Flightgear 2.4 plus something cuddly and something fishy

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... wait, yes, it's a plane. The quintessential FOSS flight simulator gets updated, Flightgear 2.4 (announcement) has been released.

The FlightGear development team is proud to announce the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulation program. FlightGear 2.4.0 reflects over one and a half years of development and incorporates several new and exciting features, as well as numerous bug fixes.

The feature list in the announcement is impressive. A summary won't do the release announcement justice (although in parts it is a bit dumbed down, but that's OK, not all of us are au fait with regards to computer game development). Still, here's an attempt:

• Realistic weather simulation, phenomena includes are fog layers that are limited in altitude, cold fronts, thermals, cloud formation in updraft winds along mountain ridges, and many, many more.


• Enhanced graphics including highly realistic mountain surfaces, 3-dimensional cityscapes, water moves realistically and sunlight is reflected from its surface.


• Many improved planes/models and additional cockpit systems - a choice of nearly 500 different aircraft, from historical to bleeding edge, from ultra-lights to the ultimate flying heavy metal.

Still no combat (see open source flight combat article) but I think that's probably a bit off topic for Flightgear.

The Flightgear project has reached what I call "critical mass" in that it no longer depends on a few active developers to maintain progress. A thriving contributor community outgrows the original development crew and it becomes owned by the community. Usually when a project attains critical mass, development accelerates massively. There are more people contributing to Flightgear than has ever been the case, it is flying. Pun intended.

In fact I can't think of many other FOSS games that have attained "critical mass" status. Battle for Wesnoth of course. Possibly Freeciv and OpenTTD (I wish they'd rename that). Some projects got close but never quite made it, such as Glest and Vega Strike. Others are knocking on the door, such as Pioneer, Speed Dreams, 0AD. (If I am being dozy and missing any such projects, point out in the comments!) The vast majority of projects never get close and usually only are actively developed as long as their originators / principle supporters are motivated.

What could be cuddly? Plee the Bear 0.6 has been released (announcement, forum thread). It features the first big boss. It is a very nice looking game with a lot of potential, and seems great for a younger player.

And the something fishy? Avid readers, those worth their salt, people who are true followers of the blog, those who will enter through the gates of St Peter before all others, they will know I am a big fan of Fish Fillets NG. Somebody has made a clone called, imaginatively, Fish Fillets Clone (screenshots). Whilst I don't like that it is an outright clone, I do like that it uses vector graphics. I think there's promise there.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Oh, yeah, hiiii to my Cuban female fanbase!

FlightGear at LinuxTag 2011

I took a quick look at the Gluon Talk and the games booth at LinuxTag 2011 and thought I'd share some pictures at least. :)

ProFlightSimulator: Commercial FlightGear Fork (Weak)

ProFlightSimulator ad on Free Gamer

A reader pointed out a hilarious coincidence: an ad of ProFlightSimulator, a fork of FlightGear on top of the Ripping-off open engine games post.

ProFlightSimulator is an open source stand alone Flight Simulator. As always disclosed this is a split / branch from the FlightGear community and has been set up for a very specific reason. It's different from FG due to the many major changes to the game.

This info is placed in Disclaimer/Terms/IsThisFlightgear?.

The text "Source code available in members area" is part of a background image in the footer of their homepage. There is also a .7z file containing "Source code of these images, content and files" (244MB - For a list of the file's content see here).

Why PFS is not FlightGear

The FlightGear team is aware of the for-pay forks and wrote a FlightGear-Professional explanation of the situation.

I have an ethical problem with there not being a "for every (final) purchase, we donate $1 to the FlightGear project" commitment. Maybe the improvements/code changes are at least useful to the FlightGear project, if any of the devs went through the trouble of buying PFS.

OGA challenges and snippets of games news

What you see here are the 2D/3D submission to the first three OpenGameArt 5-day game art challenges, which were initiated by pfunked, author of OSARE and active OGA artist.

Check out the general rules and the current challenge rules in its thread in this forum. You don't even need to register to participate, just remember to include your author information and the correct tags ("Friday Challenge" and "ChallengeTitle", separate via ",") to your submission!

The challenges/competitions last from Monday till Friday, so there are still a bunch of hours left to submit something to the current "Homage" challenge. :) This feed will keep you updated about new challenges.

The following is a preview of the four pieces of music submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)

And here are the sound effects submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)


By the way, Blendswap apparently will implement license selection soon. Since I mentioned my preference for their poll, "licenses" has been leading with ~30 votes. Thanks! This means that, depending on what licenses will be selectable, models on Blendswap will be usable by foss games.

The TORCS fork racing sim Speed Dreams (new website) seeks dev/art help for finishing the 2.0 release. The impression I get from taking a look at their commit history is that the project seems to be developing at a steady pace.

I discovered Pac Defence recently. I love this genre, but prefer the non-abstract implementations (PacDef is abstract) and the kind where you can use your towers to build mazes (in PacDef you build along the path). Here's a gameplay video for you. If you know of any foss maze/non-abstract TD games, please let me know! :)

I saw a video of FlightGear's urban effect and it looks awesome! If you enjoy these kind of videos, I can only recommend subscribing to planetacancun2 (author of the video) via YouTube profile or feed.

Violetland was tweaked a little, it has improved GUI and new pick-ups: bombs, bullet boosts, some pills which I don't know the effect of and the player has a teleport ability.

Epiar, the foss space action/trading game that is not naev had a dev chat meeting for planning the next version and is now looking for new developers and art submissions.

