X-Plane - An Obsession For Realism

caseih writes "Popular Science is running an article on Austin Meyer, the creator of the popular X-Plane flight simulator. Although not an open source project, X-Plane has a devoted community of flight enthusiasts and developers who are striving to make it the most realistic flight simulator ever. In fact, flight characteristics are calculated in real time from aircraft design data, not static tables like MS Flight Simulator. PopSci has a neat picture showing X-Plane calculating the lift-drag vectors in real-time across an aircraft. Meyer's quest for realism in his simulations dominates the development and use of X-Plane."

Comments

First post with something meaningful to say!

[Funksaw]

Anyone here have experience with the X-plane?
I would imagine that static tables are much less realistic, unless this new method of simulation is so slow the computers start lagging when processing it.

-- Funksaw

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day, it ran fine on my 233Mhz G3 (as long as I cranked the graphics down), and supposedly it's actually been getting more efficient in recent releases.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[WasterDave]

Bigger computer.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, flight characteristics are calculated in real time from aircraft design data, not static tables like MS Flight Simulator.

If the only inputs for the computation of flight characteristics are the aircraft design data, what is wrong with precomputing? Aren't all the data known in advance?

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[dougmc]

I would imagine that static tables are much less realistic

Perhaps, if you're doing something `wierd'. But 99% of the time, you're not likely to notice anything `wrong' with MSFS's flight model. And the other 1%, either the difference will be very small, or it's some 3D (stalled wing, but massive amounts of power that make it work anyways) maneuver.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine who flies ultralights put the details of his recently bought machine into xplane. While it flew sort of well in xplane, it had a few problems in some situations that just seemed to defy logic, and needed a bizarre set of movements (relative to the logic he'd been taught) to get him out of a dangerous situation.

Sure enough, after time flying the real ultralight, he got into very similar situations. The xplane practice paid off and he's still alive today, where if he hadn't he'd at least be badly injured with a broken plane.

I don't know how much longer that luck will keep up. I wouldn't call ultralights a long term hobby - but it gives an idea of the benefits of xplane. You get to customise the machines you fly in any way you choose, and it'll do a damned good job of emulating reality.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't lag nearly as much as you think. A 1 GHZ PIII with 256MB of RAM and a GeForce2 MX 400 runs it just fine. It's not perfect, no, but it runs well on a somewhat pokey machine.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[IvyMike]

I guess I can't really comment on the accuracy, having not actually flown a plane. Also, on the scale of "Flight sim hardcore rankings", I'm really just a dilettante. (OK, that rarely stops people on the forums, but it's just not my style.) But I can comment on the processing power needed to run the dynamic model, and so can you.

The demo is free, runs on Windows and OSX, which is Austin's preferred development platform. Since it is a demo, it only lets you control the plane for a few minutes, but it will let you see how quickly he can do the aerodynamic calculations and experience the realism for yourself.

My opinion: Performance is ok but not great on my 500Mhz G3 ibook (although it is quite playable). It is pretty spiffy on my Athlon 2100. The video cards probably have a lot to do with that, too, not just the aerodynamic model.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[zeno_2]

I used to support MS Flight Simulator over the telephone, so ive had to play with it quite a bit. Although I never really had to figure out how the game.. excuse me simulator, calculates flight data (ive had people yell at me on the phone for calling MS Flight Simulator a game.. you know, those people that dont play games and its a "simulator").

Anyway, to the point.

With MS Flight Simulator, when you build a new plane for it, you need to build a file that has all the information about how the plane reacts if it were to fly in the air. (it may be a bit different then this I haven't worked there for a couple years). I made a new plane in GMax, but used a different planes files and pretty much changed the model of the aircraft. When you go fly, it uses this file to figure out how winds, altitude, etc are going to react with the plane.

With X-Plane, when I build a model and fly it within the 'simulator', its going to use the actual model itself to calculate how the plane is going to fly. This seems pretty useful to someone who wants to design planes. They called it a 'virtual wind-tunnel' in the article (I only read the first couple pages).

So, the aircraft design data in MS Flight Simulator isn't based off the model of the plane itself, whereas X-Plane uses the model of the plane to figure out how it flies. I would say that for accuracy sakes, your better off testing and simulating stuff with X-Plane vs. Flight Simulator.

As a side note, Flight Simulator is the biggest pain in the ass to support. I would take a few calls a week from some ex-pilot who doesn't think a certain plane is flying correctly (it should be able to go this speed, or the panel doesn't have the gauges like they are in real-life). I really wish those kinds of people could come to my work and find out what kinds of things I can and cannot do.. If everyones plane flies the same way, I cannot really fix that.. Of course ive also talked to a guy who put a bunch of monitors into an old 737 cockpit for MSFS, and another guy who had 9 monitors hooked up, mainly using them for Flight Simulator. That product has some hardcore fans attached to it... (warning im a bit drunk and i tend to ramble, ill stop now..)

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what I thought.. it's just taking something from the post and saying "Gee, that sounds good, unless it's not, in which case it's bad".. fucking karma whores

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[rcs1000]

That's simply not true: I'm currently studying for my PPL in England, and one of the things you are taught is how to deal with spiral dives and stalls.

Now, no matter what I do in MS Flight Simulator, in whatever plane, have I ever been able to enduce a spiral dive or spin. (Trust me, it's real easy in a plane. That's why they teach you how to recover.)

And the low speed stall, particularly in the Cessna model, is a lot more benign than the real thing.

That said, MSFS is great for learning instrument work. And if you want to practise a hundred circuits, or the effects of cross-wind on landings then its good.

But I shall try X-Plane, certainly, /.'ers seem to love it.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have tried both X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, and although Microsoft Flight Sim may seem fancier (perhaps better scenary, nicer sounds), X-Plane handles a lot better, whilst Flight Sim just doesnt feel real.

I expected Flight Model for Flight sim would have been more realistic in the 2004 version but this is not the case.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[mnemonic_]

It's important to note though that building a 3d model for X-Plane is not the same as building one for MSFS. In X-Plane, the 3d model's shape is defined by the specifications set using the Plane Maker tool. For example, you type in a value for wingspan, and the wingspan of the model changes. In this way is the 3d shape each aircraft defined.

This is much more difficult (in my opinion) than modeling an aircraft in a 3d graphics package such as Maya or 3ds max, though it is necessary for the way X-Plane calculates flight models.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[Anonymous Coward]

what is wrong with precomputing? Aren't all the data known in advance?

No. A flight model is considered realistic if it performs within 5% of the real aircraft's performance in 95% of all situations. You will find that very few simulators on the market meet this standard and there is a good reason. There are situations which cannot be safely test-flown to gather data. What does this mean? You have no data for those situations. You will also find that programs that use huge data structures often don't even meet the 95/5 requirement within the *normal* performance envelope.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[dsasser]

>> I would imagine that static tables are much less realistic

> Perhaps, if you're doing something `wierd'. But 99% of the time, you're not likely to notice anything `wrong' with MSFS's flight model.

I've noticed.

The "weird" thing I was doing was taking off from Spencer, MA (http://www.airnav.com/airport/60m). I've done this at least a few hundred times in a 1974 Cessna 172. If MSFS were real I'd be wrapped around a tree. This is very strange because almost no real-world airplane performs as well as the sims.

All planes are slightly different (and few live up to "book" values), but this was quite noticable and makes me wonder what else is different. I've had similar reports from friends who fly other models that they also offer.

I believe the box of FS I have has the motto "As Real as It Gets". Hmmm.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[mf70]

Funkshaw: After two years modeling in X-plane, I'd say... Not necessarily less realistic, just different. If you were calculating the volume of a box, would you masure the height first, or the width? For tables vs. blade element, the choice comes to the situation. If you have a plane where the target numbers are well known, you can hit them more precisely with tables. That's why REAL simulators (like the airlines') do it this way. If you're modeling an airplane that cannot now be tested, blade element modeling is better than wishful numbers imported from a different airplane. (Even blade element models ultimately depend on tables, but they are tables of airfoil lift that are well distributed and available.)

Obsession is simple.

[cyt0plas]

As any animal becomes used to something, it inevitably ecomes less affected by it. By providing people with simulations closer imitating reality, you raise expectation for future simulations.

I'm just waiting for the cybernetic implants which allow simulations indistinguishable from reality. They already have brain cells growing on silicon (not made out of), it will just probably take a while for science to catch up with years and years of evolution.

Re:Obsession is simple.

[takev]

Or actually closer to what you mean, there are
already brain-implants, wich uses electrodes to communicate with the brain directly, this is used today for people which have become blind or deaf.

They started experimenting with this in the 1940s, where they could show braille to a blind person, by directly stimulating the visual cortex using electrodes.

Now they are much better, with actual low resolution grey scale from a camera.

For hearing they use a spectrum anayliser connected to a string of electrodes, which is inserted in the ear and replaces the small hairs. you know, the ones that fibrate at different frequencies

Re:Obsession is simple.

[marko123]

I'm just waiting for the cybernetic implants which allow simulations indistinguishable from reality

Not sure how to break this to you buddy, but you're already in one. For extra realism, the cybernetic implants' simulations seamlessly texture map flesh colours over their shiny metal.

You want proof? I'll give you proof. Half the shit you read in the newspapers could not possibly be happening. Democratic nations giving up their own freedoms to fight tyranny. It's a joke! You know programmers' quirky senses of humour? There's your proof. If only I can find the "Off" switch....

(quick note to you grammar nazis ha-ha fuck you! find the wrong use of an apostrophe in this!)

Re:Obsession is simple.

[Baumi]

I'm just waiting for the cybernetic implants which allow simulations indistinguishable from reality.

Who says you aren't living in one already? :-)

Baumi

Re:Obsession is simple.

[FurryFeet]

You are missing an apostrophe in the "I'm" that should go before "Not sure how to break this...".
Grammar is about more than apostrophes :)
</Grammar nazi >

Re:Obsession is simple.

[Soluxx]

Can't we just have one slashdot post go by without having someone's comment about the US government being modded up to 5?

Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[RalphBNumbers]

Alot of other flight sims are games, X-Plane is not. This is a serious piece of software used by alot of professionals to model and simulate prospective aerospace designs. I can't count the times it has been emphasized to me that this is not a game. ...that said, it's damn fun sometimes.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[dougmc]

Alot of other flight sims are games, X-Plane is not.

Game vs. Simulator. The line is very vague.

You may not have noticed this, but X-Plane is sold as a game. It's in the game section. When you ask for a list of games, there it is. People may use it as a serious training aid, but for every person who does that, there's probably several who use it as a `game'.

You say potatoe, I say potato ...

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[BWJones]

Your point is especially clear when you consider some of the features that have gone into this simulator. Take for instance, the ability to feed out a signal via networking to another computer to render other views.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[Anonymous Coward]

Something I truly love doing is shooting down in flames the egos of people who attempt to 'show off' their smarts by degrading the spelling of others.

Haven't looked at a dictionary have you little man? What does this word look like, chopped liver?

Just because you haven't learned a word in primary school doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Sorry to ruin your smarmy mouthed day, SUCKER.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably had a good point, but I stopped reading when you used the pseudo-word, "Alot". "Alot" is NOT a word...
Haven't looked at a dictionary have you little man?

What does this word look like, chopped liver?
Just because you haven't learned a word in primary school doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Sorry to ruin your smarmy mouthed day, SUCKER.

That looks like "allot". i.e. to "distribute or apportion". The poster above was complaining about the contraction of "a lot" (i.e. many) to "alot".

It looks like it is you who is incorrect... SUCKER ;)

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? You referenced the word "allot", which by your referenced definition means:

1. To parcel out; distribute or apportion: allotting land to homesteaders; allot blame.

I'm saying the word "alot" (as in, the commonly but mistakenly used contraction of "a lot") does not exist, you stupid fuck! Once again, thank you for proving my point that Americans are illiterate fuckwads.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[myc_lykaon]

This is a serious piece of software used by alot of professionals to model and simulate prospective aerospace designs

If this is remotely true I am very worried about the next flight I take. I did my PhD in use of CFD (for liquid flows rather than gas flows but the basics apply) and for simple flow over a sphere to simulate one timestep of 0.5 milliseconds required 15 minutes on a 500MHz dual processor machine using software used in the aeronautics industry.

This is of the order of a million times slower than real time.

Some approximations must be being made for the lift calculations, approximations that make me suspicious of its utility in aerospace design.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[mnemonic_]

Why the hell can't people tolerate it being called both? Steel Beasts is a game made by eSim Games. It is also used by the U.S. Army for training, and Steel Beasts 2 is being developed in close contact with the the U.S. Army to make it even more suitable for training. Tons of people use it as a game, and the U.S. Army uses it as a sim. And I'm sure lots of cadets use it as both.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[mumblestheclown]

Hmm, using that "game" MSFS, my instrument students get good at flying approaches. I give them homework in it of flying certain approaches and they show up at the next lesson better prepared.

stop with your "sim vs game" crap. it's childish and narrow.

- singleengine / multiengine / regular flight instructor, airline transport pilot.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[WWWWolf]

Depends on what you use it for.

You may use it to design aircraft and test it before going ahead and actually building it. For you it's a tool.

For me, an eyeglass-wearing geek with no chance to ever fly a plane for real, it's a way to get entertainment. Slip Mike Oldfield's "Five Miles Out" to the CD player, jump on a plane (sometimes a Cessna, sometimes something outrageous), and fly around. Hell, I don't even know how to land, never bothered to learn. For me, it's a game.

It may not be a game, but sure as hell it can be used as one.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[Ralgha]

It's a game. The FAA has very specific definitions of simulators, and neither X-Plane, nor MSFS meet the requirements. They are both classified as games. With the right accessories, they can be classified as PC Aviation Training Devices (PCATD), but they are still not simulators.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[Wyatt Earp]

Actually, X-Plane can be used for FAA airline transport certification.

http://www.x-plane.com/FTD.html
http://www.flig htmotion.com/docs/faa_approval.htm

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[p_trekkie]

I was a MSFS person until about 3 weeks ago, and the difference in purpose is tangible. X-plane will output exactly what forces were acting on the plane to a text file. It's also has a very nice interface for outputting to multiple monitors across the newtwork (e.g. for a full scale simulator). Also, it isn't really gameable, because there are no pre-set scenarios or even an instruction manual (the 15 or so html pages on the CD don't really count). It's not sold as a game either. On the front page of the program's website they show how it's being used to simulate a new aircraft that's never flown in real life. It's not sold in stores and comes in a small brown shipping box with a one page copy of the install readme.

Definitely not a game.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[dougmc]

Also, it isn't really gameable, because there are no pre-set scenarios

Just being able to fly around with no set goals can be a fun game.

or even an instruction manual (the 15 or so html pages on the CD don't really count).

Most people don't read the instructions that come with games anyways :)

It's not sold as a game either.

It used to be.

Definitely not a game.

Yet it has been seen on the shelves at the local computer store -- in the games section (Not lately though -- they seem to only selling it directly now.)

Lots of other people seem to think it's a game. Google certainly finds a lot of stuff about it on game sites.

What I think *really* happened is that X-Plane was first marketed just like any other flight simulator -- yes, die-hard pilots will buy it, but the bulk of their sales will be made to those looking for another game to play. And it was even priced accordingly, around $30-$50 if I recall correctly.

But it couldn't compete with MSFS, so they decided to stop calling it a game, and decided instead to concentrate on realism and to mark it as a `serious simulation'. And it seems to have developed a cult following -- so it sounds like this approach has worked.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[Cat_Byte]

Hell even Quicken is a game to me. Trying to keep the dollars from turning red is pretty hard. The bank monster eats even more of the dollars when it goes red and you have to make sure your character doesn't starve to death or go homeless.

P.S. don't play that game called Stock Market. It conflicts with the Quicken game.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[jo42]

So, along this vein of logic...

Is Windows an operating system or a simulation of an operating system...?

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[PurpleFloyd]

Getting a pilot's license probably isn't as hard or as expensive as you think. While a new Cessna or Cirrus may start at $200,000, there are other options. First, a decent rule of thumb is that a good used plane costs about as much as a good new car: you could probably find a used Cessna 150 or something for between $10,000 and $20,000.

If you have the time, another option is to put it together yourself, too. Something like a Van's RV-x kitbuild would probably cost $15 grand for the kit, $10 grand for a decent engine, and 100 to 200 hours of your time. True homebuilts are cheaper, but require a lot more time. If you do decide to go that route, check out Burt Rutan's designs; they not only look like a starfighter but get incredible performance and economy. As a bonus, you are eminently qualified to do any and all maintinance work on your airframe. Talk to the EAA (the Experimental Aircraft Association) to learn more about kitbuilds and homebuilds.

As for training, I have taken groundschool at my local community college. Flight instruction is also available for about $800 total (including all time in the airplane) with the number of training hours neccessary for a private pilot's license. Helicopter and commercial training are also available.

