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Open Source Flight Sims
Rorschach_6 writes: "Not one but two Open Source initiatives to create a modern combat flight sim have come to light in recent days. Both stem from the overreaching Falcon 4 flight sim. Check out eBattleField or OpenSimulation." The problem that I always had with flight simulators is that I found the ground just uncontrolably alluring. Thank god they don't let people like me fly non-virtual planes ;)
one site doesn't let me in because i don't have javascript (which i just disabled again because penny arcade's moronic ad banner script broke again) and another has absolutely nothing there.
color me impressed, yeah.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
So maybe you know what's "going on" under the hood, so to speak. Why shouldn't the game be just as fun? IANAP(rogrammer) but I can easily imagine how cool it would be to send my buddies a game I'd coded, or helped to code, and say "Deathmatch? :-)". Saying entertainment shouldn't be Open Source is a little too close to saying "I want all my diversions effort-free and prepackaged" for my liking. I watch as much TV as the next guy but I wouldn't enjoy it less if I got to help make it, or even just had some say in the plots... It just requires a little suspension of disbelief, like everything else.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Assuming, of course, that the project co-ordinators let them. Funny how people without a clue about open source keep spouting the same crap about how anyone can mess with the source. Anyone can mess with the source, as long as they can hack or lie their way onto the CVS tree and, oh yes, program in the required language. Ethics is always something that seems to suffer with the advent of large sums of money. Give me an example, with a URL, that shows how ethics suffer with the advent of open source.
This is a serious question, don't be tempted by your gilded titanium-cover edition of "Evil Geniuses."
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
It's just more trivial crap about how programmers always want to be paid and how do you make money if you release the source, blah di blah, as if people didn't code because they like doing it, you know, a hobby. I expend a large amount of energy and strain my muscles chasing a soccer ball about with a bunch of friends, but nobody says to me 'What's the point if you're not getting paid'. I make plenty of money from commercial coding too, but I also like to mess about with my own stuff because I enjoy it.
Is this is a troll? Who does this hurt?
Is it any of your business how the l33t hax0r chooses to fly his simulator? I don't think so.
I personally can't stand simulators. I'm an avid PC gamer that frequently buys software titles and whatever hardware it takes to play them, but simulators are not one of my pasttimes. To me a simulator is too much like real life, it takes a lot of hardwork and practice to get -any- kinds of results, whereas I play games to relax.
If I were to try this software, the first thing I would do is have zero-g planes hoovering around.
You speak of ethics as if it is you're the authority, I highly doubt that. In fact, I think you are right the opposite...
Sigs are awesome huh?
Name one hard-core flightsim that has recouped its development costs. Microsoft Flight Simulator in its many iterations.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Hear hear!
Of course if you do come in a little long/short you're not gonna be very happy ... and may wreck some guys yacht as he's coming out of burnham.
Seriously, it is a nice field. I can remember the night they shut it down for the first time. I was up in a rented 172rg with my father ... all of the pilots out there that night were drawing straws as the deadline came up to see who would be the last plane out. It was something else.
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
well.. I've been doing the softlanding on M$ flightsim countless times.. it's just the perspective and ways you flight your plane. I usually come in below the glide scope then the real life on the Cessna 152 or 172. and make my landing successfully. I can even land a Lear on Nimitz (in game of course..), or Golden Gate bridge.. but those in realife will be harder:p Still no time to work on my IFR though...
Check out "The Valkyrie Simulation Project"http://valkyrie.sourceforge.net/
"What's interesting about it?" you might ask? The goal is to simualte piloting valkyries (the transforming fighters from Macross aka Robotech) and other anime style mechs. It's still in early development stages, but there is some working code in the CVS...
