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https://home.flightgear.org/ - no need to spend a dime on software.
Before spending any cash, try the F/LOSS stuff first. FlightGear integrates with the world-wide ATC everyone uses already.

FlightGear is cross platform, but why would anyone choose to use an inferior platform?

The SR-71 Blackbird has one of the highest take off and landing speeds going. Around 200 KEAS, or 230mph.

Passenger jets are 120-150 mph.

Unless you're flying high performance military aircraft 'under 200mph' is a good bet.

Flight Gear, FAA, check.

Check out their Professional and Institutional Page: http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php/Professional_and_educational_FlightGear_users

this is cool: NASA/Ames Human Centered System Lab - 737NG full scale cockpit simulator developed by LFS Technologies. FlightGear provides visuals for four large screen wrap around displays, improved turbo-fan math models, detailed fuel system models, and extendable network interface to cockpit displays and electronics.

You.. you do realize who NASA is? ;)

and FAA: ATC Flight Simulator Company builds FAA approved flight simulators, that use FlightGear for the visuals. - although from looking at their web page it's an older version of Flight Gear but impressive multi-simulator setups.

As for X-Plane, it's a great simulator. The X-Plane guy is very cool. The patent troll can go to...

You know what reading this makes me sure of? That Flight Gear's visuals must be nice. But why don't they use it for the simulation of flight?

"X-plane is a cross-platform flight simulator app, notably the only serious one that supports Mac OSX and Linux."

And here I've been using http://flightgear.org/ all this time. I thought I was using a serious, free, GPL open-source flight simulator that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.. I'm glad this slashdot post came up to tell me I was wrong.

Dude charges for X-plane.. When you decide to charge for software you accept all the financial responsibility for defending it against litigation. Welcome to it.

FlightGear is a multi-platform (Windows, OS/X, Linux) written in C++ and QT. Seems to work well enough for them.

That's what i was thinking, writing portable c++ code isn't complicated, the obvious thing that is difficult is if you use platform-specific toolkits rather than something cross-platform like Qt.

FlightGear is a multi-platform (Windows, OS/X, Linux) flight simulator written in C++ and QT. Seems to work well enough for them.

FlightGear is a multi-platform (Windows, OS/X, Linux) written in C++ and QT. Seems to work well enough for them.

That's just the way big corporations are. It's their nature. Asking them to change is like asking a tiger to not eat a tasty sheep standing next to it.

That said, if you just want a flight simulator and don't want to give your money to jackasses, have you looked into FlightGear?

When Flightgear 2.0.0 was released, it was released with a new system that more-slickly rendered runway lights -- it used a so-called "point sprite approach." However, Flightgear's implementation of point sprites did not accommodate ATI's non-standard spec, so airports were 100%-dark for all those using ATI hardware. Who is at fault -- whether the Flightgear developers or ATI -- doesn't really matter to me. Why? It's fairly rare for other software vendors to ignore a quirk in a very popular piece of hardware -- ie. the runway lights have worked just fine in every MSFS version I have played.

And this went on for months with no word of a fix or a patch from Flightgear. In fact, I'm not sure that it's fixed even today.

I wonder how this new version will compare to FlightGear ?

http://www.flightgear.org/

I used FGFS to practice touch-n-goes during rainy days early in my flight training and also found the frame-of-reference to be a problem - I couldn't look out the window to see when I was abeam the numbers. So I modified my Extreme Pro joystick to use the 'twist' feature as turning the head instead of changing the rudder (since I have pedals) and find it much easier and almost natural to use now. The file I use is located on DropBox as mentioned on this thread: http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=9635

Yeah, I think it's the same guy as one pestering flightgear.org guys. See http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php/FlightProSim

...is doing the same kind of scammy crap to the FlightGear project. They've taken a very old build and are selling it for an absurd amount of money. Some people have been taken for over $100 with the scam. Clickbank seems to help them out too.

See http://www.flightgear.org/flightprosim.html for more info. If you spot these jerks on Facebook, please report their page as a scam.

tnx.

Various companies are selling Flightgear under different names.
The problem is those companies do not contribute anything to the real developers, most of them do not even mention what their product is based upon and do not seem to offer anything beside the repackaged and rebranded flight simulator. Worse, some even copy media used to promote Flightgear for their own purposes. It's legal but it's not very nice of them.

Or you can just get flightgear http://www.flightgear.org/ , which lets you fly against others, or fly planes, UFOs, even a Deux Cheveaux.

Crud. The very first thing I thought of when I saw this was "cool, a high-res DEM to create terrain for FlightGear." SRTM is getting long in the tooth.

And it is gone. Flight Simulator is discontinued, so the whole market will be taken over by open source.

