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>