YSFlight – A free flight simulator where anything is possible | Hacker News Reader

YSFlight – A free flight simulator where anything is possible

ysflight.org

308 pointsapp4soft80 comments

I never expected this to be on the front page of HN, it brings back so many memories. I was big into this game when I was a teenager back in 2010, 2011 until 2015, also being very active in the community that made this page in that period. Sadly, even all those years back, the online scene was still what most would consider dead. I have a bit of a thing for "dead" games, I wouldn't really consider 1-2 full servers at night to be dead, which is what we had. In the following years, however, server population declined even more, to the point where I would really consider it to be dead. I'd love to be proven wrong though, but that was what I percieved.

If you really wanted to ride the wave, I'd tell you to get yourself a time machine and go all the way back to 2005, 2006 or 2007. Servers were ablaze with squadrons (~groups of people having their own paint schemes on certain aircraft, playing air-to-ground missions and air-to-air missions against other squadrons...) fighting and calling each other names. It wasn't pretty, but according to what I was told, passion wasn't exactly in short supply.

Fun fact: the game looks like that because it has no textures. Instead, every polygon is colored individually. Through a recent update did give the terrain textures. Aircraft still don't have them.

> I have a bit of a thing for "dead" games,

I feel your pain. Unique and interesting games are rarely the most popular.

I have come to realize that you need to grab a multiplayer game by the horns and jump right in when it's popular, because every game has a "golden era", before which it dies. These communities are all moments in time.

I've come to learn that anything online is impermanent. Websites/communities/gaming/business/programming languages - it will all eventually be deprecated for something newer/faster/better - Honestly, the only thing that is mostly untouched are the underlying protocols - and there are plans to change those as well. The absolute worst part about it is the loss of history, however even the physical world can't escape that - like tears in the rain.

Indeed. HN has been around for quite a while though. I’ve been a member for over thirteen years.

It sure seems like stuff online obeys the Lindy effect. If some sites have been around for ten years, expect them on average to last another ten.

I would love to see any data or research that's been done on this.

I hope against hope that 100 years from now, they can still read this message

Still, Nethack/Slashem, IRC, Gopher, ZMachine games... get played and launched even 20 years later.

> I have a bit of a thing for "dead" games

I know how that feels. It's so sad to see a game that once brought so much joy now has zero players. I have so many dead games. Sometimes I install one and join one of the empty servers. Maybe someone else will see me there and join too...

10 Minutes ago i played Gabriel Knight 3 it's a fantastic game...no i don't care what others say ;)

If you want to get back into it IL2: Sturmovik is great for online play and even has stellar VR support.

> IL2: Sturmovik

It is fully another sort of flight simulator.

YSFlight core pros is that is almost "just polygonal flightsim", instead of "textured flight simulators" (such as IL2: Sturmovik, FlightGear, DCSWorld, MSFS, X-plane, etc.).

And, yes, YSFlight is fully capable for online gaming[0], and in part could be used with VR (with some tricks).

[0] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewforum.php?f=301

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

I wouldn't say that a minor aesthetic difference is all that important if you want to fly air-air and air-ground with a load of people. My suggestion to the parent is that there are other fun flight sims to fly about in and do similar things if they find YSFlight lacking at the moment.

> My suggestion to the parent is that there are other fun flight sims to fly about

But this is thread about YSFlight, not about IL2: Sturmovik.

You may create new thread to discuss your favorite flight sim.

This is not how HN tends to work with discussions. The parent I originally replied to said what they liked about YSFlight but that they've since found multiplayer to be too quiet for them. I suggested an alternative which does what they seem to be interested in and has a more lively multiplayer population.

You seem to be taking this as a slight on YSFlight which is not the intention and perhaps a bit overly defensive.

> This is not how HN tends to work with discussions.

Of course no, but I'm really not seeing any relation between YSFlight and IL2:Sturmovik, except both are in "flight simulators" category — those two software are totally different, from hackers point of view.

Also, YSFlight is freeware & partially open-source personal/hobby project, IL2 instead is a commercial product made by big company with a lot of devs specially for selling and marketing.

The relationship to the discussion I've pointed out twice to you. Let's hope a third time helps:

> The parent I originally replied to said what they liked about YSFlight but that they've since found multiplayer to be too quiet for them. I suggested an alternative which does what they seem to be interested in and has a more lively multiplayer population.

> This is not how HN tends to work with discussions.

To be clear, I posted YSFlight on HN to look on it from software developer point of view — not as a game suggestion.

