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X-Plane Flight Simulator For Linux
sho-gun writes: "It seems that Austin Meyer, creator of X-Plane, is going to be porting his simulator to Linux. X-Plane is an incredible flight simulator which models flight dynamics by using blade-element theory. Many big companies use X-Plane for development. Currently only the support programs (the programs that build the planes, scenery, airfoils) are available but the full application should be available soon, according to the website. Along side with the open-sourced
Flightgear,
this certainly is good news for flight simulator fans
that use Linux."
Dont think it will be GPLed...Austin keeps a pretty tight rein on the development.
The game is open to addons and creation of new
scenery and aircraft which can be found all over the place. www.flightsim.com is a good place to start. Dont know about the Linux version, but the Mac/Win versions are very open, even having a real time 'dump' option of paramaters in the game to feed into whatever addon programs people make.
The game also includes some pretty neat features, such as setting up a network of computers, having one be the cockpit and another
being an outside view, or one computer computing the scenery and the other taking care of the rest.
Austin has awesome support, for at least the Mac/Win versions to date, even answering support emails himself.
He is also very open to users ideas and bug tracking. Alot of what is in the game was suggested by others. Another great thing is he also is constantly developing the game, patches appear very frequently.
I'm the guy doing the port. I'm not sure whether Austin had plans for this but I guess he gave up after the repeated requests he got to give me the source to port on it. Some details:
1. It won't be open source.
2. It won't be free (I don't know what Austin's plans are but I guess the price will be the same as the Win/Mac version).
3. I'm not getting any money for doing the port -- as I told Austin, I'm doing it for the sake of having a good flight sim for Linux.
4. The file format, network data and outputs will be compatible with the Win/Mac version.
5. The port uses libSDL (before you scream bloody murder about license violation, have a look and note that it's dynamically linked).
6. Since it's SDL-based, a FreeBSD port should be easy enough to do once the general *nix porting issues are solved. I don't know what's the status of OpenGL on FreeBSD; X-Plane *requires* OpenGL and you probably don't want to run it in software emulation. Until a native FreeBSD version will exist, the Linux binaries should run just fine using the Linux compatibility mode (but see the OpenGL notes above).
If you want to see the full app happening, here's how you can help:
1. Download the beta, test it, and send me feedback.
2. Email austin@x-plane.com and tell him that you think a Linux version of X-Plane is great. This is needed because I only got the subprograms source so far, and he doesn't seem 100% convinced yet to send me the main source too.
Petru
"p.s. I am not a citizen of the USA so am just wondering"
That line right there probably answers your question as to why the Air Force doesn't open up their simulators. That's the very essence of National Security right there. To have Military Airports in a game, even if they aren't the exact replicas or layout, is a huge threat.Enemies have to get their knowledge from somewhere, and something like this (even though it would be very cool) could easily be used for harm.
The site claims the Windows version runs fine under Wine.
If you want to try it, there is a demo version available (MAC/Windows only).
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
(Sorry in advance for the long post.)
I thought in the good US of A that all projects that the government does the people of the US of A had access to the source [u]nless [i]t was deemed that it was endangering security of the nation [o]r [i]t was contracted out to a company and then they had all the IP
Both of those things is usually true.
For two years I worked as a consultant for a company that built training simulators for the USAF, the Air Force Reserve, and several foreign military services (countries like Denmark, South Korea, Jordan, Egypt, and so on). This company's two big products were an F-16 tactical simulator and an F-18 mission simulator.
Some fairly significant parts of the simulator runtime code are classified. As an example, some configurations of the F-16 can be equipped with the AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided missile. The code that handles the capabilities of the AMRAAM, and its interactions with the mission control systems, and its dynamics in the air is all classified.
(The details of this code is classified; the existence of it isn't. At least, I hope not. Otherwise, I'm in a shit-load of trouble right now.)
So obviously classified code can't be open-sourced.
The code that wasn't classified (a lot-- if you replaced classified modules with stubs, it was possible to run the whole F-16 load in unclassified mode; we did that a lot for visiting suits and stuff) was proprietary. In some cases, it was highly proprietary.
My example here is the F-16's mission control computer. The source code for this computer's programs was provided to us by Lockheed; we translated it line-by-line, mostly by hand, from assembly language into Ada-83 and compiled it to run on the sim's SGI Onyx host computer. This module was basically the core of the simulator, and it was of course a closely guarded commercial secret, even though it wasn't technically classified by the DOD.
We did something similar with the F-18's mission computer programs, but instead of translating them, we ran them natively in a Motorola processor emulator on the SGI host. This was kind of a cluster f*ck; it took 17 MIPS CPUs to emulate the two Motorola processors and the one 1553 mux bus controller in the MCC in real time. But somebody decided it was cheaper to throw hardware at it than to translate Boeing's code.
The other distinctive thing about US military flight sims-- at least the two I worked closely on, and also the F-22 tactical sim with which I worked a little-- is that they're not generic flight-dynamics simulators. Rather than taking the programmed characteristics of a wing or an airframe, like it sounds like X-Plane does, these sims were built with the full knowledge of the aircraft's flight characteristics. So it would be completely impossible to take the F-16 Block 30 code, change a data file, and have an F-16 Block 42 sim, much less a space shuttle sim or a 767 sim or whatever. These apps just weren't built like that.
A lot more goes into a tactical or mission training sim than just flight dynamics, anyway. I'd guess that maybe one out of five modules in the F-16 sim dealt with flying the plane; less than that in the F-18 sim. The rest was cockpit interface drivers (we had a real cockpit, with hundreds of individual hardware devices, wired into the sim; the serial mux control code was impressive) and inter-sim communication (DIS [defense information systems] and HLA [high-level architecture] protocols) and image generation and tactical DCS (distributed coordinate system) databases and the operator/instructor interface and it goes on and on and on. These things would only be relevant in context of a military tactical or mission sim, flown by military pilots in training, in a military installation with military instructors and other military sims connected over the military's encrypted wide-area training network.
I hope that answered your question, at least in part.
X-Plane costs less $60 US... it's right there on the web-site.
However, if your are interested in accurate physics (at least in space), you ought to try Orbiter. I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned it yet.
The physics there are the most accurate I've seen for a PC space game. The graphics are spectacular, and accurate (at least for those space bodies where such data exists). For some bodies there are 8192*8192 bitmaps (heh, you'll _need_ a good graphics card if you choose that option!). Best of all, it's free.
The only downside is it is not open source, nor does it run in anything but Windows.
I really recommend it to anyone who likes all the nice physics stuff, and the eyecandy, but isn't scared off by a _steep_ learning curve. At least go take a look at the purty screenshots.