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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

You're comparing something that literally looks like a movie to a game that nobody would even dare giving away for free in cereal packs.

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It's about a little thing called gameplay.

People who are into gaming for the visuals and the comparing of the sizes of their 3D cards wont understand this.

Well surprise (not a surprise at all actually), the gameplay of that game sucks too.

Well, that's just like, your opinion, man.

If this is a reference to the gameplay of LAC then I want to get my view in here. LAC has very very very good gameplay. You can't build your own character, but you can just jump into 1 of their many airplanes and then into 1 of their many missions and fly combat with or against real people or replay people that are devious and skilled. Go to YouTube and search for Linux Air Combat and you will see like Hundreds of video clips where people get deep into this and keep coming back for more. Theyve got fighters, bombers, fighterbombers, offense, defense, strategy, tactics, voice and text comms, and free 24/7 missions and free published source code. What else do you expect for free?

One more thing. When your selecting an airplane in LAC it always has an extra menu button for every plane that will play a YouTube documentary vid clip about that plane. Some of those clips are really good. It's like spending the day in a warbirds museum where you can learn about the planes, select your favorite, and then hop in and fly it.

I think some of the people that can't stand LAC graphics are just upset that it looks as good for people with a $50 graphics card as it looks for people with a $500 graphics card. Get over it people! You didn't waste $450. You get even better graphics on other games. Just not on LAC, where everybody gets the same pretty good graphics that will never be spectacular graphics.

My 2 cents.

Giving kids a flight sim in cereal packs? One purposefully made for Linux no less sounds like an awful idea. Of course they don't do that.

Does any cereal still come with toys?

Untill you play it. I said the same in ~2003 with the first Deus Ex. Dull graphics, not the best usage of the first Unreal engine, cliché conspiacies almost straight from the X-Files series and common urban legens.

Yet the emergent gameplay and the semi free-roaming playability made it better than most FPS crapware being shold from 2002 to 2009 save for Half Life 2 and Crysis.

This might not be the best game on the flying combat genre, but don't forget that these games are built for fun and if they work on multiplayer, for quick matches quickly forgetting the rest.

Heck, a lot of pro FPS players put the texture settings at the core mininum and with a 1920x1080 resolution at best so they can spot the rest of the players at a quick glance...

So did you play Linux Air Combat and what are your impressions?

Not LAC, but it's "dad" GL-117, yes. Flightgear was much better, (and today FG graphically curb-stomps LAC) but as a quick match against the CPU, it was fine.

Xonotic and Red Eclipse 2 began as quick, improved Q3A FPS clones and now they are pretty well known in lots of places with their mechanics being utterly ripped to set fakely placed as novelties and "revolutionary gameplays" into propietary AAA games.

Here is a link to the online reviews from SourceForge, by people that HAVE played it: https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxaircombat/reviews/

So you are sending me a links which makes my point even more better? Thanks :)

As I said, the game is to GL-117 as Supertuxkart over Tuxkart, or Speed Dreams over Torcs.

Yes. Only LAC's improvement is even more because GL-117 didn't even have any network support. It was all offline. LAC is fundamentally an online, multi-player rewrite of GL-117 with vastly improved flight models and a lot more airplanes.

Yes. I played it and I liked it. It reminded me very much of Aces High "classic" or its successor, Aces High 2.

They have a new version out for beta testing. It looks like they've had recent complaints about compatibility. Like people that didn't have a joystick. And some people that applied recent OS patches were having problems. The new beta test one purports to solve those problems. I didn't try it because the version I got a few days ago works great on all of my machines. But if you had trouble you might try the beta. It's at https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxaircombat/files/Choose...

Yes. I've been playing it for about a week and it is surprisingly good once you get past the simple tutorials. The online missions are deep even if you're the only one. The flight is credible and feels really smooth on my xubuntu desktop with Intel core 2 duo and Nvidia Quadro graphics. Two or 3 times I have had other players show up but I am not ready to tangle with experts yet so when I see others I just switch to a different mission lol. I fly the spitfire mostly cuz I always loved that plane and it seems to fly very close to what I expected.

Alright, compare to up and coming air combat game Tiny Combat Arena, which requires at least 1GB.

I haven't played Tiny Combat Arena but their video promos look very much like ysflight, which I have played a lot. I mean Tiny Combat Arena really looks very very much like ysflight. I wonder if it's a fork of the ysflight code. I don't think ysflight ever published their source code and Tiny Combat Arena is a sold-for-profit app, so we'll probly never know.

But I have played LAC and LAC looks better to me. Especially the terrain graphics and clouds.

The code has no relation to YSFlight, and predates YSFlight source being released either way, but I admire YSFlight's timeless art style.

I didn't know the source code for ysflight was ever published. That's great news!

Is the source code for Tiny Combat Arena released too?

It's not, but I upload a lot of the more general purpose code I use to my github: https://github.com/brihernandez

For the record, TCA is 243MB as of right now. I think the smallest it ever was, was ~120MB on launch, and ~90MB in early pre-release versions. The audio files alone are ~60MB. I was sad to see it hit >200MB, but it can't be helped.

TCA looks like a fine piece of software. I'm going to try it. But I prefer WW2 airplanes over modern ones. And I'm have a BLAST learning LAC. There is a lot of depth here. And LOTS of airplanes to try. I haven't spent much time in the online missions yet but I am almost ready to give that a try. I'll probably get murdered there by some bushwacker!

I will try TCA after I get tired of LAC. If I ever get tired of LAC.

Still having a blast with LAC in the tutorial and offline missions. I fiddled around mapping my controls but after a lot of changes I just went back to the defaults. Had to get used to it but now its GREAT. Smooth flight rock solid 60FPS with 1080p graphics on most of my machines. Really smooth. I hadn't realized the little hickups Windows inserts into my other flight sims until I got into this LAC. It's noticably smoother. The feeling of flight is just THERE.

OTOH the enemy AI isn't very good. The bots in the training missions don't ever do anything fancy and after awhile its finally getting easy to mow them all down. But I mean that in a good way. In a fun way.

Ground handling is primitive too. Taxi on the runway and take off and landings seem playful and not very realistic once your wheels hit the pavement. But once in the air its magical. For FOSS this is surprisingly good.

Look at Minecraft and say that.

Look at Roblox and say that.

And say what? Minecraft has always had a much nicer look than this game, without talking about the musics, etc. And even to this day it's only around 600MB.

Yes, let's compare it to Minecraft. It looks like crap compared to Minecraft.

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