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Games Entertainment

Open Source Flight Sims 67

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Rorschach_6 writes: "Not one but two Open Source initiatives to create a modern combat flight sim have come to light in recent days. Both stem from the overreaching Falcon 4 flight sim. Check out eBattleField or OpenSimulation." The problem that I always had with flight simulators is that I found the ground just uncontrolably alluring. Thank god they don't let people like me fly non-virtual planes ;)
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Open Source Flight Sims

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  • one site doesn't let me in because i don't have javascript (which i just disabled again because penny arcade's moronic ad banner script broke again) and another has absolutely nothing there.

    color me impressed, yeah.
  • I really don't think most entertainment should be open source. What's the benefit? Part of the allure of watching entertainment is to *not* know what's going on in the background.

    So maybe you know what's "going on" under the hood, so to speak. Why shouldn't the game be just as fun? IANAP(rogrammer) but I can easily imagine how cool it would be to send my buddies a game I'd coded, or helped to code, and say "Deathmatch? :-)". Saying entertainment shouldn't be Open Source is a little too close to saying "I want all my diversions effort-free and prepackaged" for my liking. I watch as much TV as the next guy but I wouldn't enjoy it less if I got to help make it, or even just had some say in the plots... It just requires a little suspension of disbelief, like everything else.

  • Assuming, of course, that the project co-ordinators let them. Funny how people without a clue about open source keep spouting the same crap about how anyone can mess with the source. Anyone can mess with the source, as long as they can hack or lie their way onto the CVS tree and, oh yes, program in the required language. Ethics is always something that seems to suffer with the advent of large sums of money. Give me an example, with a URL, that shows how ethics suffer with the advent of open source.
  • ...or are they going to compare to the Microsoft Flight Simulator series the same way that Windows compares to Linux?

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

  • It's just more trivial crap about how programmers always want to be paid and how do you make money if you release the source, blah di blah, as if people didn't code because they like doing it, you know, a hobby. I expend a large amount of energy and strain my muscles chasing a soccer ball about with a bunch of friends, but nobody says to me 'What's the point if you're not getting paid'. I make plenty of money from commercial coding too, but I also like to mess about with my own stuff because I enjoy it.
  • Hmmm, but Linux is better than Windows, so presumably you want to know whether these will be better than Flight Sim as well. Troll.
  • Moderate this down as redundant, I'm an idiot who forgot to read the other posts first.

    God I'm so !@#$ing incompetent.
  • Is this is a troll? Who does this hurt?

    Is it any of your business how the l33t hax0r chooses to fly his simulator? I don't think so.

    I personally can't stand simulators. I'm an avid PC gamer that frequently buys software titles and whatever hardware it takes to play them, but simulators are not one of my pasttimes. To me a simulator is too much like real life, it takes a lot of hardwork and practice to get -any- kinds of results, whereas I play games to relax.

    If I were to try this software, the first thing I would do is have zero-g planes hoovering around.

    You speak of ethics as if it is you're the authority, I highly doubt that. In fact, I think you are right the opposite...
  • Name one hard-core flightsim that has recouped its development costs. Microsoft Flight Simulator in its many iterations.
  • BTW: Next summer I'm planning a trip to Meigs Field (the default starting place on MS Flight Simulator) just to prove it can be done. It's also going to be saying goodbye to a very nice airfield before that scumbag Richard Daley closes it for good.

    Hear hear!

    Of course if you do come in a little long/short you're not gonna be very happy ... and may wreck some guys yacht as he's coming out of burnham.

    Seriously, it is a nice field. I can remember the night they shut it down for the first time. I was up in a rented 172rg with my father ... all of the pilots out there that night were drawing straws as the deadline came up to see who would be the last plane out. It was something else.

  • well.. I've been doing the softlanding on M$ flightsim countless times.. it's just the perspective and ways you flight your plane. I usually come in below the glide scope then the real life on the Cessna 152 or 172. and make my landing successfully. I can even land a Lear on Nimitz (in game of course..), or Golden Gate bridge.. but those in realife will be harder:p Still no time to work on my IFR though...