My first question is-- what is wrong with this guy's face?
http://www.flightgear.org/Gallery-v2.0/target32.html

My second question is--
What's he got in his hand?????

Well Merry Christmas to me! I found it! The very same file... and perhaps in the very same place. Check out the file dates in here...

ftp://ftp.de.flightgear.org/ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/

That is clearly a FlightGear mouse.

Sokoban will keep your brain busy for a while.

And Freeciv if you like a more complex challenge.

Tetris is of course also a classic good game to train your reflexes with.

And if you like flight simulators you have FlightGear.

And of course - if you want to go really classic check out Basic Computer Games.

It can't be done with Windows (at least not to my knowledge), but multiseat on Linux these days is a cinch. Google has tons of resources on the topic -- basically it involves a bit of xorg.conf hacking, and then Bob's your uncle.

I myself have done it before on an amd64 dual-core 2.2GHz system with two video cards, a GeForce 7600GT on PCI-e, and a GeForce 6200 on plain PCI. Worked beautifully. I could multiplayer FlightGear by running one instance on each seat. Each user can log on and off independently with their own keyboard and mouse.

This is a (blurry and fuzzy) picture of my setup (1280x1024 JPG). You can see glxgears running on each screen -- handled by the same computer. Cool thing about using two video cards is that each user gets his own GPU -- running two FPSes simultaneously (I tested Nexuiz) had absolutely zero slowdown.

Flight Simulator is now grounded.

Old heros don't die. They just fade away.

And for the rest of us, there's Flightgear, which is like the GPL goodness of Flight simming. Flightgear killed MSFS!

If you're looking for an alternative to Flight Simulator there is always FlightGear.

There's also X-Plane.

It's good that there are alternatives, but unfortunately on a scale that places MS Flight Sim at 10, X-Plane is a 7 and FlightGear is a 5.

This whole thing is a serious blow to flight simulator fanatics.

If you're looking for an alternative to Flight Simulator there is always FlightGear.

Yep, Microsoft is suiciding.

The backlash against any attempt to turn Flight Sim into rentware will just push people over to Flightgear.

With this sort of arrogance, the Vista/Win 7 debacle and sluggish Office 2007 adoption, Microsoft is digging a very deep trench for itself. It'll be interesting if they can find a way out.

I recommend Flight Gear. http://www.flightgear.org/ If that's too involved, you could try something simpler like Ysflight. http://homepage3.nifty.com/ysflight/ysflight/e.html

>I don't understand why anyone bothers with Microsoft Windows any more. Linux is so wonderful now and does everything I need it to

Precisely. KDE4 now even has GPU-accelerated desktop graphics.
(Caveat: if you have a Nvidia card, beware of http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=115916 issue use nvidia's drivers version 180.06 and later http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=118088 )

If your graphics card has working Linux drivers, KDE4 blows any other desktop away for performance ... and bling.

> I have one copy of XP on a computer now that is only used to support Flight Simulator. ...
>with the one exception of Flight Simulator. That's it.

Try this:

http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/Gallery-v1.0/

Enjoy.

>I don't understand why anyone bothers with Microsoft Windows any more. Linux is so wonderful now and does everything I need it to

Precisely. KDE4 now even has GPU-accelerated desktop graphics.
(Caveat: if you have a Nvidia card, beware of http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=115916 issue use nvidia's drivers version 180.06 and later http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=118088 )

If your graphics card has working Linux drivers, KDE4 blows any other desktop away for performance ... and bling.

> I have one copy of XP on a computer now that is only used to support Flight Simulator. ...
>with the one exception of Flight Simulator. That's it.

Try this:

http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/Gallery-v1.0/

Enjoy.

Linux Games..

http://savage2.s2games.com/main.php
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.freeciv.org/
http://www.sauerbraten.org/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://wz2100.net/
http://www.cubeengine.com/
http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wormux.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.ufoai.net/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://tremulous.net/
http://www.eternal-lands.com/
http://www.enemyterritory.com/

Perhaps you could stop with the "No games for Linux" BS already as you obviously have your head up your ass.

I bought (as in paid full price for) most of the games that Loki (remember them) ever ported to Linux. I still play Alpha Centauri sometimes - it still runs on modern Linux (though sadly their port of Civ3 no longer runs - doesn't get on with modern libraries in some way I haven't bothered to diagnose). I bought Neverwinter Nights when it first came out, because it was available in a Linux port (and it still runs very nicely, and yes, I still sometimes play it - mostly user-generated content, too). And I'm one of the only 597 people world-wide who have so far pre-ordered Apricot.

And that's kind of the point.