I can't help but think of how essentially geeky X-Plane really is- I _do_ think it's the best flight sim out there, but then I do things like read 'Wide-Body: the making of the Boeing 747' for fun and then design a plane a bit larger than a Lear Jet, as plausibly as possible, with two GE high-bypass fanjets dwarfing the fuselage and hurling it through the air at up to Mach 1, and then flight-test it and fix the aerodynamic problems :)
_Most_ people want to shoot down stuff or play airline pilot, not design airplanes using blade element modelling. It's very much like games like RoboWar (not an official link, a design page)- the popular appeal of something this geeky is basically nil, but for those who are willing to be captivated by the technical challenge, the depth of the game becomes phenomenal. It's like that with X-Plane, because it's basically a full-on blade element modelling aerodynamic simulator with killer eye candy for $80, something the real aircraft designers would have killed for (as an initial rough-draft tool) twenty years ago.
To be playing with this sort of thing on a home computer is beyond anything I could have imagined as a kid drawing pictures of weird airplanes instead of doing homework :)
sedawkgrep
Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
Come to think of it, wouldn't it be interesting to have a plane with _one_ GE high-bypass fanjet between two fuselages? hmmmmm (reading Slashdot has a tendency to give me ideas for cool aircraft to design- last time it was the 'flying train' ground-effect vehicle getting me to design a landspeeder- very wide rear wing and narrower canard producing a tendency to hold a fixed altitude at around treetop height and avoid the ground. I didn't quite get it so it could hurtle over rolling terrain with no pilot input, but it is a hell of a lot easier to mow the grass with this one than with any traditional aircraft :)
Anyone hear of Flight gear?
www.flightgear.com
The screenshots look really cool, and now with Xfree864.01 having 3D accleration, it should be even more playable.
I haven't been able to get it working on my machine, but if someone know of debs available, I'd be really interested in knowing.
cheers.
-Pete
Part of the allure of watching entertainment is to *not* know what's going on in the background.
Do most people who download Apache examine it in detail so they know how it works? Do you know precisely how the Linux VM system is working? Why would playing an open source flight sim mean that you'd know what was going on in the background?
If you want to make a buck off your time, I say go
Of course. How about if I want to contribute for free?
Open source flight sims already exist (Flightgear and Sabre, for example) and work. Most people who use them use them in the same way as they would a commercial flight sim, not worrying about precisely what the code is doing. However, you're given the extra choice of being able to look at the code if you want to. What's the problem here?
I should've said "...or are they going to compare to the Microsoft Flight Simulator series the same way that Linux compares to Windows?"
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The only thing left to turn FG into a combat simulator would be to add the weapons as MultiPlay does already work.
Or you could add an AI if you don't want to play over the internet...
In contrast, for those that are using this for Personal Entertainment , it doesn't too much matter what planet you fly on, how much power the jet motors have, or the value of Avrogado's (sp?) Constant.
The notion that "cheating" has anything to do with this is fairly silly; compare with the simple fact that you are pretending to fly a plane with the big-time cheating features that:
- You don't pay for fuel;
- You don't pay capital costs on that F117;
- If you crash, you don't die.
If it's just a game, then part of the fun can come in fiddling with the shape of the world. You've already "cheated" by the fact that it's a game...If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
If these projects are, in fact, based off of the source code of Falcon 4.0 doesn't that make them kind of, you know, illegal? Especially seeing as how the source code was stolen and leaked onto the net back in April?
And wouldn't having such high profile projects like these open them up to a world of hurt from Hasbro and Microprose?
I'll suggest the thought that gaming "engines" represent something that could indeed come together via some sort of "Open Source" scheme, whilst other parts of a game, such as the setting of "physics parameters," creation of "artsy stuff" like pictures, and the construction of what relationships are used in the game represent something "less open."
For instance, someone might create a really cool Quake level, with customized graphical images, as well as parameters and maze layout being set up to be somehow "particularly fun to play." If someone messes with it, it becomes somehow less satisfactory, much as James Joyce's "The Dubliners" would likely suffer if you or I were to "tweak" it as we wish.
With Quake, the "engine" somewhat corresponds to the way books have pages, and standard sorts of formatting, and familiar fonts. That can reasonably be quite open. In contrast, a well-put-together Quake level, or other game scenario, is somewhat like a novel. It loses some of its "artistic integrity" if you mess with it.
Some "game scenarios" might be pretty robust, and even designed for you to fiddle with. Others may be very fragile, where any change will work ill.
