Valen Heavy Industries models and programs unique aircraft in a massively multiuser online virtual reality environment called Second Life. In this environment, it is possible to construct 3-D objects out of fundamental building blocks called primitives ("prims") - cubes, cones, spheres, toruses, and so on. (Not geometric primitives in the sense of triangles, for those of you already familiar with 3-D modelling; SL uses a parametric modeler.) This is all streamed to the user in real time.

Second Life uses the Havok 1 physics engine. On top of that, there sits an extra layer that does some rudimentary vehicle simulation. It simulates things like linear (straight-line) and angular forces, momentum, that sort of thing. However, it is really just simulating a subset of end-effects you'll see in vehicles, rather than simulating actual vehicles themselves, and so vehicles simulated solely by the vehicle system layer tend to feel a bit "generic" and in some cases downright unrealistic.

That's where I come in.