveller (good app, btw) would give you the ability to create a fictiional terrain to which you can later render on your own. Knowing if this is strictly from the point of view of an aircraft (as opposed to ground units) can let you further optimise your terrain rendering system - as far as LOD and resources go that is. In short: 1) For your environment, look into DEM,DTED data or applications such as Daylong Graphic's Leveller for content creation 2) Look into terrain rendering algorithms (i.e. Adaptive Quadtree meshing or ROAM - are a couple old party-favorites) The site Gamasutra.com has a ton of information on this stuff (they may even have code samples too). However one thing does go almost without saying - you must be pretty adept in either C++ or C# to effectively and efficiently implement such a system. Otherwise, it may be more productive to begin learning the programming language first. In either case, best of luck - hope I was able to help answer some of your questions. -s