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How about flight simulators ?

Search And Rescue "changes the pace of recent sterotypical game themes and aims to create a plot based on positive goals such as saving victims in varying situations of distress. "

Flight Gear is also cool and has binaries for both linux and win32.

There is also Fly II.

And of course, there is also Microsoft's flight simulator product.

Why give props to MS for their flightsim, when there is a great open flightsim available? Flightgear generates its scenery from terrain maps generated by the U. S. Geological Survey.

On the other hand, look at this: http://www.flightgear.org/Projects/RayChair/raycha ir.html

Now that's force-feedback.

Oh, and it was 3 networked boxen (one per display), running Linux. The controls are as shown on the bottom of the page -- a flight yoke and rudder pedals (both USB).

Twilight 3D claims to have an SDK which will save you 7570 man-hours of coding time, which is a multi-plaform multimedia framework and 3D engine.

Crystal Space is a free 3D engine which is supported on multiple platforms, or

Flight Gear is around for those who'd like to code a Flight Sim of some sort.

All of the above are noted for their portable API and I've been following their progress for some time now. I hope this helps.

Flightgear is also running on one of the old flight simulators here at work. Someone else has Flightgear running on a motion chair that was at Linux World Expo (link here - it's the third image down).

Flightgear is also running on one of the old flight simulators here at work. Someone else has Flightgear running on a motion chair that was at Linux World Expo (link here - it's the third image down).

Flightgear is also running on one of the old flight simulators here at work. Someone else has Flightgear running on a motion chair that was at Linux World Expo (link here - it's the third image down).

Cheers //Johan

What about Flightgear ??? At least, it's already usable! I tried it, and with OpenGL, it's pretty impressive.

A combat flight sim for Linux would be cool, although, you might be able to use an existing sim from the windows world if you use wine. X-Plane works great under Linux using wine. IMHO, it's one of the best flight sims out there, but it does lack the ability to shoot/kill other entities besides yourself. I wonder how tough it would be to get flightgear working?

Has anyone seen FlightGear?!

Dead? Probably not ;-).

I have the pleasure of telling you about one such community. Find out more here. There are people from the UIUC air disaster research department donating flight models, there's work on X15 and hot-air balloon models being done, pilots from all over the place contributing advice (and code, in some cases), and some excellent core developers. Flightgear implements some truly amazing features (like an elliptoid world model; accurate geographical modelling of the whole world; complete simulation of all astral bodies according to date, time, geographic location; etc.) that has really impressed flight instructors all over the place. It's still in heavy development, especially the new flight model and the weather/scenery code.

FlightGear is a OS flight simulator that's understanding as well as creating GPS coordinates. So you can use it as a real 3D 'moving map'.
BTW: Real is as reals as it gets as FlightGear has the correct elevations of the earth as it uses DEMs.

Falcon 4.0

Flight Simulator

Flight Unlimited

The Janes series

etc.

Or more generally: sophisticated 3D games, which go beyond the FPS à la Doom/Quake/Unreal.

This is the main reason why I dual boot into Win these days. For actual work, I've found pretty much everything I need on the Linux side (however, once I'm already in Win, it's a lot faster to just fire up word rather than reboot into linux, especially since my personal files are available trough both samba and nfs)

...And I know about flightgear, thank you.

Am I alone here?

Given a choice, people will use what they think is best.
It's not impossible to support more than one platform.
There is such a thing as a cross compiler, y'know.
Actually, FlightGear is a good example. Some of the developers use MSVC on windows, some use various Unices and everybody runs the same code. There Mac binaries floating around too IIRC.

There really was a lot going on at E3. Free software is a pretty small part of it in some ways, but an important one not covered much elsewhere. Sort of like that bumpersticker that says "it'd be nice if one day the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy weapons and the local elementary school gets all the books it needs" (heavily paraphrased of course) ... Free Oses make what I hope will eventually become the platform of choice for games. The best example of what I'd like to see is the elusive but rad-looking FlightGear ... I want that, but for submarines:)

timothy

Well there's FlightGear . It's not everything, but it's a better sim than many commercial air-combat sims.

