3D radio-controlled airshow

3D FlightSaver

Radio-controlled planes fly an airshow over green hills, trailing smoke, dropping bombs and firing missiles. This is the free demo of version 3.0, from February 2003.

3DFlightSaver30Demo.zip 1.5 MB d3drm.zip 174 KB

The original download was a self-extracting 3DFlightSaver30Demo.exe (1.5 MB). The ZIP holds exactly the same two files.

How to run it on Windows 10 and 11

3D FlightSaver: a red and white plane trailing yellow smoke over green hills

Recovered from the Internet Archive

This file was not in our collection. VRMan's old website offered it for download, and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine saved a copy on 18 April 2003. The program inside is dated 21 February 2003. We checked it with Windows Defender (nothing found) before adding it here, and the checksum below lets you verify it against the Wayback copy.

SHA-256 of 3DFlightSaver30Demo.exe: f31373dc97e38143a66fa0799d2d783d57a93772e57e1b4de24052e062282618

The readme says: "please feel free to upload this screensaver anywhere, or give it away." It asks that you not sell it.

Watch it run

Silent clip recorded from the original screensaver running on Windows 11 at 640×480 with Direct3D software rendering. Colors and speed will differ from a 1990s 3D card.

Screenshots

3D FlightSaver: a red and white radio-controlled plane trailing yellow smoke over green hills — Smoke trail over the hills

3D FlightSaver: a plane flying above a field of red explosions from dropped bombs — Bombs away

3D FlightSaver: the view from behind the plane's tail with the cockpit canopy in front — Cockpit and tail view

3D FlightSaver: a plane banking over a hillside with trees and a dirt road — Over the dirt road

Captured from the original running with Direct3D software rendering at 640×480. The billboards in the demo ask you to buy the full version.

Keys

These work while the screensaver runs, if "Ignore keys" is off in Settings. From VRMan's readme.

1 – 9	Camera views: tracking, slowtrack, cockpit, target, stationary, still, chase, wingtip, front
0	Select a plane
F	Fire a missile
B	Drop bombs
L	Force the selected plane to land
M · N	Music on/off · next song (MIDI)
K	Keyboard flight controls: arrow keys steer, A speeds up (or raises a helicopter), Z slows down, 5 on the keypad centers the controls, Space doubles the control rate, S toggles the airshow smoke. Press Esc to leave.
F5 – F9	F5 all planes land · F6 all fly to one spot · F7 grounded planes take off · F8 everyone attacks your plane · F9 formation flying

In a customer's words

A customer wrote in 2004 that his two young sons come running into the room when the screensaver starts, to "shoot the rockets" and "drop the bombs".

Lanny Ritz, quoted on vrman3d.com in 2004.

Settings that worked for us

On Windows 11 we chose the display device, the RGB Emulation driver and the 640×480 32-bit mode. VRMan's readme recommends 640×480 and the Direct3D HAL driver on 1990s 3D cards, and says the recommended PC was a 2 GHz machine with a GeForce 4.