Trust me, there's nothing quite like the first time you go up in a small plane, pulling off the runway with yourself at the controls. The feeling of freedom is simply unrivaled, anywhere.

One note: if you decide to learn how to fly, I do suggest you learn to land first. Not knowing how could have some... serious consequences.

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[Anonymous Coward]

Too damn right

The problem is, I work at gamerseurope.com, (you notice the whole gamers bit), and the UK Distributors told us to review it as a game rather than a sim. So we did. God did we get flamed. Flamed to phuck. See Here

Re:Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[Anonymous Coward]

In the game section? The game section of the Internet?

Unfortunately, the corporate censors at Popular Science withheld the truth about where and how X-Plane is sold. There are few places X-Plane is sold.

"The Web's instantaneous global reach has ... allowed him to spread his gospel without any advertising or marketing ... "

How about the truth. Current versions of X-Plane are not sold in stores, but only on the Internet direct from the author or from www.x-plane.org's on-line store.

I suggest you wake up from The United Mall of America and realize the world is not a collection of department-store ideas.

Or update your outdated copy of X-Plane v5 that you might have purchased at a local Office Deep-ho, where the vast majority of your payment went to support corporate overlords who make a game of inflating the cost of commodities, labor, land and resources.

Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[sssmashy]

I can already imagine all the "great, now terrorists won't even have to go to flight school!" comments.

My advice: forget about it. If we want to prevent a repeat of 9/11, the solution is common sense initiatives such as locked cockpit doors and military quick response procedures... NOT by restricting basic technical information.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[zooblethorpe]

Okay, OT, but what about simply not pissing of 1/3 of the planet?

--------
If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[Troed]

1/3? The USA is pissing off _all_ other nations currently.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[zooblethorpe]

Oo, forgive me for being conservative in my estimate. I was actually only thinking of the Muslim world, and didn't want to come off as pure hyperbole. But then, you're probably right...

--------
If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[afidel]

They won't use a plane next time. They have eliminated hijacking as a viable method of terrorism. In the past people on a hijacked plane would wait passivly because that's what was expected of them "no one move and no one gets hurt", which was generally true, the terrorists got to broadcast their message and then were arrested, people were rarely harmed, and if they were it was generally during an attempt to board the plane by anti-terror police/military units, not in the air. Now people must assume that not only will THEY die, but many others on the ground, potentially including their friends and families will die, so every person on the plane will do what they must to stop the terrorists, even fear of death from guns and knives won't stop them. In a crowded space a couple hundred people who have nothing to lose will beat out just about any realistic number of terrorists.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah. I know.

And why not remove all the driving sims because of terrorist car bombing. I can already imagine all the "great, now terrorists won't even have to go to driving school!"

And while at it, remove all big game hunting games because it trains future terrorist.I can already imagine all the "great, now terrorists won't even have to go to big gun handling school!"

Pffft.

Lets take a shower and some advil and sleep away that brain stone please.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[Dolly_Llama]

This is true of passenger planes, but an equally fuel-laden cargo plane is just as deadly a weapon, and there is only the small crew to overcome.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

> 1/3? The USA is pissing off _all_ other nations currently.

2/3rds of the earth is water.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[timeOday]

Also much less deterrence to keep the Air Force from blowing the plane out of the sky.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[A55M0NKEY]

That's why they'll use remote control airplane technology and spycams to build a radio controlled cruise missiles to assasinate people. 30 of them with machine guns will take over the Hoover Damn and blow it up with TNT sending a flood down the river to kill thousands. There's tons of crap they could do.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[poot_rootbeer]

Okay, OT, but what about simply not pissing of 1/3 of the planet?

No matter what America does, it's going to piss SOMEONE off. It comes with the territory when you're a superpower.

This is offtopic.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[Cat_Byte]

Moderators,
How is this Insighful?

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[jo42]

...and shitting on its own people!

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[jo42]

Often the Truth is Insightful...

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is offtopic.

Sure is. Thanks for posting with your karma bonus, though.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[overunderunderdone]

This is true of passenger planes, but an equally fuel-laden cargo plane is just as deadly a weapon, and there is only the small crew to overcome.

Of course in that case the would be terrorist has to overcome the "Hey, who the **** are you!" factor before the plane even gets off the ground.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, they blew a plane out of the sky on September 11. People are no deterrent anymore...

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[zooblethorpe]

Fair enough. However, let me go out on a limb here and suggest that the US government's recent international policy is doing more to actively piss off large segments of the global population than it has in a while.

--------
If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, rather zealotted in the way you put it, but it WOULD be an interesting idea to try and free the source from the author. Anybody care to start a funds pool going and see if the author would be interested?

In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[IvyMike]

I love X-Plane, precisely for the reasons posted: it's very cool that the simulation strives to be as accurate as possible, and gets better with each release. On the other hand, at least one journalist disagrees...

Yesterday, Salon had a ridiculous article(might be restricted to subscribers only, sorry) that claims that modern consumer flight simulators are too realistic, and implies that they should be banned or restricted somehow. And of course, as the headline promises, the article does indeed place some of the blame for 9/11 on such flight simlulators!

Bad Salon, bad. What is it with the media hating video games, anyways?

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[torpor]

The media hate videogames because both videogames and media are competing for your attention.

If you're playing videogames, you're not watching TV.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[smokeslikeapoet]

X-plane and other flight simulators aren't the only victims of a cry for cry for knee-jerk legislation. The truth is society has never accepted brilliant science. We are were once witches and sorcerors, now we are geeks and terrorists. To keep this on topic, X-plane is real and yes, if we do find a "suspected terrorist" using X-plane in the course of a normal fbi/cia investigation, it should alarms go off in someones head, but to ban this game for everone? or dumb it down? Well that's just "plane" un-American. Yes, I know its a terrible pun.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Julian Morrison]

It's easier on the short-of-brains to refight the last war. Anyone sensible knows the "hijack and crash" trick won't work twice. It was dependent upon a preference for negotiation, which no longer exists.

Oh, and they fail to grasp: flight sim experience might as easily save a plane, as doom it. What if some nutter shoots the flight crew? A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true, admit it. But don't stop with flight simulators, there are far more sinister companies that operate flight SCHOOLS! Schools designed to teach people to operate the very weapons of mass destruction of 9/11! THEY MUST BE STOPPED!

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[silverhalide]

Well, there IS some truth to all that hoopla. I know a distrubutor of arcade machines, and heard from a salesmen that a middle eastern man was buying up all the available machines of Sega's Airline Pilots, an uber-realistic arcade machine for flying jumbo jets. In some months after, they realized what was up and reported the guy to the FBI, but by then it was too late (not sure if that part happened after 9/11 or not.) Still, goes to show, at least the terrorists think the games are realistic enough now....

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Vitus Wagner]

A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.


This was known for decades. Arthur Hailey (if I properly spell his name) wrote his novel "Runway 0-8" in fifties.

About this exact situation - airplane crew is poisoned with their breakfast got from new (and untruthworthy) supplier, and passenger with some flight experience from WWII saves everyone onboard.

Why don't Americans read their own literature and
need Russian to remind them?

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Coward]

X-plane and other flight simulators aren't the only victims of a cry for cry for knee-jerk legislation. The truth is society has never accepted brilliant science. We are were once witches and sorcerors, now we are geeks and terrorists.

Although it's true that those who lack knowledge will always fear it, stating that "society has never accepted brilliant science" is simply not true.

I suggest you study some history of philosophy. Science has been quite accepted (with some backlashes) since the 18th century.

To keep this on topic, X-plane is real and yes, if we do find a "suspected terrorist" using X-plane in the course of a normal fbi/cia investigation, it should alarms go off in someones head, but to ban this game for everone? or dumb it down?

But I disgress. This is not a science issue. It is a freedom of speech issue, and by extension a political one.
(Questions like: Should freedom of speech include speech which poses a threat to public safety? If so, which threats qualify? etc..)

To voice a few political opinions of my own:
The best strategy against terrorism (and this can never be repeated enough) is for americans to truly understand why the so much of the world is irritated (or worse) with us, and do something about it.

For instance, I doubt most americans agree with supporting dictators who oust democratically elected leaders (Guatemala '54, Chile '73).. so why do we allow our leaders to keep doing it? (Pakistan '99)

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[dcw3]

>Oh, and they fail to grasp: flight sim experience might as easily save a plane, as doom it. What if some nutter shoots the flight crew? A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.

Oh PLEASE!!! You have NO idea. I'm an instrument rated private pilot, and there is simply no way you're going to land that 747 with just some X-Plane experience. It would be a high pucker factor even for someone like me. You just can't get the seat of the pants experience with X-Plane, and yes I have used it...it's a great simulator.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[gl4ss]

reading books isn't hip anymore i guess, which is a shame.

anyways.. totally off topic and all, nowadays it's quite common (i suspect that aeroflot doesn't do this though, no offense) that the flight crew eats food thats made in 2 different kitchens so that there is very slim chance that all of them get food poisoned.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone sensible knows the "hijack and crash" trick won't work twice.

and why not? If anything it has put the idea in the heads of a lot more loonies. "dependent upon a preference for negotiation"? what sort of negotiation is a suiside bomber interested in? The whole thing's mostly about murder for murder's sake, which is why it's such a bizarre thing for everyone to comprehend.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Julian Morrison]

The negotiation I was referring to, was the old hostages-in-a-plane doctrine of "talk calmly and persuade the bad guys to land and give themselves up".

The post-911 equivalent is "hit them with a SAM".

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[nathanh]

Why don't Americans read their own literature and need Russian to remind them?

Well, that one's easy. Most Americans don't read anything except the TV guide.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Coward]

Silenced? Looks like I can read it just fine, if I wanted to. It's not as though it's been deleted or anything, it's just labelled as the piece of antagonistic flamebait that it is.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[richie2000]

So, any "middle eastern man" is a terrorist now? Perhaps he was simply a businessman looking to make a quick buck? (Oh no, capitalism! The horror, the horror!)

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[rat7307]

an uber-realistic arcade machine for flying jumbo jets

Right....., if they come across an airplane with a dinky little red joysick and 3 red punch/kick buttons beside it, then Look Out Everyone!!!!...........

Hopefully they run out of coins before they can do too much damage....

uber-realistic indeed....sheesh..

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[rtaylor]

Why don't Americans read their own literature and
need Russian to remind them?

Russians have longer attention spans than Amer... That dog has a puffy tail! Hee hee hee hee! Here puff! Here puff!

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[kannibal_klown]

I hear ya an agree on a level, but...

You're wrong lumping terrorists into the "witch, sorcerer, communist, etc" category. While our fear of the latter was purely unsubstantiated, the fear of terrorists is a little different. People were afraid of "witches" because either they hated that particular person anyway, were trying to gain monetray/political ground, or were just bored. We were "afraid" of communists because their ideology threatened ours and the gov needed a scapegoat (better dead than red).

BUT...

We're afraid of terrorists because, well, TERRORISTS KILL PEOPLE. Sure, their ideology doesn't jive with ours, but the communists in the 50's weren't blowing up too many buildings or killing people. and 9-11 showed us how dedicated some of them are to the cause.

Sure, I think we take this fear too far at times (the anti-flight sim is a PERFECT example), but saying that it is an unjustified fear is taking it too far.

And putting GEEKS in the same category as terrorists? Jeez.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[kannibal_klown]

and when I say the communist ideology threatened ours, I mean schmucks and politicians tried to convince the public it threatened ours. I have nothing against communists.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard from a distributor in Europe that an American Man was buying up all the copies of Command and Conquer, an ueber realistic war game - seconds later I heard that the war had started in Iraq. Do you think there was a link? The American man was overweight and a bit stupid. If anyone sees him I'll report him to Scotland Yard.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[CrystalFalcon]

The American man was overweight and a bit stupid.

Hmm, that rules out one-half of the American population (all the females). Good progress, but we need more to pinpoint. Did you notice anything else of significance?

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Laur]

About this exact situation - airplane crew is poisoned with their breakfast got from new (and untruthworthy) supplier, and passenger with some flight experience from WWII saves everyone onboard.

Hey, I saw Aiplane too! That movie's hilarious!

"Surely you can't be serious."

"I am serious, and don't call me Shirley."

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[JPVann]

RE: Salon. What do you expect from a bunch of liberal, undereducated mind-thought "journalists" who find it necessary to tell the rest of us their version of the "truth".

Everytime you read a story on Salon (or the NYT for that matter) do some comparison reading on Google News - especially some of the international articles. I think you will be very surprised at the contradictions and exagerated information you routinely find on Salon...

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[1u3hr]

Well, there IS some truth to all that hoopla.

No there isn't. This is a classic urban legend "I heard from a guy whose cousin..." etc. You ask the guy's cousin, he actually heard it from a barber. You will never find any actual witness or evidence. There's a million stories like this. See Urban Legends Reference Pages for a few others.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[TheTimoo]

I definately agree with you.
But someone that knows what he's talking about with the ground crew is better than no one, and if he manages to land the thing and totally wrecks it but saves 1/2 of the passengers - that's a good thing.

(But then again on one of the tapes I used to listen to as a kid, an _elephant_ lands a plane and saves all the human passengers, though he breaks of a wing - so how hard can it be *g*)

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[jasond2]

but the communists in the 50's weren't blowing up too many buildings or killing people.

What about Stalin and the millions that were killed under his rule of the USSR?

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Bastard Operator Fro]

which was, of course, made into the movie Airplane American's should watch more movies too, it seems.

yes, I know that Airplane was based on Zero Hour! which has Arthur Hailey credited in the screenplay... Which was based on the teleplay "Flight into Danger" which was based on the novel.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[timeOday]

You're insane to lump communists in with witches. Communism was the biggest threat America ever faced. When an expansionistic empire says "we will bury you" and "your grandchildren will live under Communism," it's serious. (And if you think the US is expansionistic you need to remember who annexed all of Eastern Europe.) When a fraction of the democratic population is swayed to agreeing with them, it's more serious still. Terrorists kill people? They haven't killed 1/1000 of what Stalin accomplished.

You have been brainwashed by Hollywood propaganda from people offending at being labeled Communist even though many of them actually were. McCarthy saved those Communists with his own overzealous and reprehensible behavior, but the Communist threat was very real, both militarily and politically.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Cowtard]

Why don't Americans read their own literature and
need Russian to remind them?

Because:

1) It would be impossible to read every American authored book in a lifetime?

2) If we did #1 people would bitch about how "US-centric" we're being and rag on us for not reading other literature?

3) Maybe that book isn't our cup of tea?

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[PainKilleR-CE]

You're wrong lumping terrorists into the "witch, sorcerer, communist, etc" category. While our fear of the latter was purely unsubstantiated, the fear of terrorists is a little different. People were afraid of "witches" because either they hated that particular person anyway, were trying to gain monetray/political ground, or were just bored. We were "afraid" of communists because their ideology threatened ours and the gov needed a scapegoat (better dead than red).

Terrorists used flight sims to practice for 9/11 so we need to ban flight sims. That's what this is about, it's what people were actually saying after 9/11 (though in reference specifically to MS Flight Sim.). People weren't being extremely loud about it, probably because there's no violence in MS Flight Sim (beyond crashing, which normally isn't in the same realm as the standard definition of violence in games) to lump it together with school shootings and every-day violence, but they were talking about it.

Fear is not something that you can get your hands on, or something that you can see coming after you. It doesn't need reasons grounded in reality and logic. The government passed a lot of laws grounded purely in passifying people's fears after 9/11, with no basis in what they are actually permitted to make into law nor reason or logic. Allowing people to continue using 'prevention of terrorism' as their entire explanation is not sufficient.

In the meantime, our borders are still open, and we have no control over passports and visas issued by foreign countries. Smart criminals break as few laws as possible, because a series of crimes can lead to getting caught before completing your plan. You can't stop teaching people to fly airplanes, because you'll undercut the industry. There are legitimate uses, and, most importantly, those legitimate uses are far more common than uses related to terrorism, whether it's a pilot school, a flight sim, or any other video game.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[PainKilleR-CE]

Why don't Americans read their own literature and
need Russian to remind them?

Most Americans that bother to read literature also bother to discern between literature and books. The literature you've referenced is probably widely considered (if it's widely considered at all) a book, rather than literature. We were brought up to read Mark Twain as the example of American literature...

That being said, I just don't care for much outside of sci-fi and fantasy, which is probably more the 'nerd' realm of books/literature anyway.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[ToastyMunch]

You apparently haven't played this rather fun (and challenging) game. It may not be the same as being there, but it's closer to the experience than you might think. Check out some screenshots (albeit rather small) at Sega's website

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[ncc74656]

We were "afraid" of communists because their ideology threatened ours and the gov needed a scapegoat (better dead than red).

There's also the little matter of the communists attempting to take over the world...what you characterize as an irrational fear (maybe even a phobia) was anything but irrational. Here's some reading material for you to consider as an antidote for what your teachers and the press have told you.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[argStyopa]

Let me see if I understand this - the point of the Salon piece is: Flight sims are getting so good, terrorists could use them to learn to crash planes into buildings.

