Vertigo – a public domain 3D flight simulator (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Vertigo – a public domain 3D flight simulator (2003)

stjerneskud.info

125 pointsapp4soft91 comments

There is also FlightGear that is still being developed and is published under GPL. https://www.flightgear.org/

There's some classic internet drama going on in their "info" section.

Believing FlightGear team’s account, looks like they think copyright is a thing, while evil FGMEMBERS team thinks copyright don’t apply to free stuff? Interesting

Link is under Posts -> Info and links to https://www.flightgear.org/category/info/

> https://www.flightgear.org/info/fgmembers-statement/

Good drama which show deep misinterpretation of GNU GPL terms by official FlightGear team.

I see no misinterpretation of the GPL here. The document explains why the FG team thinks FGMEMBERS is harmful and a bad idea; at no point that I can see did they imply what FGMEMBERS are doing was illegal.

Care to elaborate?

TempleOS also has a flight simulator, with a banger soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYQEfLaR4Pg

Needs more cowbell.

A few glitches but not unimpressive.

Memories... I miss Terry a lot.

At first I was thinking that there was a lot of unlikely stunt piloting going on. Then the bird legs came out for the landing.

I don't know if he was the smartest programmer who ever lived, but he certainly was one of the more dedicated and interesting ones.

Downloading it now, pretty underwhelming being redirected to SourceForge and now downloading 1.6 GB at 350 KB/s. They really should have official torrents.

They have a list of FTP mirrors[1], and I saw exe's listed there under 2020.1, so maybe one of those will work better?

1: https://www.flightgear.org/download/mirror/

That worked a lot better, thanks.

Just download the base, the models can be autodownloader from the launcher and the terrain is automatically fetch too.

> There is also FlightGear that is still being developed and is published under GPL.

FlightGear is nice & powerful, but actually is too heavy and require modern PC.

BTW, There is Vertigo page on FlightGear Wiki.[0]

JFTR, There is also open-source ACM 6.0[1] (enchanched fork of ACM 5.0[2]) — classic old-school 3D flight simulator.

[0] http://wiki.flightgear.org/images/cache/2/2b/Vertigo_%2528fl...

[1] http://www.icosaedro.it/acm/download.html

[2] https://wiki.flightgear.org/ACM_%28flight_sim%29

I play Flightgear on a ThinkPad T420 a couple times a week and get 30-60fps. It's just a matter of adjusting rendering settings. The feeling of flight doesn't change much. Keyboard flight controls work fine too...

Not sure if that's a modern PC in your mind, but it's not exactly a speed demon. :-)

> I play FlightGear

Version/Platform?

> on a ThinkPad T420

This is not cheap PC.

Try run FlightGear on cheap laptops produced before 2010.

Wow, 11 years? That's getting pretty far back. Still, I wonder...my FG settings are low but not terribly low. I would guess it could be done. For example, I'm not using the 2D cockpit.

Edit: 2019.1.1/Linux

> Wow, 11 years?

As for me, if desktop software can't properly work under Linux on cheap 10-year-old laptop then this is not good enough or not optimized app at all.

> I'm not using the 2D cockpit.

Because it will drop FPS under 30 FPS, right?

I would guess you represent the extreme case then. :-) Using the 2D cockpit should result in more FPS, rather than fewer. It's worth a try.

The T420 came out in 2011. They're available on ebay for under a hundred dollars.

Back in the day I played FG on a Geforce 2, but things changed a lot. But you can play FG on lowest settings at 1024x768 in a 2008-9 laptop perfectly.

I had just recently download old xsabre source code and made it compile on a modern system. Interesting that it is possible to compile something pre-c++ standardization with just a few changes.

Another interesting project: This guy resurrected gl-117 and is maintaining and improving it: https://askmisterwizard.com/2019/LinuxAirCombat/LinuxAirComb... makes me remember "Certain Impact" a little.

If anybody else is interested in another abandoned open source flight sim, Palomino (https://sourceforge.net/projects/palomino-sim/) seemed very promising while it was under development.