That is Hacker News, not a Game Wiki.

For crying out loud, since you seem to be being willfully obtuse on this, he suggested a game with a thriving multiplayer experience which is where the original poster found this particular game to be lacking.

The irony here is that app4soft themselves bring up other flight simulators in this post discussion. Somehow, in their logic, it's okay for them, but not you.

The irony is that I'm telling about open-source software flight simulators[0] and comparing them to YSFlight (which is partially open-source) from point of software.

Where 'meheleventyone' droped IL2:Sturmovik in actual thread just as "alternative game to play" — there is nothing about its software development described here and IL2:Sturmovik is not in whole or even in part open-source app.[1]

Lets not manipulate in the middle here.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30299850#30302334

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30299850#30301295

Does VR really work out though? I used to be deep into IL2 back in the days of endless zombie 4.09 (writing server control in scala deep) and the main thing I remember about what that virtual flying was like is staring at a 2x2 pixel disturbance on my 1600x1200 at max zoom trying desperately to tell axis from ally. Put that on an HMD and you have to almost crash into them before you can identify. At least that was my impression in a quick test running BoS on Valve Index. Well, that was without fully deployed cockpit controls where I'd have zoom on dedicated buttons.

The ironic part is that my IL2 past was the biggest lure for getting the Valve Index, because I spent too much time toying with headtracking (writing pascal and assembly, what a contrast to the scala of my server control adventures!) to not want that Lighthouse thing. I might have bought Lighthouse standalone if they offered a version without the HMD!

Yeah they've improved spotting in the game immensely after a rocky couple of attempts. The lower res of VR actually helps a bit there as well. The hardest part is ID though where the res does work against it a bit. There is zoom in VR as well which works pretty well. I find it a bit easier than a flat screen overall.

VR absolutely shines for gunnery though, I got a lot more accurate just making the switch. In particular I never really got comfortable with a TrackIR it never felt quite connected in the way VR does.

And then just for immersion its really fun, personally I don't think I could go back. I'm just running it on the Oculus Link with the OG Quest so no worries about lots of hardware needing to be setup. I just plug the cable in, use the hand tracking to start the link and launch into IL2.

Yeah the immersion is surprisingly good - like when I go through a cloud and droplets accumulate on the canopy, my brain gets tricked into thinking I'm smelling moisture.

Yeah particularly with the new clouds, flying between two is pretty magic.

DCS world is where it's at.

Interesting what you say about textures, on the main page there are two commercial jets with decals including text on the side. Perhaps they did add them eventually? Or are they just very high poly and still coloured individually?

No, Soji Yamakawa (the sole developer of this game) never added texture support to vehicles. Those letters you see there are entirely made out of polygons and have their own color, distinct to the rest of the plane's body. Sometimes those polygons are embedded on the plane's mesh, and others they're just floating above the fuselage. The latter technique simplifies the entire plane's topology quite a bit.

> Or are they just very high poly and still coloured individually?

Yes, all what is flying, moving or is infrastructure object ("aircraft" or "ground" addons) is just fully polygonal 3D models without texture support.

Textures used only for the next objects:

- "scenery" ground surface ("elevated terrain" has texture projected from behind surface texture);

- "clouds";

- "explosion ball" and "explosion smoke";

- "smoke from smoke generators" (which could be enabled for aircraft).

Thats all, and all those textures could be disabled in YSFlight options.

Read «YSFlight Handbook»[0] where all file formats and YSFlight options & internals described in details.

[0] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewtopic.php?t=8172&p=92286#p92286

Ever since the days when early geforce displaced late 3dfx I've been wondering how computer graphics might look like if it wasn't all buried under deceptive texturing. Doubling polygon count gives laughably low visual improvement, compared to what you can achieve with clever texture fx along the lines of bump mapping, but modern polygon count capabilities should be so big that difference might well become meaningless again.

> Fun fact: the game looks like that because it has no textures. Instead, every polygon is colored individually. Through a recent update did give the terrain textures. Aircraft still don't have them.

Of course that description made me think of Red Baron[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_(1990_video_game)

My mind exploded. I played that game on my first computer, a 286. I think it was the first game I owned, it came in a pack with Silent Hunter I think, maybe Panzer General and another game I don't remember...

If time travel of information is possible we could send and receive packets back in time to play with players located in the years of 2005-2007. It would solve the problem of dead servers and allow us to play during the golden ages again for many games.