The crucial thing about free software in this context is that in order for it to work for games, which are of arguably "frivolous" value, someone has to be willing to sponsor/commission their creation beforehand. "Open source" has been particularly successful with tools that were of demonstrable utility to their makers. If working on cfengine provides you utility, then it is clearly worthwhile, even if you subsequently give away the results.
With games, the utility is less demonstrable, and it may be necessary to have a "rich patron" willing to pay for production beforehand, with no expectation of future returns.
A few people wanting to fool around with flight simulation can find "fooling around with flight simulation" of sufficient utility to justify producing a flight sim; that's not quite the same thing as producing a line of "cool video games."
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
What sort of controls do you use? Just as a real aircraft doesn't use two keys on a keyboard to control the throttle, you shouldn't when playing a sim : A good analog throttle control is absolutely, positively mandatory. Additionally some form of analog independant rudder control is required to master the art of simulations. If you have those as well as the standard control service controls (a Sidewinder Precision Pro for instance) then you can master landing with ease time after time.
Prior to getting this stick I found landings extremely difficult and it was more a lucky crash when I did survive. Now I can land in Falcon 4 or FS 2000 under just about any condition with ease.
On two fronts!
1. I.. just wanna fly. I am interested in becoming a pilot. A good simulator gives you an idea of the Real World aero-d.
2. Code, code, code. I need to improve my raw coding skills! C, C++, Java, Python, Perl.. to name a few that I study. (Assembler too, maybe in time.)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Why is it so hard? I like flying Microsoft Flight Simulator, mostly to practice landings. Admittedly I'm running it on a Mac IIci (my Philips CDD 2000 on the NT system won't read Macrovision-protected CD-ROMs, so the Windows version won't work), so the graphics are limited, but the aircraft control hasn't changed in years. The main problem is that it's hard to look out the side window, so the left turns in the pattern are rough, but once lined up on the runway, it's not hard. Once you're lined up with flaps down and aimed at the numbers, it's straightforward. You can even land on the aircraft carrier, although that's hard, because you don't trap; you have to land very slowly and brake hard.
And Open Source doesn't make it better.
what abou flightgear?its good, open source sweetness
because I said so
and I don't like U
http://Lenny.com
What about Flightgear ??? At least, it's already usable! I tried it, and with OpenGL, it's pretty impressive.
Just curious to know how many other tech geek type people are into this sort of game - Quake seems to be pretty big on /. but to be honest I expected the sim genre to be a lot more popular.
Back in the days before Falcon 3.0 was released, it was originally supposed to be supported with a host of other simulations which you could link together to create the "electronic battlefield", but by the time the games were developed (Falcon 3.0, and Mig 29), technology had moved on.
Anwyay.. just a bit of rambling from a Falcon 4 pilot ;)
smash
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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?
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
...the physics engine. Unless they make it clear to the programmers that this is off limits, all hell will break loose. We will have zero-g airplanes hovering around because of some L337 H4X0R fiddling around with the source for cheating purposes. Ethics is always something that seems to suffer with the advent of open source.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I should add that I really, really, really wished that somebody would have taken over the Flight: Combat project when LGT folded. That looked incredibly cool, and it was very close to being finished.
Somebody may pick it up down the road, I haven't been keeping up with the rumors on that though.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
As some posters have mentioned, there are many problems in open-source entertainment. First, people don't neccessarily want to know what's going on in the background. I don't see this as a problem, as they don't have to see it. A second point was that cheating would be possible. This, of course, doesn't matter on a personal computer (that's why commercial games have cheat codes!), but in a network game that would create a problem. The best I can think of would be checking whether some move is possible and not sending stuff the other doesn't need to know. Besides that, I guess it's just up to ethics.
But the largest problem of open-source action games as I see it is boredom. People play a game for a while and then buy (or download) a new one. The only thing that might change that would be extensibility - see for example Quake. It was made to be extensible, and it is still played (HOW many years old is it?).