> If anybody else is interested in another abandoned open source flight sim

Also Search and Rescue II flightsim reborn this year.[0]

[0] https://searchandrescue2.github.io/sar2/

A quick search on sourceforge revealed these:

- https://sourceforge.net/projects/drts/

- https://sourceforge.net/projects/csp/

- https://sourceforge.net/projects/facsimulation/

Abandoned source code feels like carcasses of sunken ships waiting for someone to rescue whatever is still valuable. Makes me a bit sad and hopeful in a certain way.

> Abandoned source code feels like carcasses of sunken ships waiting for someone to rescue whatever is still valuable.

Yep.

This year I discovered that there is active development on ACM 6.0 (enhanced fork of ACM 5.0).[0]

I just hope that someone would also take a look on Vertigo for continuous development and porting it to Linux and other modern platforms.

[0] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1237898195385987076

Vertigo is old enough and lightweight enough it might work for a side project of mine, so thanks for making me aware!

Great!

Ping me on Twitter when there would be some progress ;)

P.S.: There is already mirror of Vertigo files created by someone on GitHub today.[0]

[0] https://github.com/gspu/Vertigo-Flight-Simulator

> https://sourceforge.net/projects/csp/

There is already some progress on The Combat Simulator Project by Henrik Nilsson.[0]

JFTR, There is "flightsim" category on SourceForge.[1]

Also many flight simulators also could be found on GitHub.[2]

Think, there was some flightsims on Google Code[3], but in most cases all those projects archives already mirrored on GitHub too.

[0] https://github.com/nsmoooose/csp/

[1] https://sourceforge.net/directory/games/flightsim

[2] https://github.com/search?o=asc&q=flight+simulator&s=updated...

[3] https://code.google.com/archive/search?q=flight+simulator

I loved that among Lin Warrior. Libre games have lots of gems out there.

Ugh, scons.

Another game is Falcon BMS which was released in the late 90s and has a community that is constantly maintaining it and upgrading it, it looks fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikI3i8Kn3KI

Falcon BMS is great!

Imo it's the best FS out there for a few reasons. I think what really sets it apart is it's dynamic campaign and large scale multiplayer wars that run over the course of weeks or even months.

It's incredibly fun participating in an air battle with 60 other online pilots (with human AWACS) working together or scrambling defensive flights as an enemy strike package comes in.

The high barrier of entry, both in terms of difficulty (you probably need at least 10h of tutored instruction to be remotely good at the game) and hardware investment (you need a joystick and trackir) is a feature not a bug. It keeps the toxic players out and indeed the community has barely any problems with toxic players.

Here's my view of a mission from a large scale PvP campaign. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TXqYky97auQ&t=9m51s

That was a great video, and incredible that games still going. What other games have been going for that long? I know the community has kept Doom going to some extent, new maps and textures and stuff. Can’t thank of any more still being developed since the 90s.

On just libre games:

- Nethack

- Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

- The campaigns for Freedink

On the rest, the list is huge, really, really huge.

I was wondering why it looks so old - it's because it is old, latest release is from 2002. Perhaps add "(2002)" to the title?

That in 2002 already was looking outdated.

The first screenshot reminds me of Fleet Defender (1994):

https://www.gog.com/game/fleet_defender_the_f14_tomcat_simul...

Now of course supplanted by DCS: F-14.

Now DCS F-5 Tiger and Mig-29 but long long time ago was:

https://www.gog.com/game/f19_stealth_fighter

Pixel-hunting par excellence ;)

Not open source, but Tiny Combat aims to reproduce the general 90s flight sim aesthetic: https://why485.itch.io/tiny-combat-arena

It's under a lot of active development, with clips posted to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUvUO3lqf0Y

The author puts quite a bit of free Unity-related code from related experiments on GitHub: https://github.com/brihernandez?tab=repositories

Unity, that sucks. Unusable on lowest computers. At least, ACM and most libre games with these graphics will actually run at least in 2002 era computers.

