FlightGear Reaches v2.0 85
distantbody writes "The flight sim project FlightGear has reached version 2.0. From the website: 'Highlights of this new version include: Dramatic new 3D clouds, dramatic lighting conditions, improved support for custom scenery, and many many new and detailed aircraft models.' Full list of improvements here. And of course the screenshots. The release coincides with the release of SimGear v2, the 'set of open-source libraries designed to be used as building blocks for quickly assembling 3d simulations, games, and visualization applications' on which FlightGear is based."
Great work, FlightGear team! (Score:1, Funny)
I just want to give a huge THANKS to the FlightGear team. They've put out an excellent flight sim that rivals commercial offerings. It's amazingly fun to play.
What's more interesting, I've heard to some projects in Japan where they use it to make a hentai simulators. The SimGear framework is just that flexible.
Re:Great work, FlightGear team! (Score:4, Funny)
Enough is enough! I've had it with these motherfucking tentacles on this motherfucking plane!
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FlightGear has a long way to go before it can rival Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
Re:Great work, FlightGear team! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great work, FlightGear team! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great work, FlightGear team! (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you seen x-plane 9? It beats MSFS in every way, including graphics now.
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X-Plane's biggest problem now is lack of scenery. Everything is in place for it to be premier - Terrain, planes, flight model accuracy, etc. But there's still quite limited "landmark" scenery, and a lot of the best is payware. MSFS has had, for a good couple decades now, readily available scenery for major cities with all sorts of recognizable landmarks and every release has added more. I still fly X-Plane a ton more, but I still fire up MSFS when I want to do some sight-seeing. It's really the last thing h
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I have not tried X9 but one of the big things that FS has going for it is the community.
I admit I am an odd FS user but I don't like flying fighters, bombers, or airliners in FS.
I love to fly GA and Homebuilts. There is a very good Aircamper for FS9.
Now you have me wondering just how hard it would be to make scenery for XP.
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X-P has a pretty decently tight-knit, if somewhat eccentric community. The main mailing list has a lot of older pilots (60-80 year olds) so it occasionally devolves into semi-OT stories from the 50s and even WWII. Even so it's fascinating.
There's a pretty decent planemaking community, but MSFS probably has a much wider range of random stuff available.
I haven't done any scenerymaking, but I'm told it's kind of a pain currently. The primary format changed awhile back and the dev tools haven't caught up yet. U
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X-Plane is a beautiful piece of software and even the generic terrain is great. And now that MSFS is defunct, scenery designers pretty much have no choice but to work for X-Plane in the longer term.
Lack of real landmark scenery can be a pain for VFR navigation, but then again it's a good way to get in tune with the panel if you want to land.
Already 503'd (Score:1, Informative)
Wow. First-ish post and I am already seeing 503 errors from the "Recent Announcement" links. /.?
Maybe they crashed their own servers prior to this getting submitted in anticipation of
slashdotted? (Score:4, Informative)
Because the main site seems to be struggling, here's the wikipedia page [wikipedia.org].
Their web server? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Their web server? (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Wikipedia article, starting fires when planes crash is a new feature of 2.0.0
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It's a flight simulator, not a crash simulator.
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It's a flight simulator, not a crash simulator.
But how can you have one with out the other? Crashing is an important part of flying, equally important to any other aspect of a simulator. Or at least it is when I play.
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I mean honestly, who expected Flightgear to take the place of FlightSimulator... That is the advantage of such open source software. It develops.
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Did they fix it in 4.0c? Because I recall doing exactly that and the plane just bouncing.
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Never ran into this either in 4.0, though given the nature of airplane flight it'd be pretty tricky to hit the ground at *exactly* straight down. I was pretty young and definitely tried out all the different ways of crashing things.
Their servers are soaring (Score:2)
And MirrorDot seems to be down, too.
How good is it ? (Score:2)
Seems interesting, I guess the download has been disabled for now... So how does it stack up against X-Plane ??
YouTube (Score:2)
It looks alright. Though the textures lack detail and look a little cartoonish for it. I've downloaded it to my Ubuntu PC at home via Vino, and I'll give it a try tonight when I get home.
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Is it just me or do the clouds have massive depth-sorting problems at 1 minute 45 seconds...?
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Huh? Something changed?
I've been using the classic discussion interface for over a decade. Switch to it through "help/preferences" -> "preferences" -> "discussions" -> "viewing".
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The classic discussion interface has changed too, it's actually more buggy than the 2.0 one at this point since apparently Slashdot hasn't heard of "regression testing".
All of the following buggy screenshots were taken with discussion 1.0 turned on:
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/cant_save_prefs.png [schend.net]
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/email_options.png [schend.net]
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/floating_div_corrupted.png [schend.net]
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/floating_div_font [schend.net]
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I have a bunch of other errors, and collecting more as time goes on. The requirement to register and enter bugzilla when you're just trying to browse the site and give a real bug report should be telling. If they didn't have so many bugs, they'd not mind a stray e-mail or two describing what's happening. Nope, they can't keep up with that, so users have to do it. And just wait in case someone feels like fixing it. This goes back to well before I had an account.
Most open-source fans I know read slashdot
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Yah I know, except at the time I took that screenshot:
1) The font color and background color were nearly identical, making it impossible to see the !. (Unless YOU can see it in that screenshot, maybe you have a better monitor than mine.)