So as goes for many other open-source projects, make it THE simulator that is configurable for almost any liking. Of course, not everything should be added to the same engine/codebase (first-person shooter + flight simulator doesn't make much sense), but everything related. Give the option for everything from an easy way to shoot enemy planes to an ultimately-realistic flight to a space flight (this extensibility could also reduce the amount of lamers that hack the code for benefit in a multi-player game).
Because people do it for fun and in their free time, each open-source project should live as long as possible. The only way to make a game live long is to make it extensible. So get to it.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
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).
If *I* were building a freeware combat flight sim,
I would start with the (amazing) 'FlightGear' non-combat flightsim (www.flightgear.org) and add in the weaponry. It has all the *hard* parts of a simulator down cold.
www.sjbaker.org
"Thank god they don't let people like me fly non-virtual planes ;)"
What they need to do is create a simulator that actually affects your urroundings...if you fly too low then the ground should react accordingly, especially if you crash.
Make it more realistic.
That should be the same for any game, the surroundings should crumble if struck by rockets and what not.
Hell, it might finally start using some of the processing power out of the 1 Ghz CPUs and the 256MB of RAM we keep shoving into gaming systems.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
I'm a 250 hour private pilot, and I have over 600 real landings of real airplanes in my log book. But I've never managed to make a good, on-the-runway soft landing in either Microsoft Flight Simulator or any of the other flight sims I've tried. It's just not the same thing.
BTW: Next summer I'm planning a trip to Meigs Field (the default starting place on MS Flight Simulator) just to prove it can be done. It's also going to be saying goodbye to a very nice airfield before that scumbag Richard Daley closes it for good.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
And let's not forget the "pseudo" sims, like Crimson Skies. I bought that game yesterday and it absolutely rocks.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Even if you look at it, it's too much, anyone who sees that code cannot work on this project! If they do, its open season for EA's lawyers.
For a good inexpensive taste of what flying the real thing is like, see if you can find a hang glider group in your area that does tandem towing. It's not quite the same thing as flying a plane, but you'll get enough of the physics and feedback to develop a feel for exactly how inaccurate most flight simulators are. Better watch out though, it's curiously addictive (making note to self to resume work to Hang1 next summer.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Please, please, please link a spell-checker! (The errors are left as an exercise for the student.)
Don't try to KNOW everything, just know how to FIND it.
I'm a flight-simmer, although my work keeps me from getting as into it as I'd like. But I grew out of the FPS style of game about the time Quake came along. Except for the odd game like Need For Speed, flight sims is all I play. I personally believe they offer a more varied environment and game play than games like Quake. Not to mention more outragious hardware environments. I run a K6-2 550, 128MB of RAM and a V3-3000 and still haven't bothered trying to play Janes F/A-18. "Scotty, I need more power!" "But Captain, I dinna think the engines kin take it!"
I'm sorry, I think what you meant to say is that there is the potential for ethics to suffer due to the availability of the source. I don't believe that it always suffers simply because the source is available. Were that to be true, linux, Apache etc... would not be widely used today.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
"The problem that I always had with flight simulators is that I found the ground just incontrolably aluring. Thank god they don't let people like me fly non-virtual planes ;)"
-exactly-. with MS Flight Sim, I used to gain as much altitude as possible and then dive straight down...the object of course being to have as much airspeed as possible when hitting the ground.
it was truly a beautiful thing.
Living in America, entertainment is a prized thing which pay for greatly. While I don't agree with some extravagant ticket prices, I can easily see why some people charge to make a small profit on games (Nintendo exempted, as they usually overcharge).
Besides, it's a flight sim, not some ASCII game with 2K of code. A lot of work goes into the physics and dynamic weather conditions in these things. Some sims charge up to $50 -- very high for computer games. I've seen a few around $100.
Point is, there's a hell of a lot of work involved. This is not a "hobby" that will yield an OS like Linux for others to use -- it's just a game that you're investing your time in. If you want to make a buck off your time, I say go for it.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
For the past year I have been reading every thread like this on /. and thinking that the sim (as in flight/car/physical as opposed to whats that little guy doing) is the most sensible genre for open source development. Let me explain why...
