Caracole
A simcade Mirage F1 fighter game. The depth of a Falcon BMS, without the 600-page manual.
The project
Caracole (it grew out of “the Delta Project”) is a “simcade” fighter game. It aims for the deep simulation of a Falcon BMS or DCS, paired with a gentle on-ramp. A single player aircraft, the Mirage F1 named “Caracole”, modelled in depth. And a persistent dynamic campaign where the theatre of war evolves whether you fly or not. A solo hobby project, no budget and no deadlines.
What sets it apart
Persistent dynamic campaign
The theatre is procedurally generated and evolves on its own. Events emerge from the sim, not scripts. Between sorties, the war fast-forwards. This is the Falcon BMS DNA.
Realistic flight & systems
Full nonlinear aerodynamics. Stalls, flat spins, transonic effects. No hard-coded Mach ceiling: the supersonic envelope falls out of wave drag, compressor choke and a turbine-temperature limiter. A Cyrano radar with no magic target boxes, faithful missiles (motor burn, lofting, seekers), and system-based damage.
Accessible, no compromise
Auto-startup by default (full procedure available) and a gentle learning ramp. The F1 is more forgiving because the real jet is, not because it was softened. We soften the onboarding, never the simulation.
The pilot matters
G-loading, grey-out, black-out, red-out. Sustained G damages both pilot and airframe, and recovery from G-LOC leaves you fragile.
A sky that matters
A seeded, deterministic weather sim that evolves over a mission, and that you can see: stratus decks, cumulus, anvil-topped cumulonimbus, high cirrus. Flying into a cloud is real IMC. Clouds also block line of sight and attenuate IR seeker lock, for your missiles and theirs alike.
The Levant at full scale
A real-scale Levant map running from Beirut to Amman by way of Damascus and Tel Aviv, with Rayak as home plate. Terrain streams in around you with no load wall and no map edge. The cities are solid, and flying into a building ends the way you'd expect.
War that weighs
A gritty, tense tone. War is horrible, sorties have weight. Multi-language radio: French, Arabic, intercepted Hebrew, NATO brevity where it fits.
Open by default
AGPLv3 code, human-readable data files, modding-friendly from day one. Free tools and free data.
Setting
A low-tech alternate timeline, where population and technology grew past the 1970s, but far less than in ours. No smartphones, no datalink. CRTs, analogue gauges and an evolved 1960s fighter instead. It all fits on a single Levant front, somewhere around 2002. France backs one coalition and supplies it with Mirage-lineage jets, weapons and pilots. You fly for that side, against Israeli-flown Mirage IIIs. Real countries, but borders and alliances diverge from history.
Download
Windows and Linux builds, delivered through a self-updating launcher. Incremental downloads, every file SHA-256-verified, a live game log, and one-click bug-report upload.
Changelog
Full changelog →- v11.0New
- Layered stratus and stratocumulus decks, fair-weather and towering cumulus, cumulonimbus with spreading anvils, thin high cirrus. The terrain shapes them, and they grow and dissolve over a mission.
- Instrument weather. Entering a cloud fades the world into graded murk while the cockpit stays clear behind the glass. Clouds also block line of sight and attenuate IR seeker lock, yours and theirs alike.
- Rain and storms: squall lines, wide rain shields and multi-kilometre thunderheads, with world-anchored rain falling only where the sim says a raining cloud stands.
Fixes- The razor-thin black band at the horizon is gone. The sky now continues correctly below the horizon.
- Sky brightness no longer flickers during climbs and descents. The root cause was a one-bit precision bug in the sky shader.
- v10.0New
- Full 4-city Levant theatre. A real-scale map spanning Beirut, Damascus, Tel Aviv and Amman with Rayak as home plate, streaming in around you with no load wall and no map edge.
- Cities you can crash into: every town has a streamed skyline of solid buildings that register cannon, missile and airframe hits.
- Distinct terrain textures for desert, steppe and cropland. Filled oceans, lakes and stepped river courses. The real road network drawn as 3D ribbons draped over the terrain.
Fixes- Being shot down or crashing hard no longer causes a brief freeze the first time your aircraft breaks apart.
- v9.0New
- Navigation: a HUD flight director steers you leg to leg, the route draws on the HLD moving map with curved fly-by turns, and present position comes from a drifting EGI (INS + GPS) estimate rather than perfect truth.
- Trim-driven two-channel autopilot with attitude/altitude hold, wings-level, and heading or nav route. It flies on your own instruments, so damaged avionics degrade it too.
- Unified cockpit warning system (GPWS, stall, engine, fire, gear-up, overspeed, fuel) and graduated overspeed damage instead of an instant kill.
Fixes- High-altitude afterburner no longer chatters near 43,000 ft. It lights and holds.
- Fixed edge smearing and corner cropping on the HLD and CRT cockpit displays.
Under the hood
Built with free tools and free data.
Terrain: Copernicus DEM GLO-30, Sentinel-2 data (Copernicus), OpenStreetMap.