  • Check out "The Valkyrie Simulation Project"http://valkyrie.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

    "What's interesting about it?" you might ask? The goal is to simualte piloting valkyries (the transforming fighters from Macross aka Robotech) and other anime style mechs. It's still in early development stages, but there is some working code in the CVS...

  • Re:I could go for that... (Score:3)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @06:30AM (#758142) Homepage Journal
    That's interesting to know. I'm a huge X-Plane fan and got it when it was $200 :) it stands to reason that it would work on x68 Linux under wine because Austin Meyer essentially re-implements every speck of interface- good thing to know.

    I can't help but think of how essentially geeky X-Plane really is- I _do_ think it's the best flight sim out there, but then I do things like read 'Wide-Body: the making of the Boeing 747' for fun and then design a plane a bit larger than a Lear Jet, as plausibly as possible, with two GE high-bypass fanjets dwarfing the fuselage and hurling it through the air at up to Mach 1, and then flight-test it and fix the aerodynamic problems :)

    _Most_ people want to shoot down stuff or play airline pilot, not design airplanes using blade element modelling. It's very much like games like RoboWar [teleport.com] (not an official link, a design page)- the popular appeal of something this geeky is basically nil, but for those who are willing to be captivated by the technical challenge, the depth of the game becomes phenomenal. It's like that with X-Plane, because it's basically a full-on blade element modelling aerodynamic simulator with killer eye candy for $80, something the real aircraft designers would have killed for (as an initial rough-draft tool) twenty years ago.

    To be playing with this sort of thing on a home computer is beyond anything I could have imagined as a kid drawing pictures of weird airplanes instead of doing homework :)

  • Oh, look. A troll.

    ...that guy posted some terribly uninspired comments. Jeesh. You'd think somebody with that much time on their hands would at least write SOMETHING marginally amusing.

    sedawkgrep

  • Come to think of it, wouldn't it be interesting to have a plane with _one_ GE high-bypass fanjet between two fuselages? hmmmmm (reading Slashdot has a tendency to give me ideas for cool aircraft to design- last time it was the 'flying train' ground-effect vehicle getting me to design a landspeeder [airwindows.com]- very wide rear wing and narrower canard producing a tendency to hold a fixed altitude at around treetop height and avoid the ground. I didn't quite get it so it could hurtle over rolling terrain with no pilot input, but it is a hell of a lot easier to mow the grass with this one than with any traditional aircraft :)
  • Anyone hear of Flight gear?
    www.flightgear.com

    The screenshots look really cool, and now with Xfree864.01 having 3D accleration, it should be even more playable.

    I haven't been able to get it working on my machine, but if someone know of debs available, I'd be really interested in knowing.

    cheers.
  • If a post is at zero it should be free (not use up one of the moderators points) to mod it down.

    -Pete

  • We had it running on some new P3 850 MHz machines with GeForce2 cards. One was running Debian and the other was running Win95.

    Out of curiosity: Did you do any benchmarks? Under which OS did it run better?

  • Part of the allure of watching entertainment is to *not* know what's going on in the background.

    Do most people who download Apache examine it in detail so they know how it works? Do you know precisely how the Linux VM system is working? Why would playing an open source flight sim mean that you'd know what was going on in the background?

    If you want to make a buck off your time, I say go

    Of course. How about if I want to contribute for free?

    Open source flight sims already exist (Flightgear and Sabre, for example) and work. Most people who use them use them in the same way as they would a commercial flight sim, not worrying about precisely what the code is doing. However, you're given the extra choice of being able to look at the code if you want to. What's the problem here?
  • Now that is what I want. Robotech fighters!
  • I should've said "...or are they going to compare to the Microsoft Flight Simulator series the same way that Linux compares to Windows?"
  • FlightGear supplies a very good framework that could easily be turned into an combat simulator. It even has already military aircrafts. And they are getting more. E.g. a F15 will come soon.

    The only thing left to turn FG into a combat simulator would be to add the weapons as MultiPlay does already work.
    Or you could add an AI if you don't want to play over the internet...

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

    In contrast, for those that are using this for Personal Entertainment , it doesn't too much matter what planet you fly on, how much power the jet motors have, or the value of Avrogado's (sp?) Constant.