Apparently Mohammed Atta et al aren't so sanguine about the quality of simulators - THEY all chose to spend $000's to go to flight school.

Oh wait, so they didn't use PC simulators at all and they still learned to crash planes into buildings?

So what's your point again?

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Lars T.]

Ahh, but that book has been made into several movies under the original title Flight Into Danger (Actually, it started as a 1957 Canadian television play named Zero Hour).

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Lars T.]

Yeah, and Communism forced Americans to kill millions of people to prevent them from becoming Communists. Damn you, Stalin!

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Ralgha]

If your only experience is on a PC flight simulator, the chances of you successfully getting an airliner on the ground are somewhere between "none", and "you're fucked". Die hard flight simmers will argue this point until they turn blue in the face, but the sad truth is that PC flight simulators are not as realistic as they claim to be, and the differences between them and real flying are huge.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[poot_rootbeer]

A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.

According to films like "Airplane!" and "SST Death Flight", there's always at least one disgraced ex-pilot on every commercial flight that can be counted on to take the controls if needed, and besides which landing a plane is so easy that even the ditziest stewardess can do it so long as someone on the ground talks her through it...

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[starling]

reading books isn't hip anymore i guess

Hah! Tell that to the millions of people who recently bought a certain 800+ page children's book.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Eric S. Smith]

but the communists in the 50's weren't blowing up too many buildings or killing people.

What about Stalin and the millions that were killed under his rule of the USSR?

Perhaps kannibal_klown should've written "...weren't blowing up ... buildings or killing people in the United States".

But I think that the klown may be a bit hasty in distinguishing between witches and terrorists solely on the ground that terrorists seem to be a more realistic threat.

Witches used to be a realistic threat, back when people believed that it was possible to gain supernatural powers through an unholy pact with the devil. And just because real terrorists exist, it doesn't follow that people won't fear/accuse non-terrorists just because "they hated that particular person anyway, were trying to gain monetray/political ground, or were just bored".

Let's not forget the 1980s, when we were informed (if not reliably then repeatedly) that Satanists were running day-cares and drinking babies' blood in secret underground chambers, and that anyone who said "hogwash" was In On It.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Coward]

i know, but unlucky those don't read other books.. i havent seen the original print but it was such a fast read that the font must be pretty good size, and the text rowling makes is very straightforward, easy to read(written for children, the book is faster to read through than usual 300 page books).

ok i've read them all, they aren't that bad but people who only read them don't have real basis for comparision.

i'm the one you replied to but this is geting so offtopic i'm posting anon, and to of course run away from problems because i say that i've read the book but not having actually seen it..

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Wyatt Earp]

Communism forced Communists to kill millions of people in China and Russia.

Communist farming "reforms" and "leaps" lead to the deaths of tens of millions.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Coward]

"We need to get him to a hospital."

"A hospital? What is it?"

"It's a building where they take sick people. But that's not important right now"

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[kannibal_klown]

Stalin and the lot were HORRIBLE. I admit that. And communist Russia was a bad place, my parents fled to the US to get away from there. When I said communists, I meant the McCarthy hearings, which were essentially a witch trial. The slightest whisper that you might be a communist, and you were screwed; blacklisted and made a parija. In fact, that's what the play/book "The Crucible" is realyl about; not the Salem witch trials (which it was using as an analogy), but the hearings that were going on at roughly the same time. By lumping witch-craft and communism together, I mean the complete unsubstantiated frenzy that followed the subject. Back then: " at a poarty you mention you liked book x." Some literary officianado says "Book x is commie propoganda." The book is taken out of the stores, and someone reports that you stated you liked Book x. Therefore, you are a communist. This is somewhat the same as today with terrorists, as some technical officianado says "flight sim x can be used to train terrorists" and the flight sim is pulled off the market. However, where the McCarthy hearings embodied free thought and speech for pure political gain, the attempt to remove tools from potential terrorsist hands at least displays some safety concerns. I'm think we push the envelope too far with the whole "terrorist" thing (if you drive an SUV you support terrorism, dontcha know). But it is nothing compared to the 1950's communist witch hunt, that needlessly destroyed many innocent lives.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[kannibal_klown]

EDIT - by embodied free thought speech, I meant embodied the stiffling/oppression of free thought and speech.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[overunderunderdone]

but the communists in the 50's weren't blowing up too many buildings or killing people.

Hello?? I think there are few million Ukrainians, Chinese, Poles, Czechs, Cambodians, etc. etc. etc. who would beg to differ (including my foster brother who saw quite a few people killed by Communists in Pol Pot's killing fields)

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[timeOday]

I think I agree with everything you said. The US really could have responded better to the Communist threat, or at least not done some of the bad things that were done. I don't think what the US did compares in any way to the millions of Soviets who were executed, but that's no excuse.

Also although I said Communism was the biggest threat ever against the US, I have to admit that the Axis of WWII was right up there, and in actuality caused a lot more US deaths. (Though WWII never put us at risk of annihilation at the mere push of a button like the Cold War.)

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[pixel_bc]

> (And if you think the US is expansionistic you need to remember who annexed all of Eastern Europe.)

If some Nazi shitheads murdered 30 million of your people, you may want a buffer between you and them as well. Before that, they had fun with the Napoleonic wars... understand the Russians have lost MILLIONS of people to invaders.

It's not fair, but almost understandable.

It's all about context -- not blindly being afraid of the Reds. :)

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Jonner]

A book is just one medium for literature. Is that what you mean? Other media for literature are magazines, ebooks, and the web.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[smokeslikeapoet]

I have nothing against communists.

Neither do I except for the fact that they killed about 100 million people and had nukes pointed at us for the past 50 years.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people would know the plot from "Airport" and (probably more familiar spoof) "Airplane".

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[PainKilleR-CE]

No, I mean that some people make a distinction in that they think of literature as a higher form of each of those. (I'm not saying they're necessarily right, but just pointing out that there are a lot of people with a rather different idea of what literature is).

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Jonner]

"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Literature Lit"er*a*ture, n. F. litt'erature, L.
litteratura, literatura, learning, grammar, writing, fr.
littera, litera, letter. See Letter.
1. Learning; acquaintance with letters or books.

2. The collective body of literary productions, embracing the
entire results of knowledge and fancy preserved in
writing; also, the whole body of literary productions or
writings upon a given subject, or in reference to a
particular science or branch of knowledge, or of a given
country or period; as, the literature of Biblical
criticism; the literature of chemistry.

3. The class of writings distinguished for beauty of style or
expression, as poetry, essays, or history, in distinction
from scientific treatises and works which contain positive
knowledge; belles-lettres.

4. The occupation, profession, or business of doing literary
work. --Lamp.

You must be referring to definition three. I usually think of definition two. It just goes to show you that you learn something new every day.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[PainKilleR-CE]

Yes, and I usually find that the people that make the distinction the most often are the same people that want to look down their noses at the 'Best Seller' lists and the like. For instance, those that want to crap all over Stephen King's writing.

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[Lars T.]

But in Airport nobody gets poisoned, and the pilot lands the damaged plane himself. Airplane borrows heavily from all of Hailey's Super-Pilot-saves-the-day books - and then some more.

Does it make me a bad person...

[Anonymous Coward]

if I laughed at "John Carmack: The real Columbine killer"?

Re:Does it make me a bad person...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it means you have a sense of humor, something that most of the moderators do not. That was a funny troll. The moderation system needs massive overhaul so that people can filter out crappy GNAA frist psoting and read funny and interesting threads that are offtopic. Currently I browse at threshold of +5 with Troll, Offtopic, Flamebait, Redundant modified +6. Still, this doesn't let me see the logged in trolls that start at -1 or those that are bumped down to -1 by being rated "overrated."

The article's already been written

[daveo0331]

It's on salon.com. You'll need to get a day pass to read the article if you're not a subscriber.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

and once he dies and his corpse is pushing up tulips, his code base will stagnate and fester, lost to the world forever.

Dude, it's just code. And anyway he's a young guy so he's got awhile to make decisions rather than let his code base fester.

Flightgear Anyone?

[niko9]

I am not familiar with X plane , but I wonder how it compares to the Flightgear project. One of the advantages of that project being open source was extensibilty. The project has all sorts of modding potential.

apt-get install flightgear for all you deb heads.
runs on win32 also

Re:Flightgear Anyone?

[thogard]

flightgear runs under linux.
x-plane runs under windows and os-x.

Flightgear requires a masvie set of other modules and the latest versions of thouse modules don't work so you have to dig up old versions. The only time I have ever got flight gear to run when I compiled it my self it was doing about a frame per minute. x-plane does better under an emulator than flight gear does.

Sometimes, you just can't use existing toolkits because it kills performance and I think is a problem with flightgear.

Re:Flightgear Anyone?

[pldms]

flightgear runs under linux.

Flightgear runs under Linux, Windows, OS X, IRIX and Solaris. BTW, there is a binary of 0.92 for OS X - follow the link to the master location for OS X.

Re:Flightgear Anyone?

[_xeno_]

I haven't ever used X-Plane, but I did try Flightgear once. This is more of a pointless anecdote than an answer to your question, but...

Flightgear is a little too forgiving on your landings. I tried to lawndart the plane, and found the plane would bounce off the ground after hitting it - actually, it was more like its elevation was magically increased to prevent me from flying underground. (This was after a poor landing and noticing that the ground physics seemed off.)

So for the next flight, I took off, and then landed in the lake next to the airport (whereever it turned out I was). It turns out that you can indeed land on water in this game, and you don't even need pontoons. It was funny at the time. (As I recall, I blew my approach and then thought "screw this" and decided to land on the water to see if I'd crash. I didn't.)

This was about four months ago, so things could have changed since then. I haven't played around with Flightgear since.

Phew!

[bitfoam]

"Popular Science is running an article on Austin Meyer, the creator of the popular X-Plane flight simulator."

For a moment there, I thought this was a story on Mike Meyers and his next Austin Powers movie, featuring a futuristic X-Plane thingy that spoofs Moonraker.

I'm honestly not sure whether to be disappointed or not...

Re:Phew!

[Zoolander]

Imagine the number of posts we could avoid if some AC:s had a sense of humour.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Schlemphfer]

I think it's needlessly confrontational to use phrases like "code hoarder."

I'm sure the author would like nothing better than to give away X-Plane for free. The trouble is that there are some applications that require the bulk of one person's time, for years on end, if they are to be amazing. And, like anybody else, the creator of this work needs to eat.

I think we're certain to see a greater variety of open source freeware apps in the years ahead. But there just aren't enough people out there with serious expertise in both aeronautics and coding, who can pitch in and build an open source X-Plane in their free time.

You want 1001 small apps, from hard drive erasers to science calculators, the open source movement has you covered. You're also covered with the handful of huge apps, that everybody needs, since there are sufficient coders out there to recognize the supreme significance of these apps and donate bits of their time (take Mozilla and OpenOffice.org as two examples.)

But if you want something as niche as a world class flight simulator, sorry, you're probably not gonna get it open source. It's gonna take a huge effort from a tiny group of people, and they need to do it to the exclusion of other things. Like anyone else, they've gotta eat. And to call their code "useless" because it's not open source, that's unfair, mean spirited, and ignorant.

x-plane closed source

[Anonymous Coward]

This may seem like a dumb question, but isn't he using Open Gl. And isn't Open Gl Gpl'd

Re:x-plane closed source

[usotsuki]

Apparently not, if M$ bet the farm on it before creating DirectX...

YFI

-uso.

Re:x-plane closed source

[afidel]

Nope, OpenGL is not covered by the GPL, it is covered by an X style license now and was covered by several commercial licenses from SGI in the past. See This

Space simulator

[Anonymous Coward]

There must be a gazillion flight simulators out by now. The only space simulator I can think of was "Microsoft Space Simulator", which was very good for its time (I'm still baffled how they managed to fit that much on a couple of floppy discs). It'd be great to have a multiplayer, highly realistic space simulator, where you can fly the space shuttle and man the space station and so forth. Is anybody doing this? It could make a great open source project. No matter how good a flight simulator is, it still is a very tired genre.

Re:Space simulator

[deniable]

You could always try Orbiter. http://www.orbitersim.com

Re:Space simulator

[Erik K. Veland]

X-plane already simulates both Space Shuttles and flying experimental planes on Mars, as well as other space-going crafts. Heck you can even take off into space with a Rocket!!

Re:Space simulator

[Lumpy]

holy crap.... you though that space simulator was realistic????

ICK.

Re:Space simulator

[mnemonic_]

X-Plane, unlike Orbiter, does not simulate any type of orbital flight though.

Re:Space simulator

[0123456]

Orbiter isn't open source either, which is a pain: there are a bunch of things I'd like to add to it which can't be done through the SDK, but there's no way to do so.

However, it is pretty accurate once you get outside the atmosphere (much less so for aerodynamics): flying Apollo missions, if I got stuck with something like trying to take off from the moon and rendevouz in orbit I could just track down the real procedures from the web and usually it worked.

Re:Space simulator

[CracktownHts]

You could always try Space Combat, also by Austin Myers.

Re:Space simulator

[GatorMan]

Oddly, that goes by the same name of a Spectrum Holobyte/Gordon Walton title, Orbiter. I used to play this for hours on my Mac Plus back in the 80s. In fact I'm sure I still have the install disks.

Re:Space simulator

[A55M0NKEY]

I want a spacewar simulator where you have limited fuel/or plenty of fuel but limited thrust and have to plot slingshot orbits etc to get to Jupiter to fight the rebel mining colonists of IO. I want solar wind redirected by planetary magnetic fields to interfere with communications and irradiate crew. I want to hide behind planets and launch nukes at my enemies. I want to force them to run from the explosions and get too close to Jupiter and run out of fuel too deep in the planet's gravity well to ever escape and taunt them about running out of air. I want to hunt Al-Queda training camps in the asteroid belt. I want to be a privateer that hijacks water transports to sell on the black market. I want everything to be done to scale. I want to lead a naval fleet against a heavily defended planet but I don't want to be able to maneuver ala Star Trek. I want to be coasting through space with very limited fuel and unable to change course much to avoid damage and still get home. I want to have to plan a strategy that lets my fleet get there, and get back using stealth and cleverness.

Re:Space simulator

[rwa2]

Hmm, the last space simulator I played was the Space Shuttle for the Atari. It basically consisted of three phases of "keeping the ball centered within the tolerance crosshairs" for takeoff, docking, and reentry. Ah, those were the days...

Speaking of which, are there any 3D space combat simulator games that use real physics? (as opposed to Wing Commander physics) I've played with Vendetta and a few other things, but they're all more like piloting a submarine than a spacecraft. Granted, it could be pretty boring if everyone just kept whipping past each other at 100km/s, but I'm sure there's some way to offset that...

Best Quote

[pnatural]

At the end of page one:

"I have a moral duty to make it fly as realistically as I can."

Now consider: if every programmer was able and willing to make a similar statement about their code, what would our software "ecosystem" (as MS likes to phrase it) look like?

Re:Best Quote

[madmarcel]

Most programmers already do:

"This is going to be the best damn game EVER!"
"This is going to be the best damn spreadsheat EVER!"

But then management and accounting step in and things get all messy :o

Re:Best Quote

[fr0dicus]

You misspelled 'EVAR'.

Re:Best Quote

[JanneM]

Well, let's rephrase it: "I have a moral duty to make it write as realistically as I can."

Do you really want a word processor that will only generate longhand on photorealistically rendered paper (sometimes with inkblots or smearing, depending on what pen model you load and whether you are left handed or not), complete with a statistically accurate risk of spilling virtual coffee all over the page and having to start all over again? And that will work best using a stylus, rather than a keyboard.

"I have a moral duty to make it store as realistically as I can." - a file system where you have to rifle through hundreds of virtual cabinets actually _looking_ for the correct file; and of course, there is always the chance that the file has slipped behind its wirtual drawer, or that some vistual pages of the file have mysteriously disappeared (try looking around on the virtual floor, nearby files, or asking your virtual secretary for "a piece of paper with 'main.c' on the top").

Um, no thanks.

Re:Best Quote

[Fastolfe]

I don't think the original poster meant to emphasize "realistically" with respects to computer software. I suspect he was trying to comment on reliability and fitness.

Re:Best Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

They'd get fired for refusing to execute their manager's hairbrained archetecture

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Here is an example: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xplane-linux/message /136

On Thursday, November 28, 2002, at 02:16 AM, Petru Paler wrote:
>I have another question -- I'm unclear about your position regarding
>the
>Linux port. First you make it sound like you're doing me a favor by
>letting me do it, then you promise to send an update, then silence.
>It's
>ok with me if you don't want to do it any more, but please say it
>clearly.
i just have lost interest... and i know it will slow me down in the
long run... it does not mak sense for me to put my effort into these
tiny minutiea that offer little market share... if you thik microsoft
is so eveil then buy a mac.. i see no need for linux, and negligeable
market share, and therefore an expenditure of my time that is not
justified, and the riskk in my hadning out source code is too high for
the small gain as well.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Deusy]

Why do that when there is a perfectly good open source flight simulator available in the guise of FlightGear?