It costs money to develop commercial games; quite a lot of money. The people who develop them want to sell them. If there were enough Linux users prepared to spend real money on games, we'd have more commercial games. Over the last few weeks I've been playing (and really enjoying) The Witcher. It runs on an updated version of Bioware's Aurora engine, so presumably it wouldn't be hard to port it to Linux. But I don't expect we'll see a Linux port, because Atari, who sell it, clearly don't think enough of us would pay for it. And sadly I think they're probably right.

I've haven't found many open source game projects which are compelling to me. There are plenty of good ideas out there, and half-finished projects. Globulation is quite polished and seems to me quite innovative, and plays well; but it's also quite shallow - you'll enjoy it for a week but you won't still be playing it in a year. Oolite is genuinely good and you might still be playing it in a year - but that's largely because it is a faithful reconstruction of Elite, which is one of the great classics of computer games. Flightgear may be good but it isn't my thing.

To create a new game takes a lot of vision and a lot of work. Until you've done a lot of work it's hard to communicate the vision, so it's hard to recruit people. And even then, too many of the talented people prefer to tinker with some project of their own which they'll never get finished, than co-operate to deliver someone else's vision. I'd like to be wrong on this. But what I see on Freshmeat is lots of 'alpha' and 'beta' projects, and very little that's genuinely playable.

FlightGear - Linux and Windows, great modelling and strong developer community. Speech and beer free too. http://www.flightgear.org/

Nope, you'll have to switch to Flight Gear http://www.flightgear.org/

Where are the commercial game ports for Linux? No one wants to make them, obviously, save for the FPS crowd (and there's only an Unreal Tournament for Linux because Epic passes the buck to Icculus to get the job done, not because they have the in-house talent to do it themselves). There are a few commercial games for Linux, yes, but only a few, and there's very little variety between them. In the open source world we have a few good games (the majority of them being FPS's, what a surprise), Battle for Wesnoth if you like strategy games (turn based ones, that is). Then we have the unfortunate, ugly ripoffs like "Secret Maryo Chronicles," and other games that look like they were developed for a C64. Plenty of selection, not a lot of quality.

The following publishers develop comemrcial linux games:

http://www.pompomgames.com/
http://www.garagegames.com/
http://www.introversion.co.uk/
http://frictionalgames.com/
http://sillysoft.net/
http://www.basiliskgames.com/
http://www.guildsoftware.com/
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/
http://www.rune-soft.com/
http://grubbygames.com/
http://www.caravelgames.com/
http://www.planewalkergames.com/
http://www.graalonline.com/

There are also the high profile ones such as neverwinter nights, the doom and quake series, unreal, etc.

There are many high quality independant titles such as neverball, you mentioned wesnoth, crimson fields, flight gear, torcs, the spring project, total annihilation 3d, tecnoballZ, powermanga, tile racer, pingus, clonk, freeciv, ultimate stunts, planeshift, scorched3d, VDrift, silvertree (not complete, but being created by the wesnoth guys so likely will not be vapor), ufo: alien invasion, scourge, etc.

http://spring.clan-sy.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://torcs.sourceforge.net/
http://www.flightgear.org/
https://icculus.org/neverball/
http://ta3d.darkstars.co.uk/
http://linux.tlk.fr/games/
http://tileracer.model-view.com/
http://pingus.seul.org/
http://www.clonk.de/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/
http://www.planeshift.it/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://vdrift.net/
http://www.silvertreerpg.org/
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
http://scourge.sourceforge.net/

Many of these are very impressive independently made free games. Perhaps they lack the multi million dollar marketing budget and won't make your geofrce 8800 gtxz 45 x super elite ultra melt, but theya re *fun* games, and they are numerous. Also keep in mind this publisher and free game list is only what I could find in 1 hour of searching.

Then there are freed older commercial games such as warzone 2100, homeworld, descent 1 and 2, doom, quake, etc.

Lets not stop t

Or if it had been open-sourced.

I'll eventually have to use Vista for gaming purposes,

Yes, there may not be a great need for 3D acceleration to play games on GNU/Linux, but 3D acceleration comes in handy elsewhere. It will be nice to have it next time I am looking at a surface plot of some scientific data. Or perhaps I want to visualize a model in real-time with OpenGL.

Here is a more concrete example, let's say I am an aerospace engineer and I am using FlightGear to model an airplane I am designing (my aerospace engineer friends actually do this). If I want to see and control this model in real-time that 3d acceleration is important here. Right now if you want to do this in GNU/Linux without an Intel video card you have to install proprietary software, which many people find unacceptable.

There are not that many graphic-intensive games for Linux.

Not many, true, but the FlightGear flight simulator is the main reason I upgraded from a cheap generic graphics card to an ATI 9250 based card (the highest level card with FLOSS drivers based on specs ATI released back when they were doing that). (And yeah, compared to current state of the art graphics cards, 9250s are still cheap.)

I wouldn't mind something a little faster, though.