    The notion that "cheating" has anything to do with this is fairly silly; compare with the simple fact that you are pretending to fly a plane with the big-time cheating features that:

    • You don't pay for fuel;
    • You don't pay capital costs on that F117;
    • If you crash, you don't die.
    If it's just a game, then part of the fun can come in fiddling with the shape of the world. You've already "cheated" by the fact that it's a game...
  • If these projects are, in fact, based off of the source code of Falcon 4.0 doesn't that make them kind of, you know, illegal? Especially seeing as how the source code was stolen and leaked [gamecenter.com] onto the net back in April?

    And wouldn't having such high profile projects like these open them up to a world of hurt from Hasbro and Microprose?
  • With a lot of games, there are several components that are not all of equal "creativity."

    I'll suggest the thought that gaming "engines" represent something that could indeed come together via some sort of "Open Source" scheme, whilst other parts of a game, such as the setting of "physics parameters," creation of "artsy stuff" like pictures, and the construction of what relationships are used in the game represent something "less open."

    For instance, someone might create a really cool Quake level, with customized graphical images, as well as parameters and maze layout being set up to be somehow "particularly fun to play." If someone messes with it, it becomes somehow less satisfactory, much as James Joyce's "The Dubliners" would likely suffer if you or I were to "tweak" it as we wish.

    With Quake, the "engine" somewhat corresponds to the way books have pages, and standard sorts of formatting, and familiar fonts. That can reasonably be quite open. In contrast, a well-put-together Quake level, or other game scenario, is somewhat like a novel. It loses some of its "artistic integrity" if you mess with it.

    Some "game scenarios" might be pretty robust, and even designed for you to fiddle with. Others may be very fragile, where any change will work ill.

    The crucial thing about free software in this context is that in order for it to work for games, which are of arguably "frivolous" value, someone has to be willing to sponsor/commission their creation beforehand. "Open source" has been particularly successful with tools that were of demonstrable utility to their makers. If working on cfengine provides you utility, then it is clearly worthwhile, even if you subsequently give away the results.

    With games, the utility is less demonstrable, and it may be necessary to have a "rich patron" willing to pay for production beforehand, with no expectation of future returns.

    A few people wanting to fool around with flight simulation can find "fooling around with flight simulation" of sufficient utility to justify producing a flight sim; that's not quite the same thing as producing a line of "cool video games."

  • But I've never managed to make a good, on-the-runway soft landing in either Microsoft Flight Simulator or any of the other flight sims I've tried. It's just not the same thing.

    What sort of controls do you use? Just as a real aircraft doesn't use two keys on a keyboard to control the throttle, you shouldn't when playing a sim : A good analog throttle control is absolutely, positively mandatory. Additionally some form of analog independant rudder control is required to master the art of simulations. If you have those as well as the standard control service controls (a Sidewinder Precision Pro for instance) then you can master landing with ease time after time.

    Prior to getting this stick I found landings extremely difficult and it was more a lucky crash when I did survive. Now I can land in Falcon 4 or FS 2000 under just about any condition with ease.

  • On two fronts!

    1. I.. just wanna fly. I am interested in becoming a pilot. A good simulator gives you an idea of the Real World aero-d.

    2. Code, code, code. I need to improve my raw coding skills! C, C++, Java, Python, Perl.. to name a few that I study. (Assembler too, maybe in time.)

  • Why is it so hard? I like flying Microsoft Flight Simulator, mostly to practice landings. Admittedly I'm running it on a Mac IIci (my Philips CDD 2000 on the NT system won't read Macrovision-protected CD-ROMs, so the Windows version won't work), so the graphics are limited, but the aircraft control hasn't changed in years. The main problem is that it's hard to look out the side window, so the left turns in the pattern are rough, but once lined up on the runway, it's not hard. Once you're lined up with flaps down and aimed at the numbers, it's straightforward. You can even land on the aircraft carrier, although that's hard, because you don't trap; you have to land very slowly and brake hard.
  • And Open Source doesn't make it better.
  • what abou flightgear?its good, open source sweetness
  • because I said so
    and I don't like U

  • What about Flightgear [flightgear.org] ??? At least, it's already usable! I tried it, and with OpenGL, it's pretty impressive.
  • I just submitted this recently myself :)

    Just curious to know how many other tech geek type people are into this sort of game - Quake seems to be pretty big on /. but to be honest I expected the sim genre to be a lot more popular.

