Slashdot Mirror
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."
Uh.. slashdot is not just about free software.
Xplane (the world's most accurate flight simulator you can have without a military budget) being ported to linux is *fantastic* news.
Not everything needs to be free, bub. It's only free if people are willing to write it for free.
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
#1) It's not open source.
#2) It's not "getting a free ride" or anything like that. It's about bringing good software to another operating system.
What the HELL is the big deal with people charging for decent software?
I absolutely, 100% agree that most software is crap and isn't worth the bits it's written on. But there ARE pieces of software that are WELL WORTH what the author is asking for.
Mac OS X -- I didn't mind paying $129 for it. It's well worth the investment.
X-Plane -- this is a great flight sim that's worth the $49 I paid for it.
Adobe Photoshop Elements -- Finally, a photoshop that's priced reasonably. I paid $90 for it and didn't mind one bit. It's a great piece of code and worth it.
Veritas Volume Manager -- makes your life better. Worth the $$$.
Solaris -- Worth the $80 for the media. (Although I don't think media costs NEAR $80, Solaris is still worth $80.)
OmniWeb -- worth $29. Nice browser, nice features.
Not worth it:
Microsoft anything -- we all know why.
Sun Cluster -- Sun makes some of the sh_ttiest clustering software ever.
99% of other software.
---------
I guess my point here is that JUST because someone charges for software doesn't make it bad. The quality of the code determines whether it's worth it or not!
--nbvb
From the page on Mars sims:
To me, this is the best reason I've seen yet for creating sim software that uses real-world physics and modeling. I don't know of any other sims in existence that offer this level of "playability"; am I wrong here?
These guys have gone to great lengths to make this thing "the real deal", and I applaud their decision to make it usable under Linux. I stopped messing around with Windows-on-Linux type stuff months ago (well, partially due to the fact that almost everything I use runs under Linux
I can tell already I'm gonna be spending entirely too much time modeling new plane designs (and consequently flying them into the ground, d'oh! ).
Are there any other projects out there that focus this heavily on the physics modeling side of things for sims? Please tell me some of them run on Linux
What's the name of the new flight simulator for Linux?
X-Plane.
Explain what?
Just X-Plane.
I want you to tell me what the name of the new flight simulator for Linux is.
X-Plane!
Look, i don't know how i can be any clearer here.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
There is no redundancy. Just because the Windows version may run fine under Wine means nothing. The very thought that Austin is looking into creating X-Plane for Linux is tremendous all on its own. It's a big step and it's too bad more people aren't considering doing it.
The people who really wanted to buy X-Plane already did -- months ago, when it came out initially. These people aren't likely to go out and buy it *again* -- even though it'll now run on their favorite OS -- unless they're TRULY dedicated to the game.
X-Plane came out in Feburary for Win32. How many games do you know of that you like so much that you'll buy it *again* after eight months? Not many!
If you want people to buy Linux games and buy them in reasonable numbers, you're going to need to release the Linux version at about the same time as the Windows version -- otherwise, only a few people are going to buy your game.
Suppose you've got your average gamer -- he dual boots between Linux and Windows. He goes into the computer store, and sees X-Plane for Linux -- $50. He then sees X-Plane for Windows in the bargian bin for $10. Which is he likely to buy?
The same applies to Mac ports of PC games, but to a lesser degree -- after all, outside of something like SoftPC, a Mac cannot run the same software as a Windows box -- where a x86 box that runs Linux box could also run Windows and therefore Windows games.
In any event, since Austin is doing the port for free, I guess they're not going to lose much on this one, even if nobody buys it.
Sorry.
X-Plane 6.0.4 came out on the 10th of October for Mac and Windows.
http://www.x-plane.com/
And you won't see it in the bargin bin, because the developer has gone to distributing it himself.
http://www.x-plane.com/order.html
"X-PLANE 6.00 IS NOT BEING SOLD IN STORES! IF YOU WANT X-PLANE 6.00, ORDER IT HERE!
X-Plane 6.00 is $59.99 +$10.00 Domestic or $30.00 International shipping.
This CD includes both Macintosh and Windows versions of X-Plane, as well as your choice of scenery CD.
Your purchase allows free updates through all 6.x versions."
It's never perfectly debugged but it's also never stopped adding cool details, features and stuff. These get divided among flight model features and eye candy. In the former category, Austin (yes, this is all ONE GUY coding it) added support for gyrocopters. (It's _always_ had helicopter support, which is rare). In the latter category, he's been enhancing the clouds and scenery hugely- even 5.66 (not the new version) already has very impressive 3D clouds, which don't even eat the frame rate that much.
The true geek factor in X-Plane is not even flying the planes- it's designing them. Using all the tools like Part-Maker, Plane-Maker (and these need to be included, 'scuse me for stating the obvious) you can literally design just about anything, right down to designing your own _airfoils_, using various third-party stuff to determine lift/drag/moment of the foil at various angles of attack, and then entering that into Part-Maker to bring the airfoil into X-Plane for use. Plane-Maker is about placing wings and elements anywhere, NOT about punching in 'stall, top speed' etc values: the utterly amazingly geeky thing about this sim is that it builds the flight model from just analysis of the plane parts, ten times a second, relative to things like AoA and speed and propwash and ground effect. So when you put something together in Plane-Maker, and it doesn't exist in the real world, you're actually using X-Plane as an aeronautical design tool, and instead of working out on paper whether the CG is too far aft, you save the plane, fire up X-Plane, 'get in the drivers' seat' and take the bastard up and see if it kills you ;)
That's about as cool as virtual reality gets, right there- and it's the heart of the geek appeal, to me: if you play with the sim this way you have to _be_ capable of interpreting behavior like a test pilot. The planes behave in amazingly unexpected ways. I've had a high-speed jet show a nasty tendency to pitch up sharply at a certain speed- puzzling until I realised that it was hitting Mach 1, and the shockwave was interacting with the wing geometry (!) Try _that_ in MSFS or Fly...
I've actually taken ideas from Slashdot into X-Plane: some time ago there was an article about Japanese ground-effect flying trains, so naturally what do I do? Go fire up Plane-Maker, and try to build a ground-effect vehicle that maintained a consistent ground height all by itself. Didn't quite succeed, but I did manage to make the most forgiving aircraft I've ever seen for zooming about really close to the ground... and now there's gyrocopter support, there's lighter-than-air support (and the Hindenburg), and the helos (and the SoloTrek- yes, the two-ducted-fan thing that you stand on), and whatever neat aero thing turns up next year on Slashdot, I am sure X-Plane will be able to handle modelling it. Hell, there's even an entirely fictional Japanese Anime Plane to play with. I flew it straight up into space and the stars came out, in a perfectly black sky, as I passed escape velocity. Now if we could model something _real_ that does that, we'd really have something...
Think of it as a commercial aviation design simulator for less than $50. There are in fact a _number_ of people using it to rough-draft real-world planes being built in real life... suffice to say, X-Plane getting a Linux port is _totally_ news for nerds, and if you're an aero nerd it is very much stuff that matters. It's probably the single coolest program I have, of any description. If you want a specifically opensource flight sim, Flight Gear has a lot going for it- but if your interest is strictly aviationgeek and not coder, X-Plane absolutely maims anything else out there, by a wide margin, even given that it's usually kinda quirky (5.66 was running nicely for me, though).
(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.