You were playing with info time travelers back then and didn't even know it.

Wow it’s possible I could have been playing against myself.

The polygon-based graphics remind me of Need for Madness! I played it in elementary school every day between 2008-2012. No multiplayer until a few years later though.

http://needformadness.com/

Interesting; I was not aware of their existence. They seem to be free as in beer; not as in speech. They seem to make money with shareware provided by the same company.

Nothing against closed source though. For example, I enjoy x-plane a lot which while not free (in either sense) of course has a large community providing both free and non free add-ons. This seems more of a game with a focus on combat and less on realism or looks.

An actual free, open source flight simulator that deserves mentioning is Flightgear. I've played with that a couple of times but always end up reverting to x-plane. But flightgear has some nice features and also a nice community. It just doesn't look and feel anywhere near as good as x-plane (which is a tall order because it is very good).

Anyway, I checked out some footage on Youtube. Visually, it has nothing on even Flightgear; which I'm pretty sure probably has some combat mods. Or even any version of that the last few decades or so, actually. It actually reminded me of some dos games I used to play in the early nineties. E.g. Jetfighter II (released 1990) was pretty awesome back in the day. It looks like that but with higher resolution. But e.g. the ground is a featureless green blob; just like in Jetfighter II, and clouds are white polygons hanging in the sky, etc. And Jetfighter II had a HUD that was about as feature rich as the one in this game. Of course it was way more pixelated than this. But they even managed a cockpit panel :-). I wouldn't call it photo realistic but it didn't look half bad for the time. There are probably better/later game that this thing is shooting for. But I just never really got into combat flight simulation.

I guess they are trying to recreate some of that experience. Not that it matters; but I guess the gameplay is more important than the looks for this. Actually looks like it could be a lot of fun.

BTW. I have nothing against MS Flightsimulator. The latest version looks great. But I just don't have any windows computers anymore at this point. Combat is not really something either of the other flightsims I mentioned are made for or even good at.

> Nothing against closed source though.

To be clear, YSFlight is partially open-source software.

Here is official repo[0] of its GUI toolkit (OpenGL-based) and various miscellaneous apps based on it.

PolygonCrest (aka `ysgebl`), an official 3D editor for addon making for YSFlight, based on the same toolkit as YSFlight, is fully free & opensource.

[0] https://github.com/captainys/public

[1] https://github.com/captainys/public/tree/master/src/ysgebl

[2] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewtopic.php?t=6374

Yeah, but it is a shame that the rest is closed source. This game could seriously benefit from community contributions and/or from a fork. There is a really strange issue that occurs when the map is far too big; the ground shakes uncontrollably. Given how simplistic the game looks, you'd expect maps to be able to get really big without much of an issue, yet we have bugs like these...

I do remember there being a server plugin of sorts that somehow managed to do things like darken the sky as your aircraft climbed. Can't remember what that was called.

> the ground shakes uncontrollably

Yep, that was the real problem till YSFlight version ver.2015xxxx, but since ver.2018xxxx it was a little bit fixed, but I'm agree that being open-source it could has a chance to be fixed by community.

Being in actual state, YSFlight is hobby project of single person.

That is why its hard to predict future of this amazing software.

Yep, the most suitable classification for YSFlight is freeware, not Free Software. It's some old guy's personal project with LLC title that has been running since 1999. I doubt he's making much out of it, as the download page still says the website costs him $50 per month.

Being such an old game it runs on all-custom code he refers to as "YSFlight Kernel" that don't even support texturing, but the game is extremely lightweight and its flight model is at least bearably realistic. That casts contrast to many commercial games like Ace Combat franchises. It also has good keyboard support.

During 2010s the author followed open source movement and dumped some code on GitHub, but the core value of YSFlight remains its easy and compact nature. It's a worthwhile 20MB on your doomsday gaming console to bring to your designated fallout shelter.

YSFHQ (YSFlight Headquarters) is international users community.[0]

There is large list of addons created by users, which highly extends YSFlight.[1]

Also, there are a lot of open-source utilities for addons makers.[2]

Read «YSFlight Handbook»[3] and «YSFlight Scientific Research»[4] papers for understand addons formats and some internals of YSFlight.

[0] https://forum.ysfhq.com

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

[2] https://github.com/YSFlight-opensource

[3] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewtopic.php?t=8172&p=92286#p92286

[4] https://sites.google.com/prod/site/ysdecaff/ysflight-scienti...