    Back in the days before Falcon 3.0 was released, it was originally supposed to be supported with a host of other simulations which you could link together to create the "electronic battlefield", but by the time the games were developed (Falcon 3.0, and Mig 29), technology had moved on.

    Anwyay.. just a bit of rambling from a Falcon 4 pilot ;)

    smash

  • I think the difference here is that the projects mentioned in this article are 'combat' flight sims while FG is a civilian aircraft flight sim (if I remember correctly.

    I'd love to see combat flight sims come to Linux. I think it's the only game genre that isn't well supported on Linux and it's what I prefer to play. Rather than run through darkened hallways firing rockets at strange monsters, I prefer flying at less than 500 feet at more than 500 knots to deliver a load of cluster bombs on poor unsuspecting (or perhaps quite suspecting!) enemies!

    I've tried Falcon 4 but like the article said, it did seem to be overreaching. Rather like some other software projects, it seems the developers tried to stuff everything including the kitchen sink into that sim rather than work toward stability. It was an admirable attempt and the patches helped a lot, but in the end, it's simply easier to fire up European Air War than struggle with F4. Here's hoping that these open-source projects can come up with something exciting, fun and most of all, playable!
  • A combat flight sim for Linux would be cool, although, you might be able to use an existing sim from the windows world if you use wine. X-Plane [x-plane.com] works great under Linux using wine. [winehq.com] IMHO, it's one of the best flight sims out there, but it does lack the ability to shoot/kill other entities besides yourself. I wonder how tough it would be to get flightgear [flightgear.org] working?

  • Re:heh cool (Score:3)

    by CausticPuppy ( 82139 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @05:18AM (#758165)
    I've done some combat sims (Falcon 3/4, EF2000), but it seems like I'm more interested in just flying the plane than worrying about tactical air combat. Seems like you gotta learn all the systems of a real jet before you can even stay alive in simulated combat!

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

  • Open Source could taint something... (Score:3)

    by AFCArchvile ( 221494 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @05:19AM (#758166)
    ...the physics engine. Unless they make it clear to the programmers that this is off limits, all hell will break loose. We will have zero-g airplanes hovering around because of some L337 H4X0R fiddling around with the source for cheating purposes. Ethics is always something that seems to suffer with the advent of open source.
  • I should add that I really, really, really wished that somebody would have taken over the Flight: Combat project when LGT folded. That looked incredibly cool, and it was very close to being finished.

    Somebody may pick it up down the road, I haven't been keeping up with the rumors on that though.
  • Sabre is an open source combat flight sim. Going from memory it's based on the Korean era rather than modern day, though.

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

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • As some posters have mentioned, there are many problems in open-source entertainment. First, people don't neccessarily want to know what's going on in the background. I don't see this as a problem, as they don't have to see it. A second point was that cheating would be possible. This, of course, doesn't matter on a personal computer (that's why commercial games have cheat codes!), but in a network game that would create a problem. The best I can think of would be checking whether some move is possible and not sending stuff the other doesn't need to know. Besides that, I guess it's just up to ethics.

    But the largest problem of open-source action games as I see it is boredom. People play a game for a while and then buy (or download) a new one. The only thing that might change that would be extensibility - see for example Quake. It was made to be extensible, and it is still played (HOW many years old is it?).

    So as goes for many other open-source projects, make it THE simulator that is configurable for almost any liking. Of course, not everything should be added to the same engine/codebase (first-person shooter + flight simulator doesn't make much sense), but everything related. Give the option for everything from an easy way to shoot enemy planes to an ultimately-realistic flight to a space flight (this extensibility could also reduce the amount of lamers that hack the code for benefit in a multi-player game).

    Because people do it for fun and in their free time, each open-source project should live as long as possible. The only way to make a game live long is to make it extensible. So get to it.
  • Flightgear (www.flightgear.org [flightgear.org]) runs nicely under XF4.0. I work with the main author (actually, I drink and play video games while he works, but I digress...). We had it running on some new P3 850 MHz machines with GeForce2 cards. One was running Debian and the other was running Win95.

