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 ;)

Comments

whoopee

[scrytch]

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.

Are these two sims real contenders?

[AFCArchvile]

...or are they going to compare to the Microsoft Flight Simulator series the same way that Windows compares to Linux?

This is a serious question, don't be tempted by your gilded titanium-cover edition of "Evil Geniuses."

You forgot to mention...

[Binary Tree]

FlightGear.

Re:Flight sims: Open source or die!!!

[Fervent]

Name one hard-core flightsim that has recouped its development costs. Microsoft Flight Simulator in its many iterations.

Here's annother interesting one

[Apache]

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...

Re:I could go for that...

[Chris Johnson]

That's interesting to know. I'm a huge X-Plane fan and got it when it was $200 :) it stands to reason that it would work on x68 Linux under wine because Austin Meyer essentially re-implements every speck of interface- good thing to know.

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 :)

*g*

[Chris Johnson]

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 :)

I'm not sure "taint" is the right word...

[Christopher B. Brown]

If the point of the exercise is to create a Totally Accurate Simulator for use by pilots in training, then it's probably something of an issue to make sure that, in Mr. Scott's words,

"You canna change the laws of physics!"

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...

Engine = "OS", Art, perhaps Not

[Christopher B. Brown]

With a lot of games, there are several components that are not all of equal "creativity."

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."

Re:Don't be so hard on yourself

[Animats]

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.

FlightGear?

[pip11]

what abou flightgear?its good, open source sweetness

Re:FlightGear?

[tjwhaynes]

Maybe these projects should take a long look at FlightGear before trying to do something new from scratch. It strikes me that FlightGear already provides a fair amount of infrastructure that could usefully be used in putting together a decent Combat Flight sim.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

And FlightGear ???

[jeffmen44]

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

Re:heh cool

[CausticPuppy]

I've done some combat sims (Falcon 3/4, EF2000), but it seems like I'm more interested in just flying the plane than worrying about tactical air combat. Seems like you gotta learn all the systems of a real jet before you can even stay alive in simulated combat!

So now I mainly like to terrorize downtown Seattle and outlying suburbs in Flight Unlimited 3... May Looking Glass Technology rest in peace.
:-(
I've always had a fascination with GA sims anyway, I should probably take up flying as a real hobby. I've had every version of Flight Simulator since even before it was assimilated by Microsoft (FS 2.0 on the Apple IIc, baby!)
There's some satisfaction in kamikaze-bombing Bill Gates' house right on the lakeshore in the P51. Both his house and the aircraft are rendered quite nicely in Flight Unlimited III.

Open Source could taint something...

[AFCArchvile]

...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.

Re:Open Source could taint something...

[Pxtl]

Well, look at Quake... its got everything opensource, and the only real cheats that are tough to stop are the aimbots, and an aimbot in a flightsim wouldn't work too well (Quake aimbots work because quake has no limit on how fast you rotate)... you just have to be careful how you code the server side end - if another player is flying an F15, he can't hover, the server knows that, its that simple. Personally, I want the physics to be editable.... imagine the mods possible - Independance day - real jetfighters against alien UFOs (which I doubt handle like realistic planes). Or alien environments - Lets fly two SR-71's through Neptune. Hackable physics are fun, the problem is that most flight games either a) focus on realism and make it overcomplicated, or b) make it arcade style and throw out the physics completely, like in Terminal Velocity (hello, gravity?). An opensource flightsim would let some really inventive mods come out (as happens with the Quake games). If you dissallow physics tinkering, all you get is more of the same, hundreds of fighters and planes, but no real variety.

Flightgear

[SirWhoopass]

Flightgear (www.flightgear.org) runs nicely under XF4.0. I work with the main author (actually, I drink and play video games while he works, but I digress...). We had it running on some new P3 850 MHz machines with GeForce2 cards. One was running Debian and the other was running Win95.

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).

Nobody mentioned FlightGear.

[sbaker]

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.

What they need to do....

[NoWhere Man]

"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.

Don't be so hard on yourself

[ptomblin]

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.

Re:Flight sims: Open source or die!!!

[Fervent]

"Fly!" made a good deal of money, along with all the Jane simulations (which made it even more strange when less were announced this year. They've been making a pretty decent profit).

And let's not forget the "pseudo" sims, like Crimson Skies. I bought that game yesterday and it absolutely rocks.

Flying a Flight Sim is to Flying a Real Plane

[Greyfox]

As driving a racing simulator is to driving a real car. No matter how good the simulation is, you're not getting the millions of feedback clues that let you do it correctly in the real world. Everything from the roller-coaster feel of hitting an updraft or downdraft to the very vibration of the controls caused by the engine are missing in the simulation. And I've yet to see a sim (Flight simulator or racing simulator) that get the vanishing point correct. A pilot rapidly develops a feel for how far off the ground he is. You absolutely can't do that in a flight simulator.

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.)

Here's one

[Camaro]

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!"

Kamikaze flight sim!

[Slynkie]

"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.

The ideas don't jive...

[Fervent]

I really don't think most entertainment should be open source. What's the benefit? Part of the allure of watching entertainment is to *not* know what's going on in the background. Games == movies I think, in this case.

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.

Most Logical Linux Gaming Genre?

[bfree]

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).