It feels good to post without embedding YT videos for a change. :)

FlightGear eyecandy release (2.0)

The flight simulator FlightGear now has pretty clouds and lighting. I have not had the chance of giving the new release a try, so I decided to create a little gallery of the best-looking shots from the 2.0 gallery.

Looks neat. But following video looks even better!

(youtube-dl link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4oMOFnD6bw )

Flightgear 1.0.0 Released

After more than 11 years of development, Flightgear 1.0 has arrived.

Flightgear can be played on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as other *nix platforms including FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX. Distributed under the GPL, Flightgear is one of the first major Free Software games and has become a flight simulator that rivals it's commercial counterparts. It is a stellar example of enthusiasts coming together to create something for the community.

The scope of the Flightgear project is, as you might expect for a game 11 years in the making, nothing short of impressive. Whilst it does fall short in a few departments when compared to commercial flight sims, in others it is unequalled. Having no full time developers and being of such high quality is a testament to the dedication and organisation of it's development team.

Flightgear has a pluggable flight dynamics model with 3 primary options, giving the enthusiast an opportunity to find a flight model that they feel is most accurate and/or fun. The integrated flight dynamics model is optimized for implementing plausibly behaving aircraft without requiring heaps of hard-to-acquire aerodynamic test data. Another is based on an FDM originally written by people at NASA. Quite impressive detail that most players probably won't appreciate.

Flightgear comes with an extensive and accurate database of world scenery. Over 20,000 real world airports are included in the full scenery set. Runways come with markings, lighting, taxiways, some sloped with variable elevation, the latter a feature missing from most commercial titles. The world scenery fits on 3 DVD's - pretty detailed coverage of the entire world with accurate terrain based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data. Scenery includes lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, and nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and even headlights visible on major highways.

You can fly seamlessly around the world, as scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread - minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas and keeping memory requirements realistic.

FlightGear implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time and date. Taking the 'term' simulator to another level, the sun, moon, stars, and planets all follow their correct courses through the sky and the [correctly placed] moon is illuminated by the [correctly placed] sun to get the correct phase of the moon for the current time/date, just like in real life.

Getting onto the aircraft, and you can fly a variety of aircraft, from the 1903 Wright Flyer, strange flapping wing "ornithopters", a 747 and A320, various military jets including the A10 tank buster, and several light singles.

Flightgear even can do fully animated, fully operational, fully interactive 3d cockpits which even update and display correctly from external chase plane views - although only a few aircraft have had this implemented thus far. Impressive nonetheless.

Despite the unbelievable attention to detail, Flightgear can be played on a rather modest PC. However the better the PC, the better it looks and runs so those with the latest, greatest 3D cards can still enjoy the extra beauty and a smoother experience.

I grabbed a few of the nicer screenshots from the Flightgear 1.0.0 gallery.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go and download Flightgear 1.0.0 (extras / source available here) and get flying - and enjoy knowing that this is Free Software gaming at it's glorious best.

Spread the word and digg this story on FSDaily and Digg.

The Flightgear feature list contains more in-depth analysis of the Flightgear features and is where I grabbed most of the above info - I'm in the business of Free Softare game information rather than Free Software game reviews. ;-)

Testing Testing Testing

200 posts to this blog now. :-)

Pingus

Pingus revival efforts are looking for bug testers. That means we can expect a new Pingus release soon, and even sooner if you head over there and help test it.

Also looking for testers is iteam, the Gunbound/Worms clone. Test packages are avaialabe for Windows and Ubuntu. Links and compilation instructions can be found in the Ubuntu forums thread where the game concept was originally incepted.

There's another snapshot release of JCRPG too, which has very lovely foilage lately. Now a few modellers have started contributing to the project so in the next few weeks hopefully we'll see a bit more gameplay development and perhaps the beginnings of the first game to use JCRPG which itself is a framework project for creating classic RPGs.

Somebody commented on yesterday's article that perhaps the Flightgear team should be avoiding the version number 0.9.11 given that the game is a flight sim. What do you think?

www.freegamedev.net

I registered the domain name www.freegamedev.net yesterday. Initially it will just point to the Free Gamer forums, but I want to evolve that into a proper Free Software game development community with useful features e.g.:

• announce.freegamedev.net - a really easy way for people to announce Free games in a single location. No accounts, no web forms, just email to e.g. announce@freegamedev.net and (pending moderator approval) it'll appear.


• planet.freegamdev.net - a place where Free game development blogs are syndicated.


• forums.freegamedev.net, wiki.freegamedev.net etc

Simple ways to help consolidate the Free gaming community will be the order of the day - none of this "let's implement a super redundant multi-layered workflow based CMS with tightly integrated thingymajigs" that will never happen because we are all busy people. KISS. Anyway, the forums are a good place for organisation.

Flightgear

A new Flightgear snapshot - 0.9.11pre1 - is available but it's source only. There's been a lot of updates since the last release over a year ago:

A gigantic number of new aircraft, new features, enhancements to existing models, and bugfixes were added.

Oooooo! :-)

I read a review of the previous release that commented on how good Flightgear was as a simulator, noting that - whilst it doesn't qutie have the graphical panache - it has several features not found in other commercial flight simulators like sloped runways. There are also different physics models, a massive number of planes and scenarios available. It's a very high quality open source project.

There's also a new version out of the interesting platform game DangerMan. The author notes he failed to playtest the previous version so a whole host of important bug fixes mean this release should be a better experience. The premise for the game sounds interesting:

Dangerman is an old-school platformer with modern features like line-of-sight and physics.

Anyway, let me know of any thoughts or ideas you have for www.freegamedev.net as I want it to be a community project, not a Free Gamer one. ;-)