I play Flightgear on a ThinkPad T420 a couple times a week and get 30-60fps. It's just a matter of adjusting rendering settings. The feeling of flight doesn't change much. Keyboard flight controls work fine too...
Not sure if that's a modern PC in your mind, but it's not exactly a speed demon. :-)
Wow, 11 years? That's getting pretty far back. Still, I wonder...my FG settings are low but not terribly low. I would guess it could be done. For example, I'm not using the 2D cockpit.
Believing FlightGear team’s account, looks like they think copyright is a thing, while evil FGMEMBERS team thinks copyright don’t apply to free stuff? Interesting
I see no misinterpretation of the GPL here. The document explains why the FG team thinks FGMEMBERS is harmful and a bad idea; at no point that I can see did they imply what FGMEMBERS are doing was illegal.
Downloading it now, pretty underwhelming being redirected to SourceForge and now downloading 1.6 GB at 350 KB/s. They really should have official torrents.
I had just recently download old xsabre source code and made it compile on a modern system. Interesting that it is possible to compile something pre-c++ standardization with just a few changes.
If anybody else is interested in another abandoned open source flight sim, Palomino (https://sourceforge.net/projects/palomino-sim/) seemed very promising while it was under development.
Abandoned source code feels like carcasses of sunken ships waiting for someone to rescue whatever is still valuable. Makes me a bit sad and hopeful in a certain way.
Another game is Falcon BMS which was released in the late 90s and has a community that is constantly maintaining it and upgrading it, it looks fantastic.
Imo it's the best FS out there for a few reasons. I think what really sets it apart is it's dynamic campaign and large scale multiplayer wars that run over the course of weeks or even months.
It's incredibly fun participating in an air battle with 60 other online pilots (with human AWACS) working together or scrambling defensive flights as an enemy strike package comes in.
The high barrier of entry, both in terms of difficulty (you probably need at least 10h of tutored instruction to be remotely good at the game) and hardware investment (you need a joystick and trackir) is a feature not a bug. It keeps the toxic players out and indeed the community has barely any problems with toxic players.
That was a great video, and incredible that games still going. What other games have been going for that long? I know the community has kept Doom going to some extent, new maps and textures and stuff. Can’t thank of any more still being developed since the 90s.
Unity, that sucks. Unusable on lowest computers. At least, ACM and most libre games with these graphics will actually run at least in 2002 era computers.
Makes me wonder, ho does one start to build a serious flight simulator? Is there any publicly available resources about implementation techniques and pitfalls specific to flight simulators, like there are for so many other topics, so you don't have to learn everything the hard way, make all the obvious mistakes, etc? Or is this a topic where you can really work from first principles, using just basic physics and incrementally adding simulation of more advanced effects?
I have no experience here, but starting from physics sounds like a very difficult approach since the equations that govern aerodynamics aren't that simple. So I would look for some results that simplify these equations. Like how Maxwell's equations aren't used for designing most electronic circuits, but instead people use simplifications like circuit theory. I suspect a similar simplifying approach would exist in aerospace design (but again I have no experience here). Perhaps the best idea is to take some introductory courses here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/
Look up blade element theory, that's how Laminar started with X-Plane, and they incrementally refined their model over the past 20 years. I bet the physics will take the least and the graphics will take most of development time, though.
The graphics are why an increasing number of projects are just using Unreal these days. Not sure how well it would work (level size) but it looks fantastic in racing games which also have fancy physics.
When I was a kid in the 90s, I worked through a very fun book called “Build your own Flight Sim in C++”. It was for DOS, so it also covered the 3D graphics algorithms and techniques you needed. Fun times.
Physics, software and aircraft engineering expertise are only going to help you so much. It's enough to build a general purpose sim, but to simulate real aircraft you also need real data, which is often a trade or a military secret, as DCS developers learned the hard way when one of them got arrested for alleged smuggling of F-16 manuals. For a serious sim, you need a lot of communication with the aircraft developer, and a lot of money for licensing fees.
I am not sure if it would count like a "serious" flight simulator, but the (pretty old) Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming [0] book has a pretty decent introduction I believe and I'm guessing most of the C++ code could be useful regardless of platform.
Floating origin is a nice algorithm for dealing with floating point imprecision. Essentially just translating the camera to origin regularly.
Regarding terrain there are many techniques of varying difficulties to implement. Streaming terrain data and stitching LOD seams (both normal and vertex blending) are basically the gist of it, but the implementation details regarding uniform vs non-uniform grids, tesselation vs chunking etc. needs to be considered.
It distributed fully freeware for Linux, macOS & Windows as OpenGL1 (default graphics), OpenGL2 (enhanced graphics) and Direct3D (Win-only) versions.[1]
While its default ("stock") addons are not so eye candy, community created addons are really nice.[2]
List of known community addons available as a spreadsheet[3] (regular updated) hosted on Google Docs. Actually there are 14500 aircrafts, 1049 scenery (maps), 10404 ground objects (ships, cars, characters, buildings, etc.).
There are many videos on YouTube, just search using "YSFlight Movie" and "YSFlight Promo" queries for clips which are show-reels. Here is good "The Beginner's Guide to YSFlight" for latest versions.[4]
JFTR, I started to use YSFlight just after watching "Strangers - A YSFlight Promo Film".[5]
Actually I'm fan of YSFlight & addons contributor[6], so you may AMA about it! ;)
P.S: There are also servers for online gaming (and you also could create & add own just using YSFlight installed!), mostly active on each Friday.[7]
But look witch Models you buy, you have the more simple models from the Flaming Cliffs 3 module, or the really realistic one's like the tiger/tomcat stuff
There was an svgalib flightsim shipped with some old Linux distributions, I ported it to SDL and 64-bit, it is here, it is called Sabre, Dan Hammer made it: https://github.com/ysangkok/sabre
An odd question - does anyone remember a flight sim from the early to mid 90s that had a dog-fight multiplayer mode over a null-modem serial cable? Back in DOS days. F16 or some such. I still have the cable, but for the life of me I can't remember what the game was.
Loads of games in the 90s used null modem cable for multiplayer I played I played a bunch of stuff that way on both PC and Amiga. Populous 2 was a big fave but definitely played more than one flight sim that way
Falcon 3 probably? I remember playing 1vs1 back then. Not sure if it was null modem or Ethernet/IPX, but I would be very surprised if it didn't support null modem for two players.
Would love a polygon aesthetic flight sim that sort of expanded on the feeling A-10 Cuba was going for but more planes and more weirdness.
Really cool bits in that game where you can break the tips of your wings off your grind your gears in and still keep flying, also had some really surreal multiplayer arenas like space and futuristic cities.
There is a Bohemia Interactive humblebundle on sale right now, offering a few really interesting 2010s simulators for $1, Take On: Helicopters among them.