If these people contributed that passionately to FlightGear then it would be awesome.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[nelsonal]

The only reason that OpenOffice and Mozilla exist as open source is that big companies bought the source, and released it but continued to pay developers to make it better in an effort to kill Microsoft's power bases. I don't think those sorts of efforts could be duplicated by a team of coders who never get paid.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[acrollet]

you know, one gets really tired of this kind of attitude. Did you read the article? This is his life's work, and I think he deserves compensation for it. X-plane (versions 6 and 7) is the only software I've paid for in the last 2 or 3 years, and I was happy to do it, because I'm supporting a real person, and getting a (albeit quirky) quality piece of software for it. I'm certainly a believer in the open source movement, I use it whenever possible, and I've contributed some of my work to the community. Anyway, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and code your own flight sim. (Or quit making inflammatory statements like code hoarder)

What a prick

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone break into his house and steal the code.

A stimulating simulation.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been wondering is there a realistic version for surface bound vehicles, such as boats, and cars?

Re:A stimulating simulation.

[Anonymous Coward]

On his website he had mentioned an X-Auto program he was working on, but I haven't seen anything on it since.

I'd imagine the model for a car moving on a road would be a good deal easier to code. If you wanted to account for suspension travel THEN you could get complicated.

Plus, throw in the ability to design your own cars?! Just like X-Plane's Plane Maker, you could have an X-Automotive Car Maker. Design the car from bumper to bumper. Track, wheelbase, engine size, weight and placement, power curves, transmission, final drive ratios, tire size, brake size, camber, caster... damn, that'd be SWEET. You could build any car you wanted, from a Model T to a Formula One.

Re:A stimulating simulation.

[Vitus Wagner]

I've once imagined a yacht simulator. Unfortunately,
I haven't got a time to write it. Key feature was that there were some AI seamans and you, as captain couldn't do anything on board yourself, but rather shout orders to your crew. Of course hands should have their own characters - some are clever, some ar e stupid, some are lazy to make live interesting.

Re:A stimulating simulation.

[Anonymous Coward]

A yacht simulator? Gee, THAT sounds like a fun game. Might even be more fun than those #1 market winners, "Iagno", "Glines", and "Nibbles"!

Re:A stimulating simulation.

[csteinle]

Huh, huh. You said seaman.

Re:A stimulating simulation.

[Vitus Wagner]

Do you know a way (except electrix) to use spell-checker on Mozilla web- forms?

Re:A stimulating simulation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, does anyone know of any good semi trucking simulators? I think i've heard of a couple but can't remember the titles. Preferably it should have a nice selection of tractors, trailers
and semi-trailers, such as Renault, Scania, and Volvo. Have most of the main US interstates mapped into software complete with weigh stations and truckstops. I'd like to be able to log my driving hours too.

Thanks for any information!

Re:A stimulating simulation.

[bhtooefr]

I think there's one called 18 Wheeler, but that's not realistic, and it's primarily arcade racing. Of course, there's Microsoft Midtown Madness, but there's only one truck in that. None are realistic enough, though...

Re:A stimulating simulation.

[julian_m]

there is a good piece of software being development here http://lfs.racesimcentral.com/

I do

[blunte]

I played it alongside FS2002, if I remember correctly, about 18 months ago.

It was not too bad, but it had some serious physics problems. There was a lot of incorrect behavior at extremes. It may have been technically more realistic in terms of calculation, but it was also incorrect in enough cases to make it not fun for me.

FS behaved more consistently, and close enough to correct to make it superior, in my opinion.

I'd love to give some detail about the problems I encountered, but I really don't remember anymore. I just remember buying it, giving it some good play, and deciding it had fundamental problems.

Now thinking back, the best flight sim I recall playing was the one by the guys who made System Shock. It was an aerobatics focused sim, and the physics seemed very accurate.

can I make my own plane?

[Jotham]

very cool but can I make my own plane and then play with the wingfoil design (and see how quickly I crash)?

Anyone know the format or what is used to create the 'aircraft design data' that gets processed real-time? I'm assuming it requires a high-res model of the plane and a fancy windtunnel simulator.

Re:can I make my own plane?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it comes with the software to build your own designs, or just modify one of the 1700+ that are available online.

ahh... Fond memories of when I mounted a couple of rockets on an F-15 in a Macross+ inspired experiment in uncontrollable power...

Re:can I make my own plane?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I tried the XPlane 6 demo, they had a basic YF-19 model in there (called "Anime Fighter" or something). It was wickedly violent - at something like 50 seconds from take off to space (100,000ft+).

Re:can I make my own plane?

[Baumi]

There's a bunch of user-built aircrafts available. X-Plane comes with an aircraft modelling program.

I'm not an X-Plane user myself, so I don't know how difficult it is to build a model that actually flies. If the physics are really realistic, that'd be quite a challenge. The plane building program will probably lend you a hand, though...

Baumi

Re:can I make my own plane?

[burns210]

"very cool but can I make my own plane and then play with the wingfoil design (and see how quickly I crash)?"

Yes, yes you can. The tools included let you create your own plane, then test it in the airport of your choice... and if you don't like the airports given, you can design(or redsign) your own.

The x-plane site has a fairly large collection of user made designs including ships, boats cars and some crazy looking planes:)

Re:can I make my own plane?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Plane building program, you say...

How about a genetic-algorithm aircraft designer? Take the X-Plane sim with some pre-defined flightpaths, and let a "plane building program" iterate over a few thousand generations until it optimises the airframe design? Eg, feed designs into X-Plane and see which design flies the course the fastest, carries the heaviest loads, etc, etc. Whoa. That would take some cunning coding, but the results could be, um, useful.

/drunk

Re:can I make my own plane?

[TrancePhreak]

Just start brute forcing it! By the time it finishes we'll be able to build the craft.

Re:can I make my own plane?

[BitZtream]

Actaully, all aircraft for x-plane are made with 'Plane-Maker' which is included with it, as well as World Maker, Airfoil Maker.

These do require a LOT of work to make them fly properly, you have to design the shape of the aircraft in just about every aspect, assign weights, engines and power, everything is modeled, not based on a precomputed statstics table, right down to how the fuel in the tanks will effect weight, balance, and inertia.

This is why several companies such as Carter Copter (http://www.cartercopters.com), Piper Aircraft (http://www.piperaircraft.com/) and others use x-plane for development and testing of aircraft.

Carter Copter trained pilots for its new aircraft in X-Plane before the aircraft ever went airborn. Piper now makes its aircraft available as x-plane models for demoing to potiential customers. Bell uses it to keep its helicopter pilots certified on its experimental aircraft when they can't actually use the real thing. There is also an fragment of an email from Dave Rose (Biplane racing pilot) on the x-plane home page. He modeled his plane in x-plane as close as he could, and the race area, then after lots of practice, went out in the real aircraft and set a new record. Of course, the pilot had the skill to do it, but the simulator obviously had to be pretty realistic.

Mind you, to experience the simulation like these guys do, you need hardware to go with it, but the software is there. They use the same thing you get when you buy X-Plane as a normal home user.

And just a slight MSFS rant... compare x-plane 7 to MSFS2k4. Flight model wise: the wright brothers flier in MSFS2k4 flies almost exactly like the Lear45... just a lot slower. Graphics: MSFS excels here in populated areas where there are photo scenery packages available, and x-plane has none to speak of (with the exception of SoCal which is on www.x-plane.org) Outside those areas, its nothing special. Aircraft panels... well, MSFS doesn't have squat on X-Plane there, I've yet to see one in MSFS that looked 'good'. They both have ATC, both do alright, although neither is that great at simulating large ammounts of other traffic such as you would find at a large airport, however, both do have the ability to connect to VATSIM in order to fly with hundreds of other virtual pilots around the world. There is also somewhere a 'MMORPG' based on x-plane in development, haven't seen it in a long while, but it looked promising, last I saw it you could fly with several aircraft around you, and the ATC was automatic if no one was doing live ATC for that airport, neat stuff... but seems to have disappeared (this is all much like VATSIM of course). Give x-plane some photo realistic scenery and I think its just a superior product all around, definatly from the simulator standpoint, and from the game side as well.

I'm only disappointed I paid for msfs2k4, now I have to go buy x-plane7 (Yes, I shelled out the money for x-plane6). Okay, so now I sound like a x-plane salesman, so I'm just gonna shut up :)

Re:can I make my own plane?

[Jotham]

ooh, very nice - thanks for the heads up

"If the physics are really realistic, that'd be quite a challenge.'

*nods* well I may need to remove a few design constraints to start with... 'Your design has a 100foot wingspan and can go mach4?!?' *nods confidently* 'and only weights 1 kg!' -- I'd call that a 90% finished product as it only has 1 outstanding bug - now if I can just get some venture capital.

Re:can I make my own plane?

[1u3hr]

I don't know how difficult it is to build a model that actually flies. If the physics are really realistic

Aside from many based on real aircraft (including dirigibles, space shuttles, etc) ther are some wacky ones at X-plane.org. Such as a TARDIS the teleports, and a Steinway Model D Concert Grand Piano that "glides" (down, very quickly).

Re:can I make my own plane?

[Dasher42]

If you don't have an education in aerospace engineering, there's still a lot of fun to be had. Me, I've had plenty of fun taking one of the Rutan Varieze models, shortening its flight surfaces, and doubling up the props with inline counterrotating blades. Obviously an imperfect design, but it's a kick to fly. ;)

Re:can I make my own plane?

[Eil]

very cool but can I make my own plane and then play with the wingfoil design (and see how quickly I crash)?

Yes.

Anyone know the format or what is used to create the 'aircraft design data' that gets processed real-time? I'm assuming it requires a high-res model of the plane and a fancy windtunnel simulator.

I'm not sure what you mean by "format", but X-Plane comes with its own aircraft editing program. And it's not limited to fixed-wing either, you can design just about anything that goes into the air (helicopters, blimps, gliders, RC aircraft). One thing about X-Plane is that you only design the plane once. X-Plane uses the information you provide to the plane editor to both model and plane in 3D and work out its flight characterists inside the sim. There's no way, for example, to put 6" wings on a 747 and then tell the sim that those wings will generate 9 million pounds of lift at 300 knots.

Check out the X-Plane demo at http://www.x-plane.com. It's identical to the full version except that your joystick gets disabled after 6 minutes or so. All of the various editors (plane, airfoil, scenery) come with it as well.

Re:can I make my own plane?

[SCHecklerX]

This is called "inverse design" and was a hot topic when I was still in school(BS, Aerospace, 1993). It is the focus of CFD (computational fluid dynamics). You can tell the program what type of lift profile you want, and the computer would then design your wing, for example.

We did something like x-plane does as a semester-long project. Of course, our programs only did control derivitaves, and not in real time. We used a 'lifting surface' model, modelling votex sheets, as illustrated in Dr. David Barnes's book (who also happened to be the class instructor, imagine that).

Re:can I make my own plane?

[sloth jr]

I'm not an X-Plane user myself, so I don't know how difficult it is to build a model that actually flies. If the physics are really realistic, that'd be quite a challenge. The plane building program will probably lend you a hand, though...

I am an X-Plane user, and have built a few biplanes, flying wings, and a delta wing jet. Two things:
a) The tools that X-Plane gives you could be dramatically improved without a whole lot of effort. Defining the fuselage is a bit of a pain, and positioning of wings, elevators, stabilizers, and gears are all very much unintuitive - no such thing as direct manipulation of the pieces to where you want them.
b) It's difficult to make something that actually flies. Center-of-gravity is usually for me the single-most difficult thing. I'll either have my ass dragging down the runway, or have so much weight up front that I can't rotate into the air in allotted runway space.
c) Once you have a working model, it's difficult to get a model that flies WELL, eg, responsive to controls, zero yaw, can land.
d) Once you get a model that works well, it's extremely difficult to get that model to go supersonic. After some research, I discovered the area rule.
e) Items b through d have nothing to do with X-Plane, and are damned challenging (and to my mind, enjoyable) to overcome. I have oodles more respect for aerospace engineers now.

Nothing's stopping you from downloading the X-Plane distribution - you can use all the plane maker and landscape maker programs without the CD, and test it out 5 minutes at a time.

sloth jr

In related news...

[Phekko]

A motion has been filed to ban "The Sims" because it is "too realistic and offers insight on human life and behavior that can be misused in various different ways"

No kidding!

[gantrep]

Leave him a new keyboard while you're at it. His is obviously broken.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

It got modded flamebait because it is flamebait. It's begging to get flamed with such inflammatory remarks.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

No, coders who didn't get paid would make something more ... er ... compact than Mozilla.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

except flight gear sucks, badly, and x-plane is
years ahead of anywhere flight gear is ever going
to be

it seems to me that the folks who advocate open
source with the most passion are not programmers,
but end lusers who yammer constantly but don't
themselves contribute any more than that .. we,
the coders, need to make a living - the fleeting
accolades of the stenchy masses isn't much of a
substitute

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[AceM2]

I can't read the full message thanks to Yahoo not getting along with me, but.. if that guy is the coder.. It must take him months to debug his code. I mean.. "thik microsoft is so eveil"? I understand people don't have unlimited time to spend on these groups, and I'm obviously not a grammar expert, but it's weird to me when people who *appear* rather smart make so many mistakes on a small message. Just makes me feel a little better about my accidentally hitting the shift button while typing a variable..

CFD

[tqft]

"Aren't all the data known in advance?"

Short answer - no.

Medium answer - a lot of pre-computing

Long answer is a course in fluid dynamics.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[danheskett]

Passion isn't enough. This type of programming is not "write a text editor" or write a replacement for Notepad.

Its scientific, requires loads of specific realm based knowledge, and eons of refinement and highly technical skills.

Its a simulation engine that is precise and accurate. It's not just a toy.

OSS is great. But not for everything. Somethings are too narrow for a sufficently wide pool of programmers to latch onto and program on thier own. The number of OSS-comitted programmers, with aero-engineering skills, with 3D programming knowlegdge, with sufficent free time and sufficent drive to replicate this level of work is very, very, very small.

Multi monitor flightsim goodness

[Snake_Plisken]

In relation to FS games, This guy here has got da bomb setup 9 PCs, 13 monitors, one plane. Since some idiot mod put me to -1 me down as troll for replying to an AC with the subject line of "eat shit and die", I'll try this again and wish a speedy death to the mod in question.

vectors and math

[jinglecat]

"Hey baby, that is a nice vector you have there. What is your sign, Tan? Cot? Sin? Cos?. Ah, Cos! You look like you have the flare of a cosine"

"Hey baby, you have a nice derivative on your slope, what is the rate of change on those curves?"

"Hey baby, can I integrate your function?"

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. It looks like he was drunk when he wrote that message. :)

Re:Best Quote-The athiest creed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now consider: if every programmer was able and willing to make a similar statement about their code, what would our software "ecosystem" (as MS likes to phrase it) look like?"

Bleak.

Real time calculations

[martingunnarsson]

I agree that real time calculations of forces and stuff is really cool, but can you really tell a difference from that and pre-calculated data?

Re:Real time calculations

[Anonymous Coward]

If the pre-calculated data is wrong, or unavailable, yes.

Plus, grabbing the data on the fly means you can craft whatever you want, throw it into the sim and see if it works. If data is precalculated and sitting somewhere, you can't experiment. You have to already know what your creation is going to do.

Re:Real time calculations

[lokedhs]

Yes you can.

The difference is in the edge-cases and extreme flight regimes. Once you are outside of what the MSFS table data is prepared to handle, MSFS starts to behave just strange. Especially the stall model of table-based sims are pure crap. Add to this the fact that most people that fly flight sims fly on the edge of the flight envelope all the time (because that's where the fun is) you can see the advantage of real-time calulated FM's and the static tables.

X-plane is no doubt the most extreme of the real-time flight sims, but if you like to shoot stuff, you can compare the amazing IL-2 Forgotten Battles which is real-time calculated (although not as advanced as X-plane) to Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3 (based on the MSFS engine). You don't have to be a pilot to feel which one is more real, and "live".

Re:Real time calculations

[burns210]

the untrained user, probably not... to pilots, professionals, and those in the know... yes, you can tell, and that is why it is so highly regarded and FAA approved.

Re:Real time calculations

[HeghmoH]

There's an easy way to tell the difference.

In X-Plane, you can build your own airplane and see how it flies. Some people actually do this in order to build better real airplanes.

Try that in a sim that uses pre-calculated data.

Free as in too much BEER

[elrond1999]

It's hard to imagine Microsoft coming home drunk one night from a party and accidentally uploading its entire source code, as Meyer did a few years back.