The story of YSFlight is long, but FLYBY2[0] screensaver for Windows 98 is probably one of initial implementations of YSFlight flight engine (aircraft 3D models distributed with FLYBY2 are now distributed with YSFlight in same DNM-format).

Few weeks ago Soji Yamakawa open-sourced[0,1] FLYBY2 and ported it also for FM TOWNS.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30214412

[1] https://github.com/captainys/FLYBY2

YSFlight sim used to be my jam! Back in high school (~2004), a few of my friends and I all had YSFlight sim loaded on some zip disks. Then throughout the week, our schedules would occasionally align so that we were all in separate classrooms but each had access to a computer and we could play the multiplayer combat mode over the schools network. YSFlight sim was also my first introduction to modding. I was able to take the F-22, give it unbelievable amounts of thrust (millions of lbf), zero mass, and virtually unlimited ammunition. It was great, I could fly across the entire map in a second, then loiter like a helicopter. I dominated for like a week until I gave the secret away...

This looks interesting, but the coolest part of this site is the forums. I had no idea that phpBB was still in active development/maintenance. It's surprising how ridiculously fast it is, and how much information is packed into each page. The topic pages are full of images and complex layouts, but it still renders completely in less than a second. Granted, Cloudflare and caching are a big help, but it goes to show what years and years of continued development and optimization can do.

This was pretty much always the case with these old school forums. They where always pretty fast if run on decent hardware. Unlike modern web things.

> Unlike modern web things.

I'm fully agree on it phpBB-based sites awesome in performance and, as for me, it is exactly "classic" forum engine, which also used by RCGroups[0] and FlightGear[1].

[0] https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/index.php

[1] https://forum.flightgear.org/

> It's surprising how ridiculously fast it is

This is why server-side rendering is making a comeback; for over a decade, ever since Chrome and V8 came out, the focus has been on making JS faster, but in the meantime rendering plain old HTML and CSS (especially without animations or other complexer calculations) hasn't stopped. Especially newer versions of rendering engines, employing 3D acceleration and tile-based rendering will make these things really fast.

Years ago we decided that vBulletin 3 was getting too old (it had been superseded by the slower 4 and 5 by then; slower because they did more 'tidy' coding in the back-end (object-oriented PHP) and tried to build a more JS-heavy front-end.). We first tried Discourse - we tried it for days, trying to migrate posts, but it was just so heavyweight, it seemed aimed at enterprise companies with a free-to-spend credit card linked to AWS, not some random fansite out on the internet. I gave up eventually.

Instead we went to Xenforo, which was built by the same people behind vBulletin up until v3, after which that company was bought out and the people left. They built Xenforo with similar goals as vB 3, just with a fresh start, and the result was an old-fashioned but fast forum software, suitable for mobile, some JS sprinkled here and there for e.g. instant posting without a full page reload, but other than that a pretty vanilla piece of software.

Wow, I've been flying in YSF for what feels like over a decade. Up until recently it was just a game I installed on my parent's computer and would play when I went home.

One thing I love about the game is that they nailed the F-22's thrust vectoring and supermanueverability. I play the game with a keyboard and a mouse (as opposed to a HOTAS setup), and after all these years flying the F-22 I'm proud to say I can execute stalls, a Pugachev's Cobra, and more maneuvers.

I'm not your typical gamer (I don't own a console, and I own 2 games on Steam that I never play), but YSFlight has been my "Come To Jesus" moment for recreational simulation. If you're on the fence about downloading it, I encourage you to do it. You will not be disappointed.

Intersting to see a flight sim post would make to the front page of HN lol. I'm also working on a free flight simulator lately, but focusing on drones/quadcopters/FPV and stick feel. It's browser based but can be played with gamepads or radio controllers. Give it a try if you are interested and let me know what you think, located here: https://dronesitter.com/sim

> I'm also working on a free flight simulator lately, but focusing on drones/quadcopters/FPV and stick feel.

Guess, it would be better post it in "Show HN" section[0], beacuse your flight sim is online/WebGL-based — it is probably has nothing to compare with YSFlight.

As side note, it is not good to launch WebGL-app immediately after user just visits your site — my PC near stuck with full CPU/GPU load; it would be much better give a user button "Launch now" instead to launch WebGL without permission by user/site visitor.

N.B. YSFlight could be used with RC-transmitters connected to PC as joysticks, and even more, there are already a lot of drones "aircraft" addons for YSFlight too — so you may combining it with something like Oculus or Google VR Cardoard to use YSFlight for playing in FPV-mode.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/show

Thanks for the advice! This is due to a recently added feature that maximizes FPS, I should have considered wider ranges of devices.

