flight simulators

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> In the spirit of a good linux user my
> first search was for a flight simulator. Though I have found 2-3 I felt
> morally compelled to seek feedback on any flight simulators in linux that
> you have used or use at the present before diving into any of them. Any
> recommendations , pros and cons are more than welcome.


If you really want a "simulator" (not a game), then you have X-Plane
(www.x-plane.com).

IT's the best (most accurate) flight sim for desktop computers, and
enjoys very active/commited developpers.
It's not so bad as a game either, since sometimes making it an accurate
simulator sometimes converges with the goal of a game.
For example you can have hordes of birds around, and if you fly into
them you may ruin your engines and crash. They also refine the way
birds remains/blood crash onto the windscreen, or how the rain drops
spill on the windscreen, or many tiny details like that.

Downsides ?  
- Since it's not meant to compete with games, I find the
graphics quality quite poor overall.

- If like me you like helicopters, you will not find many available,
actually I found only 2, and they are not free. (about 10 dollars the
aircraft).

- X-Plane is developped on Apple Macs, ported to Windows, and only
fairly recently (3+ years ago) to Linux. Problem is that the Linux port
is a kind of afterthought, has some little bugs I found (nothing major
though) that the X-plane crew clearly don't care about. You can
nonetheless get some help on the x-plane forum (x-plane.org), where
there is a Linux specific section.

- it's not free software, though in practice it's not that big a
problem, since the overall quality of the program is quite good/mature,
and they give you tools to easily create of modifiy aircrafts, scenery
etc, so it's not that big a "black box" as one might fear at first.
As for the monetary part of the "free" term, it's not very expensive
(got it for 60 Euros including delivery), which includes 7 DVD discs for
the worldwide scenery, as well as free updates (as I said development is
very active, so you have a new beta pretty much every other week if you
fancy so) for the life of the current release. for example version 9
has recently been released, which will likely last for 2 or 3 years
judging by past experience, so you get free updates for that long.



Plusses ?

- When you buy X-Plane you get the Mac, Windows and Linux version all
on the same disc, so you can install it on other platforms too if you
like.

- Although not free software, you can still easily reach the small dev
team to submit bug reports, they do reply. Unfortunately the public
doesn't have access to a bug tracker, so once you have e-mailed
them a bug report, there is no way to track progress on it, it's one
way process.

- If like me you like accurate helicopter simulation, then X-Plane is
the only choice. MS Flight Simulator is more of a game in that respect,
and Flight Gear is... well just forget about helis in FG unless you
want an arcade game/toy rather than a simulator.

So in short, if you prefer planes, and are not very critical about
physics, then you can consider Flight Gear or MS flight simulator
(via Wine or VMware presumably) along X-Plane.


HTH,

--
Vince