Most of the joy of flying General Aviation (small) planes is the view - nothing like it anywhere else, including that commercial jet. (which rockets up to 45,000 feet in 10 minutes where you can't see jack) Flight simulators have typically given depictions of the landscape - patterns that are rough analogies of what you'd actually find out the window.

But this is the real McCoy! Resolution is still weak, and the plane handling characteristics are lousy, but when I'm flying 5,500 VFR over the East Bay, it actually IS the East Bay. I noticed that once you've started the Easter Egg, you can re-launch from any view, which let me spin a few circles above local Oroville, CA.

For a better mix of realistic scenery and handling, have you tried Flight Gear? I haven't gotten it to work on my computer so I'm not speaking from experience, but I was taken in to try it by the fact that they have 10 degree by 10 degree texture packs you can get if you want to see the area you're in, instead of a white bread approximation of it. Or get the whole world on three DVD's!

It sucks pretty badly compared to FlightGear.

Does this distro have FlightGear bundled? :D

FlightGear appears to be in the same league as MS Flight Simulator.

Of course it does have one advantage - Free. :)

http://www.flightgear.org/

like Microsoft Flight Simulator which will probably never have Linux versions or equivalents.

Since Burning Man is a city that gets built and destroyed every year, Burning Man Earth is hoping to be able to use overlays to show the art from different years and allow time travel. Burning Man Earth started as Virtual Playa, which consists of Microsoft Flight Simulator models of objects found at Burning Man. I converted them to Flight Gear and then uploaded them to Google Earth. Andrew Johnstone and others then redid many of the models in sketchup and uploaded them to Burning Man Earth

You're being a smartass, but I wouldn't mind plugging this into FlightGear

In related news, one particularly ingenious team has given potential converters the best (worst?) of both worlds by combining both open source and flying.

I can't identify with the author either, because I am both a pilot and a developer in a free software flight simulation project. He has definitely chosen a strange metaphor to make his point with me :-)

Here's a few "Good" open source games. There are quite a few others out there. Sure, there may not be UberLeetHardcoreGamerOrgyOfTheMonth, but there are high quality ones out there if you look, plus Opensource ports of many classic games (not listed)

Planet Penguin Racing- http://projects.planetpenguin.de/
FlightGear- http://www.flightgear.org/
Armagetron - http://armagetron.sourceforge.net/
Vega Strike (see also the WC Privateer remake)- http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/
Frozen Bubble-
      http://www.frozen-bubble.org/
      Live java version- http://glenn.sanson.free.fr/fb/play.html

Quake 3 - http://liberatedgames.org/game.php?game_id=90
Scorched3D - http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
ChromiumBSU - http://www.reptilelabour.com/software/chromium/

This is just what I could think of in a few minutes- There is a really great 3d Nascar style game on the Suse 9.2 DVD, but I can't remember it's name while I'm at work.

I'm not sure whether you're voluntarily closing your eyes or if you really can't see that not all kind of games do run on consoles.In my personal case, i love simulators.

Tell me, which console offers me *one* flight simulator? And please, i *mean* simulator, i don't mean 'a game featuring a plane'. Where are the equivalents to MS Flight Simulator, X-Plane or FlightGear?

I do also appreciate submarine simulations. Where are Jane's 688 games or the Silent Hunter titles? Nowehere near.

I also happen to play wargames. I *mean* wargame here, not RTS. What the heck on a console comes close to the Combat Mission series?

Even when looking at game styles also present on consoles, there *are* huge differences. I enjoyed a lot the first game of Thief series and the first Deus Ex. I hated the last Thief, and the second Deus Ex. Guess what? Both titles were designed to *also* sell on consoles. In both cases, the games have been dumbed down. The gaming style seemingly did not fit to the mainstream console public.
I could go on to find more examples, but i suppose you get the point. Consoles do *not* provide everything. And please don't think i have anything against consoles: i have very good times playing FIFA/NBA/etc sports game, as well as GTA:SA on my PS2, and i'll probably buy some next-generation console. But there is no way i can ditch the PC as a gaming platform, and i'm far from being alone in that case. It *does* provide lots of games which simply have no equivalent on consoles. Do you really think that PC gamers are stupid enough not to buy a console instead of a PC if it was *really* doing the same thing?

It's probably not that modern consoles can't accomodate such games, as they now are gaming-oriented full computers. It is more of a decision by the game editors/designers. You don't find every genre on a console, and even in the same genre, the gaming style sometimes vary as the public is not the same...

What all modern open source games lack though is decent content and polish. There have been some great classical text games (e.g. rogue, mud, nethack etc.) but this hasn't translated well to the new world of graphics and 3D.

Surely there must be designers and artists willing to produce content to go with a game engine?