It was almost open source :)

Almost as closed source as Miscrosoft

[Johan Veenstra]

"But there are disadvantages to being a one-man show. It's hard to imagine Microsoft coming home drunk one night from a party and accidentally uploading its entire source code, as Meyer did a few years back. "I woke up the next morning and found an e-mail from a friend alerting me to what I'd done. My heart stopped. I had basically given away 12 years of work. I thought my life was over." He was able to remove the files before anyone could spread them around, but to this day he feels like he dodged a bullet. "I don't drink anymore," he says."

First Mars-plane simulation

[doorbot.com]

Those of you who have visited the X-Plane site have no doubt found the article, but here's a quick bit for everyone else...

So what sort of planes can fly on Mars? Not anything from Earth, that's for sure. Not enough lift or thrust. A Cessna or Boeing will just sit there on the ground without even moving. Put them in the air and they drop like beveled bricks with no wings. Both of my Mars-plane concepts are much like the U-2 Spyplane (designed to operate at around 100,000 ft, in simlar density air) one with a HUGE high-bypass jet engine built AROUND THE FUSELAGE, and another with a smaller rocket engine in the tail, like the X-15. The rocket plane has a lower-thrust engine, with plenty of fuel, for about 30 minutes of flight or so... the JET plane can fly for hours!

Article link (you'll have to try to ignore the excessive use of ALL CAPS)

I've always thought X-Plane was cool, but after reading this article I was convinced... and that's when I read the article well over a year ago!

Re:First Mars-plane simulation

[dcw3]

>Both of my Mars-plane concepts are much like the U-2 Spyplane (designed to operate at around 100,000 ft, in simlar density air)...

I like the simulator, but since we're into realism here, we should mention that the U-2 does NOT fly within even 4 miles of 100,000 ft...and yes, I do know this for a fact. The NASA version only goes to ~70k.

Re:First Mars-plane simulation

[RexRuther]

"one with a HUGE high-bypass jet engine"
I'd be supprised if you could get a jet engine to work in an atmosphere with little oxygen.

Re:First Mars-plane simulation

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume by U-2 Spyplane they are talking about the millitary version. You know the one that SPYs on countries.

Re:First Mars-plane simulation

[Maserati]

That could be handy, I'll need a Mars-adapted flyer for an animation project.

FlightGear is free

[Anonymous Coward]

FlightGear Flight Simulator is free and multiplatform also. Those who have the knowledge can help them out: http://flightgear.org/

Re:Developed on Mac OS X!

[Anonymous Coward]

jeebus - this project came along way before osx was
even thought of .. this isn't a testament to
anything but the skill of the programmer .. much as
your post is a testament to nothing but your
ass-rammingness

Re:Developed on Mac OS X!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos to OS X but, I don't get your point,are you saying that it wouldn't be possible on other platforms?

Flight Unlimited

[danielpavel]

Now thinking back, the best flight sim I recall playing was the one by the guys who made System Shock. It was an aerobatics focused sim, and the physics seemed very accurate.

I believe you are talking about Flight Unlimited... The company was named Looking Glass Studios.

Re:Flight Unlimited

[LinuxGeek]

Yup, I remember that and the sequel, Flight Unlimited II. They actually called it FU2, which I found hilarious.

RIP Looking Glass, System Shock2 was one of the best.

Oh. My. God.

[marko123]

The screenshots are unbelievable! Look at the little people!

Re:Oh. My. God.

[Jon Abbott]

X-Plane is not quite that good yet, but it's getting closer... I remember when Austin added roads into the sim, and there was much rejoicing. He added cars and even added emergency vehicles. At one point, someone realized that there were too many emergency vehicles on the roads, so he tweaked the car:emergency vehicle ratio to fix it. It's really amazing to think of the amount of detail that goes into these sims!

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[follower-fillet]

> But if you want something as niche as a world class flight simulator, sorry, you're probably not gonna get it open source.

"The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing."

-- <http://www.flightgear.org/>

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[nagora]

And to call their code "useless" because it's not open source, that's unfair, mean spirited, and ignorant.

But accurate: I can't use it and, given his attitude, I never will be able to. So "useless" pretty well covers it for me.

The odd thing is that this is a very good candidate for open-sourcing without cutting the programmer's throat. Flight simulations (particularly this one from the looks of it) are complex and users really need and want a good manual.

Give away the code; sell the manual! In this case I think the sales would probably go up, not down.

TWW

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[brandorf]

It's not like he's completely ignoring his user base, the article makes it sounds like he bends over backwards to put features for people into the program. I'd imagine that If I spent 12 years working on a program I wouldn't want people passing it around for free, even if it was in the name of open source. Besides, saying that a program would be much better once it's made open source is somewhere along the lines of "we would have made more money of this movie if it wasn't for pirates!"

This guy's passion is infectious!

[marko123]

The first rants full of CAPS I have read that I didn't notice the CAPS. It just reeks of excitement.

MARS! FRIGGIN MARS!

The SPACE SHUTTLE! It's a FRIGGIN GLIDER!

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

and the big companies saw it as worthwhile because it's a broad based useful product.

Browser suite is useful to everyone, and is complex to write

an Office suite is useful to everyone, and is complex to write

a plane simulator going down to the level of simulating fluid dynamics is useful to about 0.003% of the population (who will appreciate it VERY well) and is complex to write.

I'd guess the big companies going with moz/OO/etc are heading for what's useful to everyone as much as anything.

x-plane is a lot of fun

[davids-world.com]

i have spend many hours with this simulator. It's hard for me to comment on it's realism, since I have never flown a 737 or an A320 myself. But I trust the flight model is more complex than the one of MS Flightsim, and, after all, you can create "crazy things that fly". That's why companies that actually build aircraft rely on X-Plane before prototyping.

Also X-Plane can be used to log hours towards your Airline Transport Cert -- nice! Of course, you need the 150.000$ motion platform... Still cheaper than a standard simulator.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[fr0dicus]

Unfortunately, flightgear seems to be years behind X-Plane and falling away.

Furthermore, and this is important

[BlightThePower]

I'm quite annoyed by the parent argument. I know of more than one aviation lab that has approached Meyer and said "we would like this change or alteration made. how much?" and they have recieved by return of email, absolutely for free, modified versions of the software. He could of made thousands each time. Meyer is thought of very highly in these circles. Its an almost unique attitude towards customers that I find incredibly impressive. Puts a different spin on it huh. You can't argue the guy is some sort of profiteer; he's doing *free* bespoke programming for no reward. Why begrudge him the means to earn a living?

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[Anonymous Coward]

You (and why am I not surprised by this) completely missed the point. I don't WANT to be at the mercy of some fickle-minded, fat-assed, acne-faced hobbyist to implement, or more likely, NOT implement, a feature. He could die, or he could just throw his drug addled hands up and walk away -- THEN you're fucked. _I_ want to add the features.

Ask him for a Linux port, and see how quickly the "free, by return e-mail" reply comes back.

FUCK I hate proprietary code hoarders and their apologists.

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[Anonymous Coward]

You're welcome to come over here and say that to my face, you fucking guzzler! You Americans may be superior militarily, but a quick kick in the cunt will probably shut your ass up and wipe that arrogant smile of that fucking face of yours.

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[gujo-odori]

Why do you sound so much like a person who has never written, or even attemped to write, a single line of code? Ever? Like a person who just wants free (as in beer) software? Correct me (civilly) if I'm wrong, but I'm entirely certain that if he GPLed it tomorrow, you would never contribute a single feature to it, nor push any cash in the direction of someone willing to write those features on your behalf. Even if by some amazing turn of the planets I am wrong and you do code, could you code what he codes? I doubt it, or you'd be out there doing it already.

If you want to add the features, why not start now? Can't get his code? No problem, write a clone. You talk like it's so easy, so stop griping on /. and get started right away. The sooner you get something out there under the GPL, the sooner other people can start helping you with it. Or would, if they could stand your attitude and mouth. I bet that if you had whatever price he would want to free the code, he wouldn't sell it to you because of your impossible rudeness. Even by the low standards of civility one finds on /. you are exceptional.

Please try to remember that if you create a thing, you can do anything you want with it. Proprietary license. GPL. Keep it on a CD under your pillow until you die, with instructions that it be buried with you and never shown to anyone. It's yours, and no one else's. You, and only you, have the right to decide what happens to it. He has made his decision. That is his right.

I'd love to see everyone financially able to do so make everything Free Software. Some people can do that, other people can't. Let us all be grateful to the ones who can and do, and understanding of those who cannot. And let us never forget one thing: you cannot *compel* anyone to release their software under a Free license if they don't want to do so. The second you compel someone to release it, IT IS NO LONGER *FREE* because you deprived the author of her freedom to do what she wants with her property.

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[hdw]

If it makes you so upset why don't you put your money (or work) where your mouth is?

Spend some years coding something as good as XPlane and release it for free. Then you can come back and whine.

// hdw

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[Anonymous Coward]

1) I do code, in fact. I do it for a living, and before the majority of my waking hours were devoted to my company (not by my own preference, mind you), I contributed a LOT to documentation and coding projects. Now, I just can't spare the time -- unless I were to cut back on the 5 to 6 hours of sleep I get every night as it is.
2) A few years ago, I wrote a fairly big application, and I freed the code. It was a niche application, mind you, but I did contribute. Oh, and back in the DOS days I was selling it for cold hard cash.
3) I never said it was "easy", nor did I infer or imply that I was good enough or had enough time to do it myself. As it is, I contributed about 4 hours of my part-time personal life to community projects. I wish I could do it more, but the demands of a more than full-time job, a girlfriend, and other pursuits make that impossible (although I'm trying).
4) I simply suggested we try to come up with enough money to BUY the fucking code from the author so we CAN release it as open source. What's wrong with that? Why do I get all the abuse heaped on me?

In short, go fuck your hat, cock guzzler.

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[Anonymous Coward]

> 3) ... As it is, I contributed about 4 hours of my part-time personal life to community projects.

Er, I meant to say, "4 years", not "4 hours". :^)

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[gujo-odori]

Why do you get abuse heaped on you? Umm, don't look now, but you're the one who opened with abuse? Does "code hoarder" sound familiar? Don't you recall pouring out abuse on anyone who has respectfully Regarding point 2, when did you free this code? After DOS was no longer in use and the code was commercially worthless? If so, you're being dishonest. And were you really selling it, or were you asking money and wishing someone would buy it? For that matter, why don't you tell us all the names of these things that you've freed? I was around in the DOS days and way before that. So were some other /. readers. Perhaps we've heard of them? While you're at it, why not stop posting as an AC? You've got big talk when you won't even let anyone know your nick.

Regarding points 3 and 4, you did in fact state that you could/would add the features. Allow me to refresh your memory with a quote:

"_I_ want to add the features."

In fact, let me quote what went before that:

" I don't WANT to be at the mercy of some fickle-minded, fat-assed, acne-faced hobbyist to implement, or more likely, NOT implement, a feature. He could die, or he could just throw his drug addled hands up and walk away -- THEN you're fucked."

I could go into an aside here on the topic of who is heaping abuse upon whom, but it would be lost on you. Instead, let's take a look at what you have now said.

You have said "I want to add these features. I don't want to be dependent on someone else to do it." Now you have in fact admitted that, well, you can't do it yourself. Which puts you back to being dependent on others to do it. Freeing the source code would change this how? You'd be just as dependent on others as you are now, and because you have such an attitude problem, no one would do anything for you.

I would ask you to explain how one would go about fucking a hat, but frankly, Scarlett, I don't really want to know.

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[MoneyT]

Somehow I get the feeling that if he died in the next 10 minutes, someone he knows would either continue the development or offer the code for sale. Jeezuz, if you're so hung up on the opensource, stop wasting your fucking time posting on slashdot and start writing your own sim.

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen, you god damned cocksucking fucking cum guzzler, I am in no way trying to disparage the code hoarding author of X-Plane. I think the fucking accomplishments the non-Linux-porting prick has made are really impressive.

My language may be a BIT fucking colourful, but does that make what I say to you fucking retards a troll? I just thought it would be a nice idea to pay this proprietary code hoarder for his efforts and free the source code for the community.

You people have misunderstood my intentions. I'm really a very VERY nice guy, you fucking stool sucking assholes!

If you proprietary apologists don't WANT the fucking source code, just fucking say so. I guess us non-Windows using users are just FUCKED, though. But that's completely fucking fine, right?

You gum guzzling Microsoft using pricks!

Re:Furthermore, and this is important

[QuatMosk]

That's a lot of guzzling!

But seriously...

You seem to keep moving back and forth on your point (or in and out, judging from your colourful language), but I don't know when you're going to stop... I've been reading some of the other entries, and there's lots of examples of guys using X-Plane in Wine, so your "Linux problem" is solved.

As for making changes, I would have to go back and look at your messages again, but have you even hinted at what you'd like to change? Other than a full Linux port? Maybe if you were nicer to the "non-Linux-porting prick", he'd let you be one of his team members (mentioned in the article), and you could be part of the (admittedly closed-source) development of a Linux port.

And I know others have mentioned it, but you really did start the big Ball-o-abuse rolling yourself. I like a good swear now and again, but you're nuts!

QuatMosk
Guzzler, Esq.

To Answer Some Questions:

[peatbakke]

Yes, dynamic modelling is better than static tables. Not only is the performance more in line with reality, but it allows people to design airfoils and aircraft with the included software, and test their performance before any parts are fabricated. No guess work. Real engineering.

It's a hackers dream, because ALL of the flight controls and flight data can be imported/exported over a network. It also has a very sensible plugin system, and the author encourages people to come up with new and cool tools without any licensing restrictions. It might not be open source, but the architecture is very open.

X-Plane is the flight simulator of choice for many companies, including Scaled Composites, the builders of Spaceship One. It's also FAA approved for training towards commercial, transport, and instrument certificates.

Not only is the flight model incredibly accurate, but you also have to deal with differences in traction between tires on a wet runway, damaged windscreens from hail, and more equipment failures than you can shake a stick at.

It's amazingly beautiful with a reasonable graphics card and the latest scenery plugins, and it can use real-time weather information from NOAA.

It's not a toy or a game, even though it may be fun. It's as close to flying as you can get on your PC. I could go on and on, but it's probably better that you head to the web site. :)

http://www.x-plane.com/

Re:To Answer Some Questions:

[Vess V.]

Small note: Scaled only uses the graphics engine from X-Plane... they have their own realtime CFD engine for the flight dynamics.

Re:To Answer Some Questions:

[mumblestheclown]

X-Plane is the flight simulator of choice for many companies, including Scaled Composites, the builders of Spaceship One. It's also FAA approved for training towards commercial, transport, and instrument certificates.

Umm, actually, so is MSFS. The catch is (for either program) that you need to buy a certain amount of hardware (far more than just yoke and rudder pedals) to make it a valid PFD.

- singleengine / multiengine / regular flight instructor, airline transport pilot

I do too.

[LinuxGeek]

I have been using X-Plane for a few years and I and my pilot friends use it. My only real dissappointment was when Austin canceled the Linux port, but 6.x will run under wine now, haven't tried 7.x betas.

X-Plane is the only FAA training approved consumer package available. Read the front page on the web site, people have been using this flight program for a couple of years now to model aircraft behaviour during development.

I think you may be confusing ease of flight or level of fun with realistic physics. I had a couple of programs for my bro-in-law to practice with while he was taking flight lessons and he too latched onto X-Plane.

Re:I do too.

[mnemonic_]

X-Plane is only approved by the FAA when combined with a full motion platform. Flying X-Plane on your computer while sitting at your desk is not certifiable as training.

Re:I do too.

[LinuxGeek]

I realize that, I pointed to the page that explains it also. Add the motion platform and an instructor and you can actually log the time, much cheaper per hour of use than renting a suitable plane.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree - you could probably count them on the fingers of one foot!!

On the plus side, he's clearly demonstrated what one utterly dedicated person and some friends can accomplish. Open source or not it's awesome.

x-p does have issues& flightgear isn't there y

[davids-world.com]

Indeed I believe the fact that X-Plane is not open source, and maintained by mainly one person in lose cooperation with a few graphics people is a major disadvantage.

It's absolutly amazing that Austin could achieve this, but the project is getting at it's limits. Why?

Even the 4th release candidate still has quality issues, or, with a less friendly word: bugs. The user interface is really, really bad. Not only does it use custom widgets, but the widgets do not follow the usual expectations. The dialogs behave strangely (exit buttons), and, for example, if you increase the rendering quality, the system drops you down to the nearest airport, which comes handy if you're flying a 747 and you end up on a helipad.

People also develop flight models and (photo)realistic landscapes (e.g. the Global Scenery Project or, e.g., Cormac Shaw's high-detail scenery for Ireland and his Aer Lingus Jets at the Irish Hub.) Stuff like that generally works much better, and there is a great variety to choose from!

I also tried to evaluate FlightGear. This project is not anywhere near X-Plane. If I'm not mistaken, they only accurately simulate piston engines (other engines are a weak approximation). Besides, FlightGear doesn't compile if you don't have certain libraries installed, which turned out to be a pain on OS X...