    Flightgear is also running on one of the old flight simulators here at work [flightgear.org]. Someone else has Flightgear running on a motion chair [flightgear.org] that was at Linux World Expo (link here [linuxpower.org] - it's the third image down).

  • If *I* were building a freeware combat flight sim,
    I would start with the (amazing) 'FlightGear' non-combat flightsim (www.flightgear.org) and add in the weaponry. It has all the *hard* parts of a simulator down cold.
  • "Thank god they don't let people like me fly non-virtual planes ;)"

    What they need to do is create a simulator that actually affects your urroundings...if you fly too low then the ground should react accordingly, especially if you crash.
    Make it more realistic.
    That should be the same for any game, the surroundings should crumble if struck by rockets and what not.
    Hell, it might finally start using some of the processing power out of the 1 Ghz CPUs and the 256MB of RAM we keep shoving into gaming systems.

  • Don't be so hard on yourself (Score:4)

    by ptomblin ( 1378 ) <ptomblin@xcski.com> on Sunday September 24, 2000 @07:33AM (#758174) Homepage Journal
    I'm a 250 hour private pilot, and I have over 600 real landings of real airplanes in my log book. But I've never managed to make a good, on-the-runway soft landing in either Microsoft Flight Simulator or any of the other flight sims I've tried. It's just not the same thing.

    BTW: Next summer I'm planning a trip to Meigs Field (the default starting place on MS Flight Simulator) just to prove it can be done. It's also going to be saying goodbye to a very nice airfield before that scumbag Richard Daley closes it for good.
  • I think the difference here is that the projects mentioned in this article are 'combat' flight sims while FG is a civilian aircraft flight sim (if I remember correctly.

    You do remember correctly. However, I think they should take FlightGear as a base for the physical modelling if nothing else. It's so incredibly realistic it just hurts!

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

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

  • I can land a real cessna with just using trim and throttle with a bit on the yoke to make the turns in the pattern. I've never seen anyone come close to that with a sim even with all the fancy equipment. For IFR training, I wan the plane to work like a real one. Set the trim and point it in the general direction and make slight left, right adjustments and make sure the power is correct. In the real world, I can run 1/4 hour without adjusting the power or trim once its set right. I want a more realistic simulator
  • Earlier the code for Falcon 4 was leaked on the net. EBattlefield states: As I am sure you can all guess the base in question is the now famous leaked Falcon 4 source code. We must stress that this code will not be further developed and released as eRazor and Co. are currently doing, rather it will be looked at for guidance and ideas in our fledgling effort until we have our own base developed. We wish to remain free of all legal implications in any way we can.

    Even if you look at it, it's too much, anyone who sees that code cannot work on this project! If they do, its open season for EA's lawyers.

  • (-5, Offtopic, Flamebait)

    KDE [kde.org].

    Fully GPL'd -- and then they use other people's GPL sources, and link the resulting programs with a non-GPL library.

    Thankfully this is over now, but in my book using code without permission is stealing it. :(

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

    For a good inexpensive taste of what flying the real thing is like, see if you can find a hang glider group in your area that does tandem towing. It's not quite the same thing as flying a plane, but you'll get enough of the physics and feedback to develop a feel for exactly how inaccurate most flight simulators are. Better watch out though, it's curiously addictive (making note to self to resume work to Hang1 next summer.)

  • Please, please, please link a spell-checker! (The errors are left as an exercise for the student.)
  • I'm a flight-simmer, although my work keeps me from getting as into it as I'd like. But I grew out of the FPS style of game about the time Quake came along. Except for the odd game like Need For Speed, flight sims is all I play. I personally believe they offer a more varied environment and game play than games like Quake. Not to mention more outragious hardware environments. I run a K6-2 550, 128MB of RAM and a V3-3000 and still haven't bothered trying to play Janes F/A-18. "Scotty, I need more power!" "But Captain, I dinna think the engines kin take it!"
  • Well, look at Quake... its got everything opensource, and the only real cheats that are tough to stop are the aimbots, and an aimbot in a flightsim wouldn't work too well (Quake aimbots work because quake has no limit on how fast you rotate)... you just have to be careful how you code the server side end - if another player is flying an F15, he can't hover, the server knows that, its that simple. Personally, I want the physics to be editable.... imagine the mods possible - Independance day - real jetfighters against alien UFOs (which I doubt handle like realistic planes). Or alien environments - Lets fly two SR-71's through Neptune. Hackable physics are fun, the problem is that most flight games either a) focus on realism and make it overcomplicated, or b) make it arcade style and throw out the physics completely, like in Terminal Velocity (hello, gravity?). An opensource flightsim would let some really inventive mods come out (as happens with the Quake games). If you dissallow physics tinkering, all you get is more of the same, hundreds of fighters and planes, but no real variety.
  • I'm sorry, I think what you meant to say is that there is the potential for ethics to suffer due to the availability of the source. I don't believe that it always suffers simply because the source is available. Were that to be true, linux, Apache etc... would not be widely used today.
  • "The problem that I always had with flight simulators is that I found the ground just incontrolably aluring. Thank god they don't let people like me fly non-virtual planes ;)"