Makes me wonder, ho does one start to build a serious flight simulator? Is there any publicly available resources about implementation techniques and pitfalls specific to flight simulators, like there are for so many other topics, so you don't have to learn everything the hard way, make all the obvious mistakes, etc? Or is this a topic where you can really work from first principles, using just basic physics and incrementally adding simulation of more advanced effects?

I have no experience here, but starting from physics sounds like a very difficult approach since the equations that govern aerodynamics aren't that simple. So I would look for some results that simplify these equations. Like how Maxwell's equations aren't used for designing most electronic circuits, but instead people use simplifications like circuit theory. I suspect a similar simplifying approach would exist in aerospace design (but again I have no experience here). Perhaps the best idea is to take some introductory courses here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/

Floating origin is a nice algorithm for dealing with floating point imprecision. Essentially just translating the camera to origin regularly.

Regarding terrain there are many techniques of varying difficulties to implement. Streaming terrain data and stitching LOD seams (both normal and vertex blending) are basically the gist of it, but the implementation details regarding uniform vs non-uniform grids, tesselation vs chunking etc. needs to be considered.

Look up blade element theory, that's how Laminar started with X-Plane, and they incrementally refined their model over the past 20 years. I bet the physics will take the least and the graphics will take most of development time, though.

The graphics are why an increasing number of projects are just using Unreal these days. Not sure how well it would work (level size) but it looks fantastic in racing games which also have fancy physics.

JSBSim is a nice modular example: https://github.com/JSBSim-Team/jsbsim

But yes it’s something you can approach in a layered manner adding in more detail.

When I was a kid in the 90s, I worked through a very fun book called “Build your own Flight Sim in C++”. It was for DOS, so it also covered the 3D graphics algorithms and techniques you needed. Fun times.

Physics, software and aircraft engineering expertise are only going to help you so much. It's enough to build a general purpose sim, but to simulate real aircraft you also need real data, which is often a trade or a military secret, as DCS developers learned the hard way when one of them got arrested for alleged smuggling of F-16 manuals. For a serious sim, you need a lot of communication with the aircraft developer, and a lot of money for licensing fees.

I am not sure if it would count like a "serious" flight simulator, but the (pretty old) Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming [0] book has a pretty decent introduction I believe and I'm guessing most of the C++ code could be useful regardless of platform.

---

[0]: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/black-art-of-macintosh-game...

Does anybody know other old 3D flight simulators for the PC? I really enjoy the low poly style but don't know where to start looking.

"Su-27 Flanker" by SSI which is the predecessor to DCS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su-27_Flanker_(video_game)

Corncob 3D....real old :)

YSFlight[0] is mostly what you are looking for.

It distributed fully freeware for Linux, macOS & Windows as OpenGL1 (default graphics), OpenGL2 (enhanced graphics) and Direct3D (Win-only) versions.[1]

While its default ("stock") addons are not so eye candy, community created addons are really nice.[2]

List of known community addons available as a spreadsheet[3] (regular updated) hosted on Google Docs. Actually there are 14500 aircrafts, 1049 scenery (maps), 10404 ground objects (ships, cars, characters, buildings, etc.).

There are many videos on YouTube, just search using "YSFlight Movie" and "YSFlight Promo" queries for clips which are show-reels. Here is good "The Beginner's Guide to YSFlight" for latest versions.[4]

JFTR, I started to use YSFlight just after watching "Strangers - A YSFlight Promo Film".[5]

Actually I'm fan of YSFlight & addons contributor[6], so you may AMA about it! ;)

P.S: There are also servers for online gaming (and you also could create & add own just using YSFlight installed!), mostly active on each Friday.[7]

[0] https://ysflight.org

[1] https://ysflight.org/download/

[2] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewforum.php?f=234

[3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1caVHoWU6g1YSB-G-W5Q-...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-Iy3W7s4O8

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMkaTtrQlHM

[6] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1274084993179009024

[7] https://ysflight.org/serverlist/

Really old? A10 Tank Killer, Gunship: 2000. Countless hours playing them :)

On this site you can fly Microsoft Flight Simulator 1-4 directly in the browser. Have fun.

https://github.com/s-macke/FSHistory

Something I did about 25 years ago, with low poly and software rendering:

https://github.com/rixed/fachoda-complex

Plain C with minor dependencies, should still compile.