That said, I believe that FlightGear may outperform X-Plane in a couple of years. Until then, I'll stick with X-Plane...

runs great under wine

[acrollet]

Just for the record, I've had good luck running X-plane under wine - opengl support, sound, joystick, the works. (latest winehq build, you may have to turn sound hw accel off depending on your card) This is using nvidia cards and the nvidia drivers. One might argue that a linux port isn't strictly necessary...

OT: food. clothing. shelter.

[Saeger]

You said this twice:

1. And, like anybody else, the creator of this work needs to eat.
2. Like anyone else, they've gotta eat.

Every time I hear someone say that I just stop to wonder how much the world will change in only a couple short decades once no one has to worry about slaving away at a dayjob just for the basics of life. When the necessities - and many of the luxuries - are no longer scarce, there will be a LOT less selfishness out there, and open source, in its many forms, will be the norm.

Molecular manufacturing is "just around the corner", and this ability to "grow" anything given energy (sunlight) + molecular feedstock, will be more liberating than even the information age.

When everyone's living like Kings, it'll be those who GIVE the most (instead of TAKE and HOARD) who will earn the real wealth/respect.

And as for the existing rent-seeking landlords who won't give an inch ... well, the cities won't be the meccas they used to be, and 70% of the Earth's surface area is water - perfect for floating communities... and then there's outer space, and then finally innerspace. Now living space ain't so scarce anymore either.

End of OT mini-rant.

--

Re:OT: food. clothing. shelter.

[Saeger]

Heh, man are you in a dream world.

Yeah, pondering the implications of nanotech for years can do that to you. Of course, it's easier for people like you to be pessimistic and overly cynical about the future because you didn't get the impractical flying car that was promised you for The Year 2000.

--

Re:OT: food. clothing. shelter.

[bertrandom]

Wow, you're a few beers short of a six pack, aren't you?

Re:OT: food. clothing. shelter.

[JasonAsbahr]

Not being cynical here, but it's not just a matter of food, there's also real estate.

Huh?

[autopr0n]

According to the article, the physics engine is good enough to test new aircraft design, and use for traning. What exactly was so bad about the physics engine?

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[nathanh]

The only reason that OpenOffice and Mozilla exist as open source is that big companies bought the source, and released it but continued to pay developers to make it better in an effort to kill Microsoft's power bases. I don't think those sorts of efforts could be duplicated by a team of coders who never get paid.

Konqueror. In many ways, as good as Mozilla, and open source from the start.

Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent perhaps half my life playing flight simulators of all kinds. I loved it. About 2 years ago I started playing X-plane, investing in the CH sim yoke and everything. I flew Cessnas all the time.

Finally, about a year ago, I decided that 15 years of simulators was quite enough, and I started to take flying lessons in real airplanes. The same aircraft - Cessna 172. I was expecting that with my many years of simulator experience, including 2 years with mega-realistic X-plane, I'd be able to waltz right in and fly the plane as if I was an expert.

Guess what? The plane kicked my ass. Flying it felt *nothing* like the simulator. Although x-plane may accurately simulate how the aircraft moves through the air, the air itself is in motion in very complex ways that aren't simulated. The plane moves around in ways the simulator never prepared me for. I couldn't land for shit until I'd done it in the real plane maybe 100 times, and I didn't get really good at it until about 300 times. I've taken some of my other X-plane addict friends up flying with me and let them take the controls, and they always say "It doesn't feel anything like the simulator".

And, completey separately from the actual aircraft control feeling unrealistic, no simulator I've ever played has done a good job of simulating the stress of a real flight. X-Plane does nothing to prepare you for trying to fly the plane while a controller is continuously talking in your ear to you and the other 10 airplanes in his airspace. X-Plane does not put you in a panic that you just intruded on a class B airspace boundary. X-plane does not wait until you're on short final, then tell you to start a climb, do a 360 and then reestablish yourself on final because a jet just got his IFR release. X-plane does not ask you to keep 3 other targets in the pattern in sight while landing. X-plane does not make you try to listen to the ATIS recorded weather information and controller simultaneously while also trying to fly through clouds on instruments. All of these things happen to me regularly in real planes.
(Admittedly, I do fly in the most complex airspace in the world - the LA basin - so maybe this is an extreme example.)

On the positive side, simulators do an excellent job of giving you an understanding about how navigation works (e.g. how to track VORs, when they're reversed, how to form a mental picture of where you are based on navaid information, etc.)

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[blunte]

I couldn't land for shit until I'd done it in the real plane maybe 100 times, and I didn't get really good at it until about 300 times.

That's scary... I was making respectable landings slipping in with 10kt crosswinds by my 6th hour of airtime. That probably amounted to 15 touch and goes.

I wish you weren't AC, I'd like to make sure you're never my pilot :)

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit it took you some hundred tries to learn to land a plane? I am a CFI and no one I have ever instructed took longer the 15 hours to land a Skyhawk.

On a seperate note I do agree in some respects to the unrelistic qualities of X-Plane. for instance it is incredibly easy to learn how to land a 747 on less then half an aircraft deck.

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[BitZtream]

I'd have to say, please don't fly for anyone :) I was landing a Cessna 152 in my second flight hour, with cross winds. While true, x-plane does NOT simulate the way the air moves the plane around, it does simulate wind gusts, microbursts, thermals and many other aspects of the weather to a reasonable degree. If you use the real weather updates and an app to keep the datafile x-plane uses in sync with the world, I find it pretty accurate. But, thats just my opinion of course :)

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[Knackered]

And no simulator gives you the feeling of 4g's first time you pull a loop, the disorientation of your first few spin entries, the weirdness of turning in inverted flight, or how cool it is to fly a seaplane 6 inches off the deck for a while.

I'll add my vote: get away from your computers, and learn to fly a real plane!

Flight simulators are most useful for instrument training and revising emergency drills, not primary training, IMHO.

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[mnemonic_]

This is why the FAA only approves X-Plane for training when used with a motion platform.

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[A55M0NKEY]

I always thought the reason flight sims sucked was that you both a yoke and *rudder pedals* to really get the feeling of flying an airplane. Also flight sims will never simulate the inertia you feel from really moving. Maybe those smooth simulated touchdowns would have felt like a monkey was flying the plane if they had been real.

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you and I have different standards for what it means to be able to land.

Could I physically get the plane on the ground after 15 touch and goes and just a few hours of flight time? Yes. My instructor is very hands off and I was landing the plane from the very first (non-demo-flight) lesson I ever took, although of course for the first ones he would nervously grab at the controls about 2 seconds before touchdown to put in some extra flare or whatever.

Could I *consistently* land every time, on the centerline, near the threshold, at the right speed, without any doubt of safety? That took something like 80 to 100 times before I felt comfortable.

It took 300 before every landing was one that would cause passengers to clap :-)

What is "scary" to me, to use your word, are people who do 20 hours in a plane and then think they know how to fly :-)

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[orn]

Sorry your comment is generating so much beef, but...

Flight simulators will never take you out of your living room and put you into the air. They are just a very, very complicated thought game. My CFI called it arm-chair flying and I would call it more important than the actual time you spend in the Cessna. But, I'd also say that sitting there in your chair without the flight simulator and just thinking about flying is in many ways more important than the real thing. In your chair, you have time to think about all the things that you should be doing. In the simulator, you don't have time to think about the details. In the airplane, you _have_ to have those skills polished.

Yes, it takes a large number of landings to really get a feel for all aspects of it. Other people are saying you should be landing after a couple hours - and you should be. But it's one thing to point the plane at the ground and land in one piece. It's another thing entirely to set the plane up perfectly (never needed to touch the throttle again until the threshold (or beyond)), judge your winds perfect, make your base and final turns perfect (you did remember to steepen up as you turned to the upwind, right? you did remember that left hand crab on base, right?), follow the glide slope in even when there isn't a glide slope indicator, hold that nose off the ground and flare such that the plane settles with the passengers completely unaware that they aren't flying anymore.

That takes practice. And that takes _real_ airplanes. Don't expect any simulator _ever_ (even when they have holodecks!) to take away the real world side of the equation.

That said, I'm really excited about flying on Mars! I just ordered my copy. :)

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

No you weren't. You know that instructor sitting next to you? Yeah. -CFII

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[Ralgha]

Bullshit. That is all.

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[mydigitalself]

the question is, though - how much longer would it have taken you to have learnt to fly a plane if you had never tinkered with x-plane at all?

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[-tji]

I concur.. I've never been really effected by watching over someone's shoulder while playing Flight Simulator.

But, when I rode along on one of my father's flight lessons, after 30 minutes of practicing turns I had already deposited that morning's bagel in the barf bag and was continuing to heave. My body was trying to purge the contents of my empty stomach, sweat was poring from my body, and I was about ready to jump out of the plane to make it stop. (I'm a fairly frequent business flyer, and have never had air sickness before. I've even flown in a couple Cessna's in the past. So, this problem really took me by surprise.)

Try to capture that in X-Plane!

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[dsasser]

Things I believe most simulators lack:

1. Good amospheric model. Flying an airplane is cake in silky smooth air, and the sims probably do a pretty good job of simulating it. I've found that air about 4 times in the last 112 hours. It's dealing with all the little things throwing you off that takes the skill.

2. Control force feedback. In the little planes I've flown it's very important. VERY.

3. Visuals. Need more monitors, or a head-tracker set of VR goggles.

4. Sound. I can close my eyes and tell you if we're climbing or diving. There's all sorts of noises that tip you off in little airplanes.

I also have found that flying the simulator doesn't help you fly a real airplane. However, flying a real airplane *really* helps you fly a simulator.

As for complexity: Yeah, the LA basin does take the cake, but FS2K makes up with it because you have to control your whole panel with one little mouse. It's *so* much easier when you have all the switches and knobs. :)

<flame bait type="blatant">Perhaps a 747 is easier. I've heard all they do it sit up front and set the auto-pilot</flame bait>

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Also check out X-Squawkbox, a great plugin for X-Plane It will let you fly on the VATSIM network, where you can get live ATC during your flight.

XSquawkbox

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[David Jericho]

I've had the oppurtunity many times to go for rides in real simulators, with the simulator staff present to provide all that interaction. I've also sat in the jump seat many times as my Father is a pilot.

I'm an X-Plane fanatic myself, but I'll agree that the real thing and X-Plane are still worlds apart when it comes to the actual reality of flying.

But I do feel most of the difference lies not in the fact it's on a computer, but that you don't have enough sensory input. Professional motion platforms and other sensory input systems of 10 years ago were still enough to make you think you were really there.

As has often been said, it's not about presenting realism, but the illusion of believability. The flight model in X-Plane is very believable. Add a motion platform, and other events and inputs, it'd be a much real experience.

Having said that, it's still fairly common to meet armchair pilots that want to fly with all the distractions. More often than not, it's for the sheer joy of "flying".

Re:Even X-plane comes up short... sorry

[JimPooley]

the question is, though - how much longer would it have taken you to have learnt to fly a plane if you had never tinkered with x-plane at all?

Probably not as long. It's fairly well known that home flight sims give people bad habits they need to get rid of once they get behind the yoke or stick of a real plane. I know this from personal experience, and just don't play with sims any more.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[afidel]

Actually Mozilla is from scratch, no bought source here =) While the Mozilla project did start as an overhaul of the Communicator codebase it became apparant in the first year that the code was crap and that a from the ground rewrite was needed (for lords sake Communicator was based on nearly a decade of hacking at the NCSA code to try to keep up with the evolution of HTML from pre-standards to HTML 4). From that point on it has been a fresh start and has involved nearly as much code generated outside of Netscape/AOL as that from their paid developers, and almost all of the Q&A has been free from the community, which is normally nearly half the cost of a software project.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla and OpenOffice aren't great examples, because they were commercial codebases which were built up over a number of years and then released, rather than built from scratch. I can't think of a major ground-up free software project that isn't an operating system (*BSD) or system component (Linux, XFree86, KDE, GNOME).

Reality is not.

[BiggerIsBetter]

I think the answer is electromagnetics with some chemical helpers to let you ingore the real world. If there's a way of targeting a small electromagnetic pulse at a neuronal level (eg external to the body, and in 3D), that might work and would be far less invasive than implants. It would of course involve different targets for everyone and be a bitch to train for each person.

On a completely unrelated AI topic, if someone successfully modelled the human brain in software, then downloaded a map of an existing person's brain, how would you really know it worked, unless you also modelled the expected IO interfaces such as eyes, ears, nerves, and muscles and voice?

"It's using all the CPU but it's not *doing* anything!"

/drunk

problems

[blunte]

Like I said, I forget specific details, but it was something like erratic behavior at certain limits. Perhaps it was rounding problems, or perhaps something else.

For example, and I think this is one of the specific problems I encountered, if you pulled into a vertical, cut power, stalled, and played with the controls, you could cause the plane to spin wildly (pitch) at the center of gravity. The rate at which the aircraft was doing endover spins was impossible, assuming even such a flipping motion would have occurred.

This was not a flat spin. This was something physically impossible. Assuming the aircraft would begin such a flipping motion, there would be no force to cause it to continue along that axis, much less at that very high rate.

There were two or three different situations that could cause impossible behavior. I may not have my details right, as I stated, because my recollection is fuzzy.

I'm not making this stuff up. I was very interested in trying that sim from what I had read.

Re:problems

[LinuxGeek]

I've practiced spins with X-Plane before and what you are describing sounds like a downloaded airplane with really messed up lift and force vectors. If it was a supplied airplane, then a quick email to Austin should have produced a fix in a week or so.

The current versions are accurate enough that Piper has modeled the Arrow and made it available for download from their own website. Pretty good endorsment, give it a try again. The 7.x betas are looking very good on windows.

Re:problems

[Vokbain]

Maybe you're just a really bad pilot.

I've been using X-Plane for about... 7 years now? That has never happened to me during normal use.

It only happens when I do really stupid things, the kinds of things nobody would ever be dumb enough to test in a real plane.

Re:problems

[agallagh42]

Isn't that one of the reasons for using a simulator? So you can do those dumb things without actually ending up dead? It establishes for you those things that would be really dumb in a real plane...

WARNING WARNING WARNING!

[swordgeek]

I had a run-in with the X-plane people (Basically Austin and his buddy Mike Brown on sales) over their "guaranteed upgrades for life." In a word, they lied. Furthermore, they continue to lie, and are absolute ASSHOLES about it.

To be specific here, they will always make the latest patch available for the current version. That is, if they're developing X-P 6.x, then the latest 6.x patch is available. However...

1) You cannot get any older patches. This is a problem because several times the current versions has been buggy, unstable, or broken.

2) Once the initial 7.x release is out, you are absolutely SOL on downloading the final 6.x patch. He will NOT provide it under any circumstances, once he's decided to get rid of 'free support for life' on a previous version.

I'm sorry to have to post this. I think that X-P is a really cool program. I'm utterly amazed at how far he's gotten with it. However, his code review (poor), attitude ("fuck you!"), and flat out lying on support all lead to something that I'll never drop money on again.

Pity, really. If he lost his ego, he'd write better software.

You can read more about it here.

Re:WARNING WARNING WARNING!

[The Wing Lover]

Just the other day, in rec.aviation.piloting (or was it rec.aviation.student?) some guy posted an email exchange between himself and Austin Myers that ended with Myers calling his customer a whining little shithead....

Re:WARNING WARNING WARNING!

[dsasser]

If he lost his ego he'd probably not be writing this software at all.

Computation Method

[Anonymous Coward]

Any one know if he uses panel method to compute aeronautical forces?

Austin listens to his customers

[thogard]

With Popular Sci running an atricle and a /.ing, I'm sure Austin will be glad to get the attention. I've played with the demos over a number of years but never bought it until today.

X-plane now runs under os-x, I expect most of the hard work to get it to work well under linux will need to be done for the os-x port as well. If enough paying customers let austin know they still want a linux port, there is a chance it might happen but only if its not too much work.

It appears that the new UDP network system will allow x-plane to segment from the calculation engine from the display and all the instrments can already be done on an external computer.

Re:Austin listens to his customers

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks.

Cool concept, but the quality control is shit, and I'm not giving another single penny of my money to that fucker.

Re:Austin listens to his customers

[GrubInCan]

Subscribe to the xplane-tech list at yahoo and see what his customers really think.

Re:Austin listens to his customers

[Have Blue]

Not really... It's a common misconception that since OS X is "a Unix", all OS X programs resemble all Unix programs. OS X still has some proprietary libraries, most importantly Carbon, which is almost certainly what was used here to port the Mac OS 9 version of X-Plane. So, no, an OS9-OSX port does not really make a Linux port easier.

Re:Austin listens to his customers

[thogard]

A program that is ported to both windows and Os X is not likly to use teh advanced features of ether. From what I can see of x-plane, it seems to do its own gui and basicly uses a full screen window that it does its drawing in and that is done via open GL. Now that OS X is unix, it means there are other ways to deal with files and since the most windows like way happens to be a full posix way, it makes sense to use that in place of the two different sections of code that he might be using to read in thigns like config details.