    -exactly-. with MS Flight Sim, I used to gain as much altitude as possible and then dive straight down...the object of course being to have as much airspeed as possible when hitting the ground.

    it was truly a beautiful thing.

  • The ideas don't jive... (Score:3)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @05:45AM (#758186)
    I really don't think most entertainment should be open source. What's the benefit? Part of the allure of watching entertainment is to *not* know what's going on in the background. Games == movies I think, in this case.

    Living in America, entertainment is a prized thing which pay for greatly. While I don't agree with some extravagant ticket prices, I can easily see why some people charge to make a small profit on games (Nintendo exempted, as they usually overcharge).

    Besides, it's a flight sim, not some ASCII game with 2K of code. A lot of work goes into the physics and dynamic weather conditions in these things. Some sims charge up to $50 -- very high for computer games. I've seen a few around $100.

    Point is, there's a hell of a lot of work involved. This is not a "hobby" that will yield an OS like Linux for others to use -- it's just a game that you're investing your time in. If you want to make a buck off your time, I say go for it.

  • "...and we are merely the players"
  • Landing a plane when you have no physical feedback is harder. You can feel a real plane react to the control inputs, whereas a sim you get all your info thru your eyeballs. BTW- I remember landing the Learjet on the carrier after about fifty tries, flying just on the edge of stalling and reversing thrust just before hitting the deck. Flight sims are great. They'd never let me do that for REAL.
  • We will have zero-g airplanes hovering around
    Hey! Why stop there, think having a negative-g airplaine. You actualy have to figt your way down to earth, or you will get lost in space... awsome ;o)
    --

  • For the past year I have been reading every thread like this on /. and thinking that the sim (as in flight/car/physical as opposed to whats that little guy doing) is the most sensible genre for open source development. Let me explain why...

    The sim genre of game depends on three main charectoristics: Model, Locations and AV. Unix has been used for decades to provide an environment for performing simulations (cfd, fea, etc.) and I cannot see any reason why a Linux system would have any problem with the Model. Open source development would also surely provide the best position for reviewing and analysing these models to refine and improve upon them (let the academic world lose on it, I can easily imagine it being used in University courses for CS and Engineering), the only downside would be the potential for requirements to upgrade engines for playing particular games. I would also presume (I am an optimist) that if this was taken on to a serious degree the model would be useful for all genre of games, with the ability to add and remove levels of realism at compile time (who needs to calculate the bending stress of the player from a rocket in Quake unless you want really, really realistic gore but it is kind-of important to know it in the Suspension of your F1 car coming into the straight at Indy).

    Locations for sims are generally real world locations, and surely these are exactly the sorts of models which should be developed once under an Open Source licensce for re-use. I would help design levels for places I can get to (and places I can get detailed enough data on) just to make my F1 or Flight Sim more realistic. I am surprised that as yet I have not seen an Open Source Project to map the world!!! The benfits of such a project are huge... and the simple fact that people wanting to use real world places on a PC would ALWAYS start here should mean that it would be under constant revision and ultimatley reach very high levels of quality (for most of the planet anyway I'd say it would be 5-10 years).