Rixed, that’s a nickname I hadn’t seen in a while (25 years?). You were on Eden BBS maybe? You contributed to Le Reporter didn’t you?

Indeed, I'm not sure what part of oneself survives that long but that nickname did.

Have you been time traveling in a similar trajectory?

$nickname at free.fr

JSF

Off topic, but a great window to HN demographics via referred traffic in these legacy stats trackers.

Sigh... The days when showing off your traffic stats was more important than privacy or confidentiality.

http://extremetracking.com/open?login=norupv3

EDIT: spelling.

I mostly play https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/

But look witch Models you buy, you have the more simple models from the Flaming Cliffs 3 module, or the really realistic one's like the tiger/tomcat stuff

DCS is off-top in this thread as it is not open-source, even not fully freeware flightsim.

>even not fully freeware flightsim.

What does that even mean? You can play it for free (Frogfoot) and with that, it is at least freeware.

There was an svgalib flightsim shipped with some old Linux distributions, I ported it to SDL and 64-bit, it is here, it is called Sabre, Dan Hammer made it: https://github.com/ysangkok/sabre

> There was Sabre Fighter Plane Simulator — an svgalib flightsim shipped

Nice! If possible, add screenshots of your fork into README file.

FYI, Take a look on ACM 6.0 too.[0]

[0] http://www.icosaedro.it/acm/download.html

An odd question - does anyone remember a flight sim from the early to mid 90s that had a dog-fight multiplayer mode over a null-modem serial cable? Back in DOS days. F16 or some such. I still have the cable, but for the life of me I can't remember what the game was.

F29 Retaliator?

Looks familiar, but I think that's not the one either.

Falcon 3 probably? I remember playing 1vs1 back then. Not sure if it was null modem or Ethernet/IPX, but I would be very surprised if it didn't support null modem for two players.

Thanks, but nope, not this one either.

Thought it might have been Jet but apparently not

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_(video_game)

Had forgotten how good 80s game box design was

No, it was a bit after Jet's time.

F22 Lightning II maybe

No, that's not it. It was earlier than that...

Loads of games in the 90s used null modem cable for multiplayer I played I played a bunch of stuff that way on both PC and Amiga. Populous 2 was a big fave but definitely played more than one flight sim that way

YSFlight?

Nope, not the one. YSFlight is from 1999 and forward.

Chuck Yeager?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager%27s_Air_Combat

Thanks, but no, that's not the one.

Maybe Dogfight/Air Duel by Microprose in 1993? In multiplayer mode you could have a F-16 fight with a Fokker if you wanted.

Not this one either. I remember it had a square minimap at the bottom right corner that was about 1/3 of the screen height.

Would love a polygon aesthetic flight sim that sort of expanded on the feeling A-10 Cuba was going for but more planes and more weirdness.

Really cool bits in that game where you can break the tips of your wings off your grind your gears in and still keep flying, also had some really surreal multiplayer arenas like space and futuristic cities.

Another flight sim shoutout: it's just over a week until the release of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_(20...

Love this image when the guy is heading nose first in the tarmac http://stjerneskud.info/vertigo/v018img/nose.gif

Hoping to see a open-source version of flight sim. Are there any ?

https://www.flightgear.org/

Reminds me a bit of Interceptor from the Amiga: https://youtu.be/oHsUbGTIXyE

There is a Bohemia Interactive humblebundle on sale right now, offering a few really interesting 2010s simulators for $1, Take On: Helicopters among them.

Commercial flightsim out-off scope for this thread.

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