Re:x-p does have issues& flightgear isn't ther

[henley]

I'm a 2-year user of X-Plane, although I confess I've not been following the v7 beta stuff (I've stuck with 6.60 for now). I've logged hundreds of hours on the sim, and tinkered with the other tools available (e.g. I've modified aircraft etc).

X-Plane is a fantastic piece of work for a single person to have to his name. Probably the highest praise I can think to give it, is that it's not only the best at what it tries to do - simulate flight of all kinds - but it's also usable.

Having said all that, usable is about as far as it goes. It's not, and has never set out to be, a polished application with a glitzy UI. The interface for the sim and the tools is good enough and no better. If you need to get out and see what'll happen to an NF-104 at 100K feet when the control surfaces fail on you, then X-Plane is for you. But be prepared to adapt to it's interface, rather than have it teach you.

I've been looking at FlightGear recently too. And about all I can say about this right now is that it's clearly got promise, it looks good, but there's a looonnggg way to go. At least X-Plane lets me choose aircraft from a file selector dialog; I have to shut down FlightGear and use a different command line switch to load a new aircraft. It's clearly still very much for the Geeks for now, wheras I know there are professional pilots using X-plane.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[hdw]

As a seriuos flightsim geek I've used over 40 different sims and games (just counted and found 35 flightsim CD's on the shelf, then add dowloads).

I stay updated on the latest versions of Flight Gear and due to it's openness it's the most promising sim I've found.
But it's way behind XPlane (and, dare I say it, MSFS).
Sadly enough I think what FG really needs is a madcap like Austin to get really good.
And even more sadly that I can't reach that level of commitment myself :(

But maybe some fine day it will be the best flightsim around.

// hdwbr

Use of the SDK?

[BlightThePower]

If you know what you are doing, which specific features do you want to add to X-Plane that the SDK [http://www.xsquawkbox.net/xpsdk/] doesn't allow you to already?

Strange

[Vokbain]

IIRC, X-Plane has only been available from X-Plane.com and X-Plane.org for the year or so.

I haven't seen it in the games section anywhere for quite some time.

Re:x-p does have issues& flightgear isn't ther

[mnemonic_]

This is not a troll, but considering the fact that Austin Meyer is a hardcore Mac user, I find it surprising that he does not focus that much on GUI issues.

Re:x-p does have issues& flightgear isn't ther

[mnemonic_]

FlightGear is designed to simulate more than just piston aircraft "accurately", though accuracy is infinitely arguable. FlightGear supports multiple types of aerodynamics models, including LaRCsim (developed at the NASA Langley Research Center), JSBSim, and YASim, the latter of which simulates performance based on aircraft 3d geometry, much like X-Plane's flight model.

A flight model developed by UIUC is also supported which is capable of modeling nonlinear aerodynamics.

Balancing lookup tables with calculated dynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

Working in the simulation industry I'm always interested in any new simulators/games that come along. Having designed and built many stand alone dynamics models that need to recreate real performance it is always important to get a balance between what can be calculated and what needs to be included in a look up table.

Despite unexhaustable effort in developing a calculated dynamics model there will always be unforseen relationships between different aspects of a vehicle. In addition when a new capability or feature is added to a vehicle the calculated dynamics model almost invariably cannot cope.

I would love to see an open source dynamics simulator that uses a combination of configurable lookup tables and configurable caclulable dynamics. Given my limited knowledge of the internals of MS Flight, X-Plane, Flight Gear I'm not too sure whether any of these solutions could support such functionality. Anyone got any insights?

As an actual Pilot

[Anonymous Coward]

As a pilot, I can tell you that Microsoft Flight Simulator has several problems. I've noticed that their Cessna 172-SP model has several issues in particular.

1) The yaw caused by rudder. This is so unrealistic. The yaw just doesn't seem right. It really prevents you from doing proper slips (both forward and slide varieties).

2) The engine sounds. In a real Cessna, when you pitch the nose up for a full-power stall, the prop is working harder than in cruise flight because the prop is beating against air that is almost still relative to the plane (as oppossed to cruise where the prop is simpy maintaining momentum). In the real world, the engine noise increases. In flight simulator, it decreases a bit. This may have been fixed with a patch on fs2002, but I have seen NO patches.

3) Ground effect. Ground effect occurs when the plane is flying near the ground. The area of low pressure on top of the wing tries to trade places with the area of relatively higher pressure on the bottom of the wing. Some of this air exchanges over the wing tip. The ground disrupts the smooth flow of air around the wing tip so the plane actually flies better near the ground. Ground effect is why in airliners you often see the swirling air in the exhaust fumes at the end of wings. In the real world, most planes, including the Cessna, fly much differently in ground effect than out of ground effect. For example, in a Cessna, when taking off, if you are too slow you can still apply back pressure on the controls and the plane will lift off the ground. However, if the plane is still not ready to fly (too slow) it will never get above 10 feet off the ground because ground effect is providing the more efficient lift to make it fly. In flight simulator, this never occurs.

4) Spins. In flight simulator, it's almost impossible to induce a spin. It's must easier in real life when using spin-positive control inputs.

Re:As an actual Pilot

[L.Adamson]

Spins..... I suggest you pick up the FS2002 3rd party RealAir Marchetti SF260. It slips, spins & recovers more accurately than those of X-Plane or IL-2 Sturmovik. This is payware, but a freeware RealAir update for the stock 172 is also available....... which allows for slips & spins. I'm also an actual pilot with a lot of actual spin practice in a Pitts. Have flown the real Marchetti 260 also. L.Adamson

Look at www.x-plane.org too

[Inode Jones]

If you're not american and want to buy the software, be careful.

x-plane.com charges US$25 international shipping. For a $60 product? Yeah, right. Getting better, though, it used to be $30.

x-plane.org also sells the software. They have recently increased their shipping rates to Canada - to $16.25 (up from $10).

Dammit, I have a 2Mbps DSL line! Why can't I PayPal the $60 and download the thing, like I do with FreeBSD? Paying $25 to ship a CD is atrocious.

Re:Look at www.x-plane.org too

[davids-world.com]

Sorry, you obviously don't live in this world.

I ordered X-Plane a couple of weeks ago, and I think I paid about USD 10 for international shipping & handling to Ireland.

You need to get the CD simply because the software has a (weak) copy-protection -- it requires the orig CD to be in the drive.

But generally you're right, download would be much better, especially since it would save you customs.

Re:Look at www.x-plane.org too

[BlightThePower]

To whom it may interest: In the UK, I've seen a boxed copy in my local Game for approx 30 quid (I think it was 35 - a discount they were running at the time).

Re:Look at www.x-plane.org too

[quacking duck]

Seen it as well, but it's probably version 5, almost two generations out of date.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the kind words on FlightGear. I, too, believe it is promising - the calibre of our developer base is high, and new developers are still hopping on board.

I have to say that I am impressed with MSFS and X-Plane both - though I have not tried X-Plane. Austin, by all accounts, is a very driven and talented individual. Given that he has done this on his own (to the best of my knowledge) is an accomplishment worthy of acknowledgement.

Writing simulator code is time consuming and often arduous work, made particularly *interesting* in our case as we need to craft cross-platform code. How I wish someone would pay me to simply develop open source simulator code! :-) I write code for and use engineering simulators as a career choice, currently for the space shuttle program. Flight simulation is "in the blood" of a lot of our developers. It takes up a lot of our spare time. If you visit the various web pages, you can see that FlightGear is getting some very interesting usage.

While the opportunity presents itself here, it would be interesting to read about the wants and needs of users - what is not now modeled (or not modeled well) in current flight sims that you'd like to see done better?

Jon S. Berndt
Project Coordinator,
JSBSim Project (a FlightGear flight model)
http://jsbsim.sf.net

Agree wholeheartedly

[CrystalFalcon]

I own a motorcycle. A fast motorcycle (a Suzuki Hayabusa).

Anybody telling me that piloting a fast sports bike in whatever simulation comes anywhere near the real thing with wind, rush and G-forces tickling your fear and adrenaline buttons as you push the bike to the tarmac in sharp curves at 300 km/h (175 mph) have probably never been on two wheels, just in their little safe steel cage on four.

Saying that it's even close to the same thing to be on one of those arcade-style simulators, even one where you lean the bike (which is about as close as you can get in bike sim), is a ridiculous statement.

That's my first point: a sim is nowhere close to the real thing. You can get useful lessons for the real thing from a sim if you are actively doing both, but otherwise, forget it.

Now for my second point: An aggressive low-flying sportsbike has 2 (two) important gauges. Speed and RPM. You can ignore the speedometer. Most of the time, you can ignore the RPM gauge too (you get that info from the engine noise anyway).

How many gauges are there on a 747, and how many of these can you routinely ignore?

Re:Agree wholeheartedly

[Asgard]

I'm not a 747 pilot, but I imagine there are a lot of status guages that could be ignored most of the time. Things like engine temperature, oil pressure, hydraulic pressure, etc. Assuming nobody shot up the engines or the wings there are probably a lot of guages that indicate things that _might_ be important in a mechanical failure, but can be ignored if all you want to do is keep it from nosediving. Altitude, speed, rate-of-descent, gear, flaps and spoilers are the core indicators of any plane (well, many planes don't have spoilers or retractable gear) and someone who can idenfity and read them can go a long way in keeping the plane from making a large crater.

A controlled crash landing is much better then an uncontrolled dive.

Re:Agree wholeheartedly

[MrCreosote]

Having just spoken with my brother, who *IS* a 747 pilot, he says that in the simplest case of a visual approach, the only thing you couldn't know intuitively would be airspeed. Everything else you could know just by looking out the window.

He said that nowadays, the computers generally hide all the 'system status' type info, and only shows it when somthing goes wrong.

Re:Agree wholeheartedly

[Jonner]

Don't forget the attitude indicator (the instrument that indicates the pitch and roll angles); it's essential in low visibility. Also, flaps and spoilers are control surfaces, not indicators. If you want to talk about control surfaces, the most essential ones are elevator, ailerons, and rudder.

Skewed definition of "realism"

[mumblestheclown]

the definition of "realism" that this article uses is skewed towards aerodynamic realism. this is only a tiny part of what makes a simulator "realistic."

As an ATP-rated pilot, what I like seeing in a simulator to make it "realistic" are plausible flight models in normal regimes yes, but more so accurate avionics and systems, believable clouds and weather, a realistic "environment" including other traffic and ATC, and a nice looking terrain.

MSFS has X-Plane beaten by a mile in those departments. X-Plane is a nice sim, but it seems to be pretty much the domain of a few people who bleat about flight model being everything just like several years ago on slashdot you'd find people bleating about how stability was everything for an operating system, usability be damned.

Re:Skewed definition of "realism"

[davids-world.com]

Realisitc traffic?

Lately, on final to EIDW 28, I was cleared for landing by ATC, the TCAS goes off and what do I see coming down at about 10 o'clock?? I couldn't believe my eyes --- it was a Space Shuttle. Check this out (Screenshot).

What an honour for the small international airport at Dublin, Ireland. :)

I kind of remember people saying that PC Flightsims are great to learn IFR, but for "simple" VFR in a "simple" Cessna, they don't actually help student pilots significantly. Which means: Flight model realism isn't all that important (for serious use), after all...

Re:Skewed definition of "realism"

[mumblestheclown]

Flightsims are great to learn IFR, but for "simple" VFR in a "simple" Cessna, they don't actually help student pilots significantly.

False.

Which means: Flight model realism isn't all that important (for serious use), after all...

True. However statement 1 does not have an implication ("which means") in statement 2.

I have trained over 190 students now. MSFS (indeed, most flight simulators) are valuable tools EVEN FOR VFR PILOTS even in areas beyond the usual suspects (basic instrument techniques, navigation, etc).

Yes, it does take some prodding from a thorough instructor to get students to do the right thing the sims, but here's where they shine: let's say I'm teaching a basic approach ("power off") stall to a private student - what's going to be his biggest stumbling block?

getting over the fear of stalls? that's 10 minutes. getting the hands and feet moving correctly? that's maybe another 15. The biggest part where students take time learning is in LEARNING THE MANEUVER STEPS. I.e:

• Pre-maneuver checklist
  • (all the steps therein)
• clearning turns
• carb heat
• heading and altitude
• power back
• heading and altitude
• white arc flaps 1
• heading and altitude
• flaps 2
• heading and altitude
• flaps 3
• heading and altitude
• power idle
• heading and altitude
• Announce pre-stall buffet
• (on stall), full-power, carb heat cold, single-notch of flaps up
• heading and altitude
• Flaps up as airspeed incrases
• Cruise speed, power back
• re-trim as necessary for level fligth

and so on and so forth. If you've seen this a billion times, it's simple. if you're a new student, it's getting the order and the speed of operations correct that's the problem. Even if the flight model is not 100% (and make no mistake about it - MSFS has been well better than good enough for this kind of stuff for quite a while), you can learn the order of operations for the maneuver. You will save time and money.

Incidentally, if you ever see an SR22 actually flying into Dublin, Ireland, it may well be me.

Re:Skewed definition of "realism"

[Anonymous Coward]

Although people use simulators for different reasons, I would say that if you are using it in a training environment, the flight model is nearly always important. Of course, if you're training IFR procedures, you don't need the most sophisticated flight model available (there the "brainwork" is the most important element in that training - that you gain situational awareness and are able to interpret the instruments correctly and fly the procedures), but your "aircraft" should fly like a *plane* in the end. You will find that many aircraft in various flight sims don't fulfill this requirement. And in the end, for training purposes, I think that you will agree that visuals are usually unimportant. Take a look at many full motion sims: their graphics are lightyears behind X-Plane, let alone FS2004. The question is: does it matter? If you're planning on training VFR navigation, then yes, maybe. If you're doing LOFT or are training engine-out approaches, then I doubt that you will mind the outdated graphics that much. And as for the ATC and air traffic in FS, I don't think that it's *that* much better than XP's, but that's a matter of opinion...

As for systems and avionics.. there you have a point. In its current state, XP is behind in that domain. Not because it *couldn't* handle it, but because nobody has taken the initiative to do it yet. I think that with the new plugin system, things will change in that respect. Of course, you should also see things in perspective and you could say that simulators that simulate "every switch and knob" are very realistic and also as unrealistic as it gets at the same time. It depends on how you use the simulator. If you are trying to learn the systems logic and memorize various checklists, then every switch and button is what you're looking for. If you're training IFR flight or are doing LOFT, then you want realistic *workload simulation* and that of course isn't having to handle every possible flip of the switch - things which your FO would normally be doing on jets.

So I think that things need to be seen and evaluated relatively. Thus saying that XP is "only" good for flight modelling is short-sighted and incorrect in my opinion.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[mumblestheclown]

Because flightGear SUCKS.

FlightGear is OSS's shame. It is like a mutant that is kept under the stairs when guests come over. It:

• exists to fill a massive market
• has had dozens of volunteers over many years now

and yet

• it doesn't come close to closed-source, for-profit equivalents. in short, it sucks.

Flame me if you will, but do check it out - it's true. Now, I don't mean that it sucks completely, but there can be little disagreement that compared to X-Plane or MSFS, it really is behind the times. Furthermore, as other posts have pointed out, the code is such that it will be very hard to ressurect it.

One of the Meyer brothers?

[rhiorg]

If we could somehow get Austin Meyer and Sid Meyer to work on it together, we'd have the world's finest airport management simulator ever.

Then if we also enlisted the help of Oscar Meyer, we'd have winged weenies waging war.

Re:One of the Meyer brothers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it sucks for you that it's Sid Meier and Oscar Mayer.

Re:One of the Meyer brothers?

[rhiorg]

i bow to your superior knowledge of weiners.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Registered Coward v2]

Give away the code; sell the manual! In this case I think the sales would probably go up, not down.

Until someone decides that documentation should be free as well and starts an OS manual.

Arthur Hailey

[Vitus Wagner]

Well, that one's easy. Most Americans don't read anything except the TV guide.

But this is ./. Nerds ought to be more educated than average people from same country.

I consider Hailey very nerdish author. He pays much attention on how things work in modern civilization.

Re:Arthur Hailey

[spyderbyte23]

I consider Hailey very nerdish author.

He also sucks. I read Strong Medicine, Wheels and Airport in high school. He's clearly done a lot of research, but his characterizations are paper-thin and his dialogue's terrible.

I can't tell you how depressing it is for me to hear a guy from the same country as Doestoevski describe Arthur Hailey as "American literature." We can do better than that, man, I swear. Go read James Ellroy.

Old News

[Jainith]

Just wondering why all the "cool" popular science articles are always mentioned on slashdot two weeks after I get my copy, have read it, and filed it somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind...

Jainith

Simulation vs. Game II

[cubyrop]

I've played X-Plane several times on my roommate's computer (he's a flight sim freak), and I've come to the conclusion that it is an amazing simulation of flight, but a very poor simulation of fun.