    Within a sim I always feel the AV elements are the least important as long as things remain clear. I don't care if the car ahead of me uses 16 faces instead of about 1024 curves to describe its shape as long as I don't get thrown off the road for rolling over usable kurbs (though its aero model will obviously be less accurate if the 16 faces are used there). I love F1 games and if it races like an F1 car (down to the suspension, rollers, tyre pressure and dampers I selected) then it can be pretty ugly. Who believes a great OS game engine and game would remain ugly for long? I would suspect it someone would simply get it using OpenGL and /dev/dsp and let the system be fast enough (and with the 1GHz+GeForce II you can expect to see as a minimum spec real soon we'll have horsepower to burn). If the engine is a 3d model surely it should be able to pump out the 3d data required directly for an OpenGL world.

    I don't think the FPS genre is suited to the OS development model, the game is highly dependant on weapons design, atmospheric effects (artistic work) and AI and these are things that come best from small teams of designers under a director (IMHO, think of a film being made by everyone shooting their bits and sticking them together, it could only work if it was a documentary of scenes from around the world or similar) and not from everyone chipping in to do their bit. We could make an OS FPS but it could never be definitive. A sim for vehicles however could easily become definitive as I believe that it would be relatively early in its life cycle when we would see companies from Boeing to Ferrari contributing (not their designs or specs but improvements to the model so they can use it for real work) and from that point on we could take the model as a dependable piece of OS software like Linux, emacs and apache (to name a small subset), the physical mapping is an ongoing work and will progress faster and faster as its use increases (more games that are being played are produced which derive their maps from it).

    One post I read mentioned that one of these projects has the hope of being a complete war simulator....but why stop there? If it can simulate a tank and a helicopter and an aircraft carrier, can it not simulate a Grand Prix, a Red Arrow display or anything else! A grand scheme to hatch, lets just make sure we stop thinking game with this one and think simulation and flexibility.....cause then OS will work and win this battle (what other hope do we have of flying the Shuttle using NASA's own sim of it).

  • Surely the flight model would be something which would be stored (and modified) on the server running the (presumed) multi-player sim. In that instance, if the server is set up to allow 'zero-g lightspeed travel', then everyone will be able to, er, enjoy it.

    Certainly, it would make things far more interesting if you could easily, by changing some textures and maps and just tweaking the physics engine a little, turn the sim into a Mars flight sim (or something even more esoteric).
  • For an example of the opposite, check out Flightgear [flightgear.org]. Flight sims can be complex (and fun!) enough without having to worry about being shot down by SAMs.

    Cheers //Johan

  • Problem is (and this is the reason you're seeing these initiatives all of a sudden) when you count on someone else to create your entertainment, you don't always get what you want. In this case, there's a dearth of commercial development of hardcore flight combat simulations. There are good economic reasons for this--the community isn't large enough to support the effort a company would have to put into a game--but a lot of people in the F4 community look around and don't see anyone working on the next generation of the sort of game they want to buy.

    Think of it like independent film-making. Do you constantly want Hollywood formula slop, or do you want to see the occasional well-though indy flick?

    Your point on the effort involved is well-taken; I'll be curious to see how far these efforts get, particularly in light of the fact that they seem reluctant to pool resources (well, the Opensim people, anyway). But there are a lot of people out there already who have put an enormous amount of time into patching up and improving Falcon4 after Hasbro stopped supporting it (I don't know how many people here know it, but a version of the F4 source mysteriously appeared on a public server a few days after Hasbro canned the dev team, making this game uniquely updatable in the sim world), and none of them get a dime for their efforts.
  • I don't think things like Linux and Apache count in this situation, you never hear someone say "That Linux user railed my root! He must be using an aimbot!"

    ----
  • A handicapping system could be used to control mods that have an unfair effect. It could work like this-

    Handicapping:
    Each player can set his own handicap which would be sent to the server and other players. Higher numbers would mean more of your bullets/bombs, etc. would have no effect. In addition, players would rate each other, effectively increasing the "cheater's" handicap. If a cheater's average rating is too high, the cheater is placed in a higher level category where both he and the damage he induces is see only by others in the same playing level. If he finds himself alone, he can handicap himself to play at a lower level.

    Banning:
    Each player has a "ban list" that would be sent to the server. A player and anyone on his list would be invisible to each other, including the damage they do. Banned players would find "their kill" would be sometimes given to unseen players.

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