"The important thing to think about when considering the performance of 3D cards is that the present generation of consumer-level boards only speed up the
pixel-pushing side of things.

When you are drawing graphics in 3D, there are generally a hierarchy of things to do:

1.Stuff you do per-frame (like reading the mouse, doing flight dynamics)
2.Stuff you do per-object (like coarse culling, level-of-detail)
3.Stuff you do per-polygon or per-vertex (like rotate/translate/clip/illuminate)
4.Stuff you do per-pixel (shading, texturing, Z-buffering, alpha-blend)

On a $1M full-scale flight simulator visual system, you do step (1) in the main CPU, and the hardware takes care of (2), (3) and (4)

On a $100k SGI workstation, you do (1) and (2) and the hardware takes care of (3) and (4)

On a $200 PC 3D card, you (or your OpenGL library software - which runs on the main CPU) do (1), (2) and (3) and the hardware takes care of (4).

On a machine without 3D hardware, the main CPU has to do everything."

"The important thing to think about when considering the performance of 3D cards is that the present generation of consumer-level boards only speed up the
pixel-pushing side of things.

When you are drawing graphics in 3D, there are generally a hierarchy of things to do:

1.Stuff you do per-frame (like reading the mouse, doing flight dynamics)
2.Stuff you do per-object (like coarse culling, level-of-detail)
3.Stuff you do per-polygon or per-vertex (like rotate/translate/clip/illuminate)
4.Stuff you do per-pixel (shading, texturing, Z-buffering, alpha-blend)

On a $1M full-scale flight simulator visual system, you do step (1) in the main CPU, and the hardware takes care of (2), (3) and (4)

On a $100k SGI workstation, you do (1) and (2) and the hardware takes care of (3) and (4)

On a $200 PC 3D card, you (or your OpenGL library software - which runs on the main CPU) do (1), (2) and (3) and the hardware takes care of (4).

On a machine without 3D hardware, the main CPU has to do everything."

Ah, but there is one. www.flightgear.org is an open source flight sim project that has been in development for some time now. I don't know what the latest status is, but if it's ever finished it should be quite something (as opposed to quite nothing, which of course nobody wants).

Check out Flightgear.org if you're looking for a flightsim. It's still under development, but it looks pretty promising!

It's there--competitive with at least the low-end SGI hardware. Basically, there is a hierarchy of computations in 3-D graphics. (Copied from the flightgear hardware requirements page.)

1. Stuff you do per-frame (like reading the mouse, doing flight dynamics)
2. Stuff you do per-object (like coarse culling, level-of-detail)
3. Stuff you do per-polygon or per-vertex (like rotate/translate/clip/illuminate)
4. Stuff you do per-pixel (shading, texturing, Z-buffering, alpha-blend)

At each level of the hierarhcy the amount of computation goes up an order of magnitude or so. The GeForce256 moves up the hierarchy to the per-polygon level, providing, (eventually, when the software properly supports it) an order-of-magnitude improvement in 3-D rendering, just like an SGI system does. There is apparently going to be Linux OpenGL support, too. Price, I believe, is in the $250 range.

Gimp
X-Accountant (Quicken Clone)
Quicken for linux?
Flight Gear

One educational program:
Nightfall

look before you speak, this took my 3 minutes to find. :)

We should translate the data to the FlightGear open source flight-sim format. Then hack that so it takes into account the lower gravity and lower air pressure. It would be interesting to see how planes designed for Mars would differ from those designed for Earth.

Licensed under the GPL, looking for any contributions, pretty nice already-- Flight Gear.

http://www.flightgear.org/ is an open-source flight simulator that has a port to Linux.

They describe on their website:

The Flight Gear Flight Simulator project is a free, open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight sim development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GPL. The Flight Gear project is working to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for the development and pursuit of interesting flight simulator ideas. We are developing a good basic sim that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing. There are many exciting possibilties for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas.

Check out flightgear. Site seems pretty slow today, but there are mirrors listed.