Yeah, clicking this link on my 2016 MPB caused all of Chrome to completely hang for about 3mins until I could close it... yikes.

I found the calibration hard to use and it didn't give me much feedback to say if I was doing what it wanted or not. The end result seemed to get the axis extents correct but the mapping all over the place.

Thanks for the feedback! I do feel your pain, will make this clearer in the future, already on the "roadmap" :D

It's still alive! Yes.

For Linux users who don't want to run the .py install script... The Linux binaries are hiding inside the MacOS .app dir, you can run them in-place without installation, e.g after unzipping, the 64bit GL2 one can be run with:

  ./ysflight64_gl2.app/Contents/Resources/ysflight64_gl2

LGR recently did a Blerb about a floppy disk found in a computer from Lockheed Martin, that had a screen saver based on an old version of YSFlight on it. The screen saver would stage flybys of YSFlight's distinctive, untextured models of fighter jets.

> LGR recently did a Blerb about a floppy disk found in a computer from Lockheed Martin

Here is already comment[0] on this with links to related HN thread.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30299850#30301403

Don't forget Linux Air Combat: https://askmisterwizard.com/2019/LinuxAirCombat/LinuxAirComb...

Yep, LAC[0] (fork of GL-117) even has a thread on YSFHQ forum.[1]

BTW, I think YSFlight is more related to ACM[2] & Vertigo[3] flight simulators, instead of GL-117/LAC.

As for more advanced open-source flight simulator than LAC, take a look on Marek Cel's[4] Mscsim and FightersFS.[5]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27073052

[1] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=8496

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22549969

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598269

[4] https://github.com/marek-cel?tab=repositories

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/marek-cel

The author also made an interesting demscene release for the Fujitsu Micro 7.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=72288

Author, Soji Yamakawa[0], is not only active demoscene performer (few times winner of Demosplash Party) but also is a big fan of Fujitsu FM TOWNS[1] — in last few years he did an open-source emulator, "Tsugaru"[2].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=in.coocan.jp

[1] http://ysflight.in.coocan.jp/FM/e.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269460

I believe he's also a professor at CMU. His demoscene contributions also often represent many of the first demos ever on their respective platforms. If anybody is even remotely interested in Japanese retro computers he also contributes many of them to the retro petting zoo at Demosplash (when they're live). The computing club there goes through some serious heroics to keep many of the old systems alive and is responsible for a huge amount of these platform first demos in the scene.

Just a little bit of previous discussion:

YSFlight RIAT 2021 – The Marine's Rally: A Tribute to Gunny [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28845160 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)

Announcing YS Flight (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27047041 - May 2021 (1 comment)

YS Flight Simulator 20th Anniversary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303825 - June 2019 (1 comment)

Thanks dang for always being such a great steward of this community!

MalwareBytes flags this site as potentially containing malware

Don't use MalwareBytes[0], even MS Windows at all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malwarebytes_Anti-Malware#Secu...

This and another highly upvoted site submitted yesterday were flagged by MWB. Giving it the benefit of doubt could be that user submitted content for the game may be the culprit but I am just guessing. Worst case there could be an active campaign to infect people in the tech industry just prior to a military engagement. I will assume and prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

if you're into this you should check out Tiny Combat Arena:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1347550/

spiritually similar, but single-player and cuter graphics. the release is in two weeks, but i've been following the dev for a year because the clips are so fun to watch.

I just tried it and I'm not impressed at all. There are many better, yet still free alternatives, so not sure I understand why this got on front page...

I'm happy to see a flight simulator that isn't locked down with annoying rules. What's the point of playing digital games if you can't go crazy?

Of Mac with M1 it will crash as long as you don't give permissions to listen to key-input. So yes, it works with M1.

> Of Mac with M1 it will crash as long as you don't give permissions to listen to key-input.

So, it under macOS BigSur with M1 it works if "give permissions to listen to key-input", right?

Yes, just tested with the 2019 version

> with the 2019 version

Ther is no YSFlight version 2019xxxx, latest version is 20181124.[0]

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

The author brought several Fujitsu computers to Demosplash and wrote some fun demos. Much appreciated.

Is it sponsored by Zombo?

Is there something like this but in the browser?

It can bring back my dead wife?!

Only if you want it to.

If the graphics quality increases I might play it one day.

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