The sim genre of game depends on three main charectoristics: Model, Locations and AV. Unix has been used for decades to provide an environment for performing simulations (cfd, fea, etc.) and I cannot see any reason why a Linux system would have any problem with the Model. Open source development would also surely provide the best position for reviewing and analysing these models to refine and improve upon them (let the academic world lose on it, I can easily imagine it being used in University courses for CS and Engineering), the only downside would be the potential for requirements to upgrade engines for playing particular games. I would also presume (I am an optimist) that if this was taken on to a serious degree the model would be useful for all genre of games, with the ability to add and remove levels of realism at compile time (who needs to calculate the bending stress of the player from a rocket in Quake unless you want really, really realistic gore but it is kind-of important to know it in the Suspension of your F1 car coming into the straight at Indy).
Locations for sims are generally real world locations, and surely these are exactly the sorts of models which should be developed once under an Open Source licensce for re-use. I would help design levels for places I can get to (and places I can get detailed enough data on) just to make my F1 or Flight Sim more realistic. I am surprised that as yet I have not seen an Open Source Project to map the world!!! The benfits of such a project are huge... and the simple fact that people wanting to use real world places on a PC would ALWAYS start here should mean that it would be under constant revision and ultimatley reach very high levels of quality (for most of the planet anyway I'd say it would be 5-10 years).
Within a sim I always feel the AV elements are the least important as long as things remain clear. I don't care if the car ahead of me uses 16 faces instead of about 1024 curves to describe its shape as long as I don't get thrown off the road for rolling over usable kurbs (though its aero model will obviously be less accurate if the 16 faces are used there). I love F1 games and if it races like an F1 car (down to the suspension, rollers, tyre pressure and dampers I selected) then it can be pretty ugly. Who believes a great OS game engine and game would remain ugly for long? I would suspect it someone would simply get it using OpenGL and /dev/dsp and let the system be fast enough (and with the 1GHz+GeForce II you can expect to see as a minimum spec real soon we'll have horsepower to burn). If the engine is a 3d model surely it should be able to pump out the 3d data required directly for an OpenGL world.
I don't think the FPS genre is suited to the OS development model, the game is highly dependant on weapons design, atmospheric effects (artistic work) and AI and these are things that come best from small teams of designers under a director (IMHO, think of a film being made by everyone shooting their bits and sticking them together, it could only work if it was a documentary of scenes from around the world or similar) and not from everyone chipping in to do their bit. We could make an OS FPS but it could never be definitive. A sim for vehicles however could easily become definitive as I believe that it would be relatively early in its life cycle when we would see companies from Boeing to Ferrari contributing (not their designs or specs but improvements to the model so they can use it for real work) and from that point on we could take the model as a dependable piece of OS software like Linux, emacs and apache (to name a small subset), the physical mapping is an ongoing work and will progress faster and faster as its use increases (more games that are being played are produced which derive their maps from it).
One post I read mentioned that one of these projects has the hope of being a complete war simulator....but why stop there? If it can simulate a tank and a helicopter and an aircraft carrier, can it not simulate a Grand Prix, a Red Arrow display or anything else! A grand scheme to hatch, lets just make sure we stop thinking game with this one and think simulation and flexibility.....cause then OS will work and win this battle (what other hope do we have of flying the Shuttle using NASA's own sim of it).
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Cheers //Johan
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
I don't think things like Linux and Apache count in this situation, you never hear someone say "That Linux user railed my root! He must be using an aimbot!"
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
A handicapping system could be used to control mods that have an unfair effect. It could work like this-
Handicapping:
Each player can set his own handicap which would be sent to the server and other players. Higher numbers would mean more of your bullets/bombs, etc. would have no effect. In addition, players would rate each other, effectively increasing the "cheater's" handicap. If a cheater's average rating is too high, the cheater is placed in a higher level category where both he and the damage he induces is see only by others in the same playing level. If he finds himself alone, he can handicap himself to play at a lower level.
Banning:
Each player has a "ban list" that would be sent to the server. A player and anyone on his list would be invisible to each other, including the damage they do. Banned players would find "their kill" would be sometimes given to unseen players.