Best Free Flight Simulators For Mac

Before you take your new drone out for its maiden flight, it’s a good idea to use a simulator to get a feel for its handling to avoid embarrassing and potentially expensive crashes. You could pay hundreds of pounds for a realistic drone sim, but the strong community spirit of drone pilots means there’s also a growing collection of superb free simulators to help you master your props. There are two main types of drone simulator: those designed to help you practise first-person view (FPV) racing, and those for refining handling of camera drones to help you achieve better video and photos. The best sims offer a variety of courses, variable weather conditions, and realistic physics so you’re fully prepared and know how your drone will respond in different situations.

A flight simulator is a device that virtually recreates aircraft flight from the group up. Flight simulators can easily be downloaded onto your HP or Mac, and they have many different purposes. The official simulator of the professional Drone Racing League, DRL Drone Racing Simulator is the most polished of the free drone simulators here. It’s currently in beta, but the League was.

Real licensed drone models are also a boon, as is scope for future development. All of the free drone simulators here let you use your own RC transmitter, which you’ll need to connect using a device like the (a quick Google search should reveal whether there are any alternative ways to link your specific controller to your PC). Most simulators support game controllers as well, and some even let you fly with a keyboard and mouse, though you’d need three hands to control a quadcopter with any success. Blast through neon mazes in dizzying first-person The official simulator of the professional Drone Racing League, is the most polished of the free drone simulators here. It’s currently in beta, but the League was confident enough to use it for pre-qualifying for the 2017 world championships. DRL Drone Racing Simulator features courses from the real competition, and is scored in the same way, with points earned from a combination of checkpoints and completion times.

Real-life DRL racing drones are fully customizable, and so are their simulated counterparts. Outdoor maps are fairly realistic, but the simulator really comes into its own indoors, where LED-clad drones hurtle through a Bladerunner-style tangle of neon. DRL Drone Racing Simulator is compatible with both console and RC controllers. There’s a menu option for keyboard controls, but in our tests the sim failed to detect any hardware; something of a moot point, because the fine-control necessary for navigating the complex courses at high speed would be almost impossible with key-hammering. Download here: 2. A stylish sim for amateur drone racers who want full control over handling is also in active beta, available to download and enjoy with no restrictions.

Like DRL Drone Racing Simulator, the goal of this great-looking sim is to reproduce the experience of FPV drone-racing as accurately as possible, with advanced physics courtesy of the Unity game engine. Hotprops offers fully adjustable parameters to replicate the behavior of your own drone as closely as possible. The settings offer a very impressive degree of granularity, and the impact of each slider and radio button is clearly explained. Hotprops’ developers are constantly adding, removing and adjusting features in response to testing and user feedback. As a result, there can be considerable wait-times while the sim is updated automatically at launch – sometimes up to half an hour.

There’s more loading mid-sim too; even if you don’t intend to pit your skills against friends or strangers in the game’s multiplayer mode, you’ll need an internet connection to download courses before you can fly them. The simulation itself is superb, with realistic flight physics and smooth, good-looking graphics. Best buy office for mac. There’s a great choice of maps to test your skills, and they’re fun and varied enough to enjoy as a racing game in their own right (albeit one that requires an RC controller).

Best Free Flight Simulators For Android

We don’t yet know whether the Hotprops release candidate will be free-to-play or carry a subscription fee, but the active beta is very promising. One to keep an eye on. Best display for mac pro. Download here. Real licensed drones and real fun, with lots of extra features still to come is in pre-alpha (an early testable release), so it’s still a little rough around the edges and doesn’t yet have a full complement of courses and features. It’s very promising though, and the developers are planning to keep it free to play, with optional donations to support the project. Real Drone Simulator offers two types of environment to practise your skills: ‘virtual reality’ (realistic but computer-generated) and real-world (based on Google Earth).