For real flight sim fun with accurate physics models, might I recommend Starfox for SNES?

The coolest thing about X-Plane

[drouse]

The X-15/B-52 drop scenereo actually allows you to drop *anything* from around 40-50K feet at about 500 MPH (I can't remember the exact numbers, I'm normally too busy to look at those gauges at the time).

That is so much fun! Especially when you turn off the sim's realism for in-flight airframe damage. Gliders do huge loops at that speed. Not much lift for helos though. I see that someone has built a grand piano model, that's going to be my next drop...

Even with airframe damage turned on you can drop a helocopter and see how long you can go before the rotors fall off. Then watch with the third-person camera as you fall on Burbank, or whatever.

What they need is a cruise missle model, then you could play not-so-smart bomb...

but is it better than Sopwith2 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think not.

what bout a real car sim

[cheekyboy]

btw im writing this on a pda, on couch wifi

id like to see a real true car driving learning sim gta3 quality but road rules accurate .

Re:what bout a real car sim

[isorox]

id like to see a real true car driving learning sim gta3 quality but road rules accurate .

I live in Greece, GTA3 is road rules accurate!

Re:what bout a real car sim

[shrewmy]

i remember reading somewhere on the x-plane or one of his other sites about he was working on a car thing... like x-car or x-racing or something like that
but theres also Drivers Education, which you can get off certain abandonware websites with a quick google search you shouldn't have trouble finding it
it's a bit restricted in terms of you can only go so fast or run so many redlights before it stops you
plus you have to do all the "hit this button for seatbelt, this button to check your blind spot, this button to check your makeup in the rearview" crap too before you can even leave the parking spot
but you can pretty much cruise around it's city
i havent really seen how big it is since i usually get throttle happy before i get too far
it's not a simulation at all but as far as learning goes it doesn't seem to bad
it's actually a educational thing that teaches you all the driving laws and crap of your favorite state and pretty much just has the 3d driving thing in there so people dont get totally bored of it

so let me get this straight

[rootofevil]

you actually expected the plane to fly the same way in real life as it did in the computer?

i have this bridge up for sale, its in brooklyn, so itd be a bit of a drive for you...but its a great deal!

Re:Balancing lookup tables with calculated dynamic

[eutychus_awakes]

FlightGear with the Jbsim Flight Dynamics Model (FDM) can do these things. Many researchers use it for just what you are looking for. Quoting from the Jbsim site;

The aircraft configuration file is in XML format (more or less), and contains information about mass properties, landing gear positioning, propulsion, etc. Of course, the aircraft aerodynamic characteristics must also be described. This is done by entering the stability derivative information on one of three ways:

A static value A one-dimensional table (i.e. CDalpha as a function of mach) A two dimensional table (i.e. Cnbeta as a function of mach and altitude

We are also looking at being able to specify stability derivatives given aircraft geometry, using standard equations you might find in a textbook, as well as being able to specify them as polynomial functions.

Moreover, FlightGear, because it is open source, can be tweaked, modified, optimized. . .whatever. There are several additional open-source tools available for FlightGear to aid in doing terrain modeling, aircraft design, etc.

Better Yet

[A55M0NKEY]

A genetic algorithm orinthopter designing program.

X-plane rules

[slashbot-101]

I've been playing that simulator for quite a while; it's very realistic & fun. You can do stuff like..fly into realtime naviational weather..construct your own plane & it attempts to apply realistic pressures on it (stress on components etc). They give you a wide variety of craft to fly by default..helicopters..fighter planes..big commercial airliners, even gliders and crap.

Nothing is as fun as climbing as high as you can force a plane to go, taking a dive straight to the ground..seeing if you can recover from it without ripping the plane apart/crashing. Then flying mach 2 like 150' off the ground over hilly terrain..that keeps me engrossed for hours.

They state on their site that it runs under WINE - it does pretty well under it too, the time that I tested it..

Anyway if you have any interest at all in flight simulators / well written programs..I would buy it. The only thing I haven't been able to do well is land :-)

What happened to ACM?

[OYAHHH]

A long long time ago a flight simulator called ACM was available. What ever happened to it? Was it renamed? Does anybody still have the source?

With it you could define aircraft characteristics and the like.

It had a server and multiple client machines could connect and play utilizing X11. It was quite fun battling my co-workers although I was always pathetic.

For 1994 standards the 3d graphics weren't too bad, especially since we were running it on 40mhz machines.

Re:What happened to ACM?

[siglercm]

Luuuke! Use the Google! (Or was that the Schwartz?)

Web Simulations, Inc.

Re:What happened to ACM?

[OYAHHH]

Hey,

Thanks!

Actually I did the Google thing but whatever I was putting in was returning a bunch of off-topic stuff.

And given I knew I was gonna post anyway, I figured somebody out there already knew.

Yes, I'm lazy, my apologies.

Thanks again though. I'll need to check it out more thoroughly....

I use X-Pilot you insensitive clod!

[286]

X-Pilot is not just a game.
You can create your own planes
and maps, in ASCII no less.
It's the flatland of all flight sims!!!

ok. I'll go home now...

The pass of Thermopylae - Imaginary Crowd Rush

[SpikeSpiff]

Terrorists are crazy, not stupid. They know that they will be rushed the next time they hijack a plane. A determined, practiced, and equipped group of men can absolutely defeat an unprepared, unarmed crowd. Especially a crowd that is approaching one at a time. Remember the battle at Thermopylae. This is the end of boxcutter and soap bar bomb hijackings, and the beginning of machette and .357 magnum hijackings

Re:The pass of Thermopylae - Imaginary Crowd Rush

[mOdQuArK!]

Do you really think people are going to be approaching one at a time?

I personally think it would be more "dogpile" - climbing over seats as necessary - especially if the passengers become SO afraid for their lives that they pass into an "enraged" state.

In that situation, a machete or even a handgun (if you could get either on the plane) would only incapacitate a limited number of passengers before the weapons are rendered ineffective - even with a "highly trained" team. You'd need a team large enough to be comparable in size to the rest of the passengers on the plane - if you don't, the passengers will bury them with their bodies if nothing else.

Re:The pass of Thermopylae - Imaginary Crowd Rush

[Anonymous Coward]

Rushing the attackers might disrupt terrorist Plan A, but Plan B is probably "crash the plane."

The list of simple ways to attack a jetliner from the inside while it is cruising at altitude is lengthy and not appropriate to publish here. But once a crew is incapacitated and the passengers are rushing the new terrorist crew, all the terrorists need to do is slam the yoke in. Passengers could not even make their way to the cockpit because the floor would be at a steep angle and g-force would not allow easy movement.

The crew of a FedEx plane once used aircraft motion to immobilize a disgruntled employee trying to crash the plane into Memphis FedEx terminal. But once control of an un-piloted aircraft is lost to diving forces, there is little chance passengers could regain control before it power-dives into the ground

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[eckythump]

next thing you'll tell me that science isnt altruistic and that corporations with managers getting salaries just to decide my salary have been responsible for all the advancements of mankind

Other dynamically-calculated flight sims

[argStyopa]

FWIW, WW2OL (World War 2 Online) is a MMOG that ALSO uses dynamic flight modelling, rather than static tables.

Plus, it's a lot more interesting seeing the dynamic model in action when there's a D.520 behind you being held off by your (human player) tailgunner, while you thread your way through (human controlled) AAA fire, dropping bombs in support of your (human player) buddies on the ground as infantry and tanks.

OK, there is some AI in the AAA, but everything else is played by real people.

And you think a short-approach to EGE (Vail, CO) is stressful? Ha!

Any good trucking simulators out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, does anyone know of any good semi trucking simulators? I think i've heard of a couple but can't remember the titles. Preferably it should have a nice selection of tractors, trailers
and semi-trailers, such as Renault, Scania, and Volvo. Have most of the main US interstates mapped into software complete with weigh stations and truckstops. I'd like to be able to log my driving hours too.

Thanks for any information!

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[Politburo]

Is the reason you can't use it truly because it's not Open Source? If so, you are the one ideologically cutting yourself off from a good piece of software.

If the reason you can't use it is because it's written for Windows, that has nothing to do with Open Source. Don't confuse the two. Open source software exists for Windows, and closed source exists for *nix, but if it's not written for your platform, chances are* you're SOL.

*Yes, programs can be ported.

X-Plane 7

[iJed]

The current X-Plane 7 beta runs rather nicely on my 450MHz PowerMac G4 with GeForce 2MX. I can't use the super-high resolution textures but it still looks pretty good at the normal high resolution. It runs similarly well on my Pentium III 500 which also has a GeForce 2MX. Unfortunately its about a 5.5G install with full world scenery. It must come to something like 8G with Mars scenery too!

MST3K

[Overly Critical Guy]

"I'm fully certified for Microsoft Flight Simulator."

...

"You killed the Hubble!"

Oh my, yes

[Jeremy Erwin]

Every so often, salon publishes an article that can only be described as "slashdot bait." Mildly interesting-- but tarted up to the point where they're practically begging to get a slashdotting, and all the ad revenue that presumably comes with such a distributed denial of service.
The basic theme of that salon article was that a skyjacker of today would have an easier time learnng the ins and outs of a modern jet instrument panel with a computer program then he would four or five years ago. Apparently, earlier flight simulators took certain liberties with instrument layout. Additionally, many of the modern simulators also simulate the flight management sytems fairly well, so if a terrorist wanted to automate portions of his flight plan, he would be more prepared to do so.
It's slightly more sophisticated than the "Doom trains students to kill" articles of a few years ago, but not by much. (And I say this as a loyal subscriber of Salon.) It might well get debunked by salon's "Ask the Pilot" column.

You're right. It shouldn'tve been -1 troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

Should've been -1 redundant

Let's be precise.

[blunte]

You said,

I couldn't land for shit

I took that to mean, you really couldn't land "for shit" as you put it.

You then suggest it took 100 tries before you could land "for shit". Now you suggest that you mean "make a very nice landing".

Perhaps you can see why I misunderstood.

Re:Let's be precise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as I said, I think my definition of "for shit" is just unusal :-)

You're right that "for shit" was misleading. By my 3rd lesson I was convinced that if my CFI had a heart attack, we could still get safely to the ground. But landings were shitty (inconsistent, not pretty, hard, bounced, uncentered) until 100 ;-)

I think we're in agreement.

Really?

[LMariachi]

Odd, then, that the last mention of "Austin Myers" in rec.aviation.* was last August. There are no matches at all for myers+shithead, and whining+shithead turns up nothing relevant.

Re:Really?

[The Wing Lover]

Here's the link. Unfortunately he's taken the story down off his website now. - awh

Ha!

[iantri]

THIS is a flight sim? You ain't seen nothin' yet:

This guy has an um.. interesting setup.

Bittorrent?

[partipilo]

Anybody know of a Bittorrent link to download the demo?

sometimes reality is painful

[LifesABeach]

consider the following senario:

you're part of group of passengers that successfully over powered a group of terrorists that killed the flight crew in a jumbo, flying heavy.

congratulations.

with the aircraft fully on manual, terrorists would do that, you are now in the left seat.

again, congratulations.

you do not have access to any manuals, or notes; the terrorists handled that for you. and there are only screaming voices behind you.

you will need to:

1. turn on the radio

2. you must now communicate to anyone who might be listening. try saying the following phrase, "mayday, mayday, flight crew down, help us, PLEASE".

3. if #1 is not completed in a timely mannor, (15 minutes), you must communicate to the approaching fighter jets that you're a 'friendly'.

4. you have 3 minutes to complete #3.

"sidewinder" means never having to say, "you're sorry" --t.clancy

why modded down?

[mnemonic_]

All right why was I modded down? I wasn't bashing Macs, and I wasn't insulting Mr. Meyer. Macs have great GUI's and usually Mac users care about efficient interface design a lot. If you've ever tried X-Plane you'd notice that the interface is very un-Mac like, not only because it doesn't use Aqua but also because it doesn't follow Apple user interface guidelines. I'm not saying Apple's way of UI design is the only way either- all I'm saying is that Austin Meyer doesn't seem to be a typical diehard Mac user- not that there's anything wrong with that.

Re:why modded down?

[quacking duck]

all I'm saying is that Austin Meyer doesn't seem to be a typical diehard Mac user

IIRC, Austin doesn't make the interface, that's farmed out to someone else. His concern is more the guts of the sim, as it should be.

I'm not a fan of the X-Plane interface. I'm an interface freak myself, and have argued your point before about other games. But X-Plane is not a Mac application in the sense that you can use other apps at the same time--this isn't Photoshop.

It's either a game or a highly accurate simulation tool. If it's a game, games (esp. cross-platform ones) usually use their own interface, and I've seen a LOT worse. If it's a sim, then it's no different than an app that lays out and simulates microcircuitry, i.e. a lot of techy options that don't fit neatly into a standard window.

Not another conspiracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's simple. Media is populated by a generation that didn't have video games (or at least realistic video gamse) when they were growing up. They don't really know video games, and what they don't know they fear. Like some people considered Rock n' Roll an abomination and a cause of all kind of problems, way back in the day.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[frankie]

you are the one ideologically cutting yourself off from a good piece of software.

No, you are simply misreading. Nagora said that X-Plane's source code is useless to him, and it is. He can't read/modify/compile it, because it's not available to the public. X-Plane's executable binary is a separate topic.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[nagora]

Is the reason you can't use it truly because it's not Open Source?

Yes. If it was open source and the creator was still not interested in porting it to Linux then someone else might.

In the broader sense, the fact that the source code is closed means that it is useless in a social way: other coders can not build on good ideas within it (while, of course, the writer is free to incorporate other people's good ideas into his code), nor can other people fix bugs that the current maintainer has not prioritised because they are not in areas he is interested in.

I do use closed programs under Linux (Opera, for example) but as a programmer it is a source of endless frustration to have to wait for a small team to fix bugs that I know I could sort out over a weekend.

TWW

Re:Balancing lookup tables with calculated dynamic

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, it's JSBSim, rather, and the website is here.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Try MSFS2000

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates flight simulator, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, which was on the shelves at the time of the 9/11 attacks, included a scenario called "A Walk in the Park". With the push of a button, a pilot could load a low-flying Cessna pointed toward Central Park, headed south. Flyers were invited to enjoy "A leisurely stroll down museum row" before they felt their "pulse rise as (they) weave through the buildings of downtown Manhattan."

A prospective suicide flyer could load MicroSofts' simulator, use the preset scenario to make suicide-attack training more efficient, replace the Cessna with a 757, then spend his last months training at home, thanks to Bill Gates.

In X-Plane a terrorist would need to download scenery, or build accurate scenery for New York City, then take off from an airport before each practice attack. For terrorist or insurgency training, Microsoft probably makes the better product.

Using Microsofts simulator to recreate the attacks, we can speculate why the squad choose the flight paths they selected, and even explore clues why the second pilot might have lowered a wing on the way in. The north side of the north tower is not visible from the south tower, so occupants of the south building had little way of knowing what had happened to the north building. It worked. After some initial concern, most remained in the building, unaware they were the target of an attack in progress. Of course, everyone along Museum row and all of Manhattan north of the towers new, because the attack was apparently planned (in MSFS?) for maximum visibility downtown with minimum visibility from the south tower.

As the second plane approached from the west, the pilot apparently choose a flight path that was least likely to be interupted by an unexpected bump against the already-burning north tower. From the slightly more southerly route, dropping the left wing and banking into the tower avoided any possible contact with the other tower, which could have crashed the plane outside the building and blunted the force of the attack.

As for X-Plane, Austin Myers after the attacks backed off of plans to inclue guided missles in his very accurate simulator. His concern, reportedly, was that someone could hack the source code and use the algorithm to create real guided missles.

y uo are a ufkc

[Anonymous Coward]

u re a fukck

Hernh?

[zooblethorpe]

I'm baffled as to why I was labelled flamebait here. Unless I'm mistaken (and if so, please correct me), roughly 1/3 of the world is Muslim. I was simply trying to explain that I feel the Bush administration is doing nothing to make friends with this sizeable segment of the global population.

--------
If I can own an idea, does that mean I can legally claim some portion of your soul once I tell you that idea? Or even if you just come up with it on your own? Heck, who needs contracts written in blood...

USage in a LAB...

[Anonymous Coward]

Professor Jack Schlein, at York College, Jamaica, NY
(The City University of New York)
(not the York College in Nebraska, nor the York College in Pennsylvania)
uses X-PLANE in the SEMAA Program.
Using a Vision Dome Flight Simulator, X-Plane is used in the AeroSpace Education Laboratory, as well as by Students in York's New Aviation Institute.
See some images at:
http://www.york.cuny.edu/aerolab

See ya

Flight Unlimited III by Looking Glass

[Allen Varney]

Now thinking back, the best flight sim I recall playing was the one by the guys who made System Shock. It was an aerobatics focused sim, and the physics seemed very accurate.

Flight Unlimited III by Looking Glass Technologies (1999). Review.