2) The rollover was implemented in such a way that it was completely impossible to click it. The instant you moved your mouse towards it to click it, it would disappear.
Like I said, some of those bugs have been fixed (although the bugs in the bugtracker have never been *mark
Not in Ubuntu repos (Score:2)
"On Ubuntu, FlightGear can now be installed using the "synaptic" tool"
Nope. It's on 1.9.1-1ubuntu1 as far as I can see.
Dramatic! (Score:2)
That's like, dramatic! :)
Seriously, Flightgear is a great game. Congrats!
Graphics (Score:2)
My first question is-- what is wrong with this guy's face?
http://www.flightgear.org/Gallery-v2.0/target32.html [flightgear.org]
My second question is--
What's he got in his hand?????
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1) A combination of automatic smoothing groups and a planar UVW map (in other words: lazy modelling)
2) A joystick. I hope not the one out of his pants.
windows only (Score:4, Interesting)
and they forget to mention, version 2.0 is only available for windows. the linux and mac versions are still at 1.9.x.
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why obviously? they generated a windows dist. that's the attitude that keeps linux from moving forward on the desktop ... telling people they need to compile it from source before they can use it.
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Lets think about it like we have a brain.
A) Most Linux users are capable of compiling their own apps, its rather common since most Linux distros come with a compiler, and you've almost certainly compiled things in the past for that app that doesn't work right on your distro or in your setup or whatever it happens to be due to the millions of possible combinations of distros and base software distrubtions, you can assume nothing about the environment you'll be running in when you distributed compiled binari
Re:windows only (Score:4, Insightful)
got news for you the vast majority of Linux users do not know how to do this anymore... most distros do not need you to get down and dirty in the command line to install software... the package will be there in the repositories, not necessarily the absolute latest, but a recent stable one.
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you need to cut down on your testosterone injections.
i'm curious, did you my OP? i said this is what holds linux back from being a mainstream desktop. you are right, most linux users can compile, but the other 99.9% of desktop users can't, and this is just one more reason why they won't choose linux. so yes, you proved my point well thanks.
regardless, maybe you have all the time the world sitting in your parents' basement without a job or girlfriend, but other people have lives and regardless of whether the
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this is what holds linux back from being a mainstream desktop
And in my opinion, well it should!
For Linux to appeal to the common user, stuff has to just work without needing a proxy to make it work for them (i.e. package maintainers) or getting it to work themselves (i.e. compiling it). For this to work, Linux has to become standardized.. so that people don't have to worry about supporting my favourite stack vs some other gentoo (or other distro) user's.
And then you basically just have a cheaper, more open version of windows.
Personally I see Linux as a playground. I
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I debated whether to mod this flamebait due to the obvious flamebait parts of your post, but mixed into the unfounded insults you actually make a salient point, so I'll respond to the valid point instead.
The reason distros are out there is to make installs easy. Each distro manager takes applications they want to support and builds an installer that suits their distro for each application. This means that someone who understands and maintains the distro has compiled the application and confirmed that it u
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Linux, on the other hand, has many different installation systems. It's not reasonable to ask of the developers to create several distinct packages that would probably get rejected by the package system maintainers anyway.
They could provide an installer to x32, but it's not encouraged by many distros to install things that w
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So, I'm only getting to reading this some days late, but...
flightgear was updated to 2.0 in the archlinux repositories on the same day you made this comment:
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=flightgear [archlinux.org]
Personally I don't mind that linux doesn't "move forward" quite the same way windows and mac does. On linux, I can get whatever I want right now, or if I don't care that much I can wait a while and get it automatically. On windows and mac, I can't really get exactly what I want either way. Well I guess I co
not great (Score:2)
installed (version 1.9.1) on linux. constant crackling from my speakers. when i tried to quit, it hung. used the little "kill window" utility, and it left a process running that was burning up my CPU. all in all not a great experience.
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A suggestion (Score:1, Insightful)
If you're going to post to Slashdot saying "Come download our new version!", do us all a favor and set up a torrent and a tracker.
Good Timing (Score:2)
Just bought a new PC for a dedicated Sim box, so the timing is perfect.
FG 1.9.1 sound was a bit buggy on my old 2.8GHz Arch system, and I figure the old Celeron needed replacing.
I'm learning to fly right now and I find the flight model in FG is mostly accurate (the niggles I have are minor and not that important), and given MS have dumped Flight Simulator it looks like more focus will be on FlightGear and XPlane.
(I really upgraded my box for XPlane, but I have been using Flightgear for years on and off)
Here
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I'm going to be putting together a new system soon to be used primarily for simming, and I'm curious about the specs of your new system, and how it's performed with the sim software you've run on it. I'm currently running FS9 and Orbiter an older Athlon system. I want to upgrade so I can run FSX and X-Plane. Any advise you can share from your upgrade experience would be appreciated.
Maps? (Score:2)
Anybody else?..... (Score:1)
Anybody else manage to download the Win32 version, then check the SHA sum against the listed sum given on the d/l webpage?? I'll wait and try downloading it again later...
TFA raises questions... (Score:2)
Can clouds be dramatic at all ? Do they have to be 3d or can 2d clouds also be dramatic ?