Flight Unlimited II is a 1997 flight simulator video game developed by Looking Glass Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. The player controls one of five planes in the airspace of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is shared with up to 600 artificially intelligent aircraft directed by real-time air traffic control. The game eschews the aerobatics focus of its predecessor, Flight Unlimited, in favor of general civilian aviation. The team developed new physics code and an engine, seeking to create an immersive world for the player and to compete with the Microsoft Flight Simulator series. Commercially, Flight Unlimited II performed well enough to recoup its development costs. Critics lauded the game's graphics and simulated airspace, and several praised its physics. However, some considered the game to be inferior to Microsoft Flight Simulator '98. Following the completion of Flight Unlimited II, its team split up to develop Flight Unlimited III (1999) and Flight Combat (later Jane's Attack Squadron) simultaneously. Both projects were troubled, and they contributed to the closure of Looking Glass in May 2000.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Unlimited_II
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
902:
Led by Ibrahim II of Ifriqiya, the Aghlabids captured the Byzantine stronghold of Taormina, concluding the Muslim conquest of Sicily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Sicily
1774:
British scientist Joseph Priestley liberated oxygen gas, corroborating the discovery of this element by German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen
1834:
The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force, officially abolishing slavery in most of the British Empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
1984:
Commercial peat-cutters discovered the preserved bog body of a man, called Lindow Man, at Lindow Moss, Cheshire, North West England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindow_Man
2007:
Bridge 9340, carrying Interstate 35W across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, suffered a catastrophic failure and collapsed (pictured), killing 13 people and injuring 145. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
olympicene: (organic chemistry) A pentacyclic aromatic hydrocarbon whose structure is in the form of the Olympic rings. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/olympicene
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
 Nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way. --Ken Kesey https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey