Flight sim?

Has anyone got any flight sim to run on the Raspberry?
I think it would be a blast to fly using my big screen TV as the display.

I know flightgear is probably too resource hungry for the Raspberry PI, but surely there is a less resource hungry flight sim?

I have been able to run Tie Fighter (1994) under DOSBox. Using the MAX settings and a frame-skip of about 4. In-game settings pretty low.

I am running Arch. Overclocking as follows: cpu=900;ram=500;gpu=300

All that said, Tie Fighter is slow (playable-ish). It is no-where near what I can get on my laptop, but it is running inside the DOSBox emulator. PRBoom which runs natively in Linux runs Doom at high in-game settings pretty fast.

This all leads me to believe if we can get a Linux based flight sim like FlightGear compiled and running natively I believe the RasPi can handle it. Through a layer of emulation it struggles.

I suspect like most 3D games/apps, the problem will be finding a flightsim that uses OpenGLES rather than regular OpenGL...

Any kind of real world sim with a half decent rendering engine would be good - I was hoping Pifinity would bring a framework that could be used

I confess to once-upon-a-time being a "small-sized-cheese" in the MS Train Sim community to the point of a) contributing to stuff on the shelves of Game and b) getting a good way down writing my own engine in VB consuming MSTS assets. (sadly the better ORTS rewrite of the same ilk has been done in C# otherwise there could have been a port option)

One of my specific interests in Gambas2 was to see if I could port my VB code - the biggest challenge being the need to replace a friends DirectX based renderer/viewer component

Wandering around wikipedia, have found FlightGear Flight Simulator use OpenSceneGraph which has opengl es support.

We should give it a try

I got flightgear to install with:
'sudo apt-get install flightgear'

I have not got it to start up yet.
For anyone wanting to try it, I believe you need to 'startx' first.

I suspect that any precompiled binaries (such as those installed from a repository) will probably be compiled to use OpenGL. Getting it to use OpenGLES will probably involve configuring and compiling from sourcecode.

I wondered if YS Flight http://www.ysflight.com might work on the Pi? Graphically it's not very challenging but can be great fun, especially multiplayer.

It's pre compiled and it doesn't look like the source code is available though

Today I managed to have Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 and 4.0b both running under DOSBox.
Irrespective of whether DOSBox is run fullscreen from the console or windowed from LXDE, FS3.0 and FS4.0b have both (measured at classical Meigs takeoff position with no weather or dynamic scenery) 4 fps. (This with the optimal DOSBOx cycle wich happens to be around 2000 to 3000. ) This is the best one can get, but using a scenery where about a dozen buildings and a few trees show (I tried my old Argentina-Uruguay scenery) the fps go down to 1 fps. Certainly these frame rates are is just enough to show that these simulators do run in the RPi, but the fps are too low for any practical use.

Will try the other simulators suggested above, but obviously one has to look outside DOSBox, for something native Linux, to achieve anything practical.

Thanks for the suggestion about FlightGear. Installed. Cannot run it, cannot find the command. Whether from console or from LXDE, there is an error: no flightgear command. Guess for some reason it is hidden in some folder. Would be pleased to know the full command to start Flightgear once installed on the Raspberry.

Thanks!

I confess to once-upon-a-time being a "small-sized-cheese" in the MS Train Sim community to the point of a) contributing to stuff on the shelves of Game and b) getting a good way down writing my own engine in VB consuming MSTS assets. (sadly the better ORTS rewrite of the same ilk has been done in C# otherwise there could have been a port option)

Not so small Steve - help is at hand if I can get my pi into a reasonable state

(Also a keen flight sim modeller and 3D programmer)

Paul

Thanks for the suggestion about FlightGear. Installed. Cannot run it, cannot find the command. Whether from console or from LXDE, there is an error: no flightgear command. Guess for some reason it is hidden in some folder. Would be pleased to know the full command to start Flightgear once installed on the Raspberry.

Thanks!

fgfs is the command if I recall correctly.
Not that I ever got it to run.

umm,
I've written too many of those to even think about doing one now ....
ummm
no I'll not dig out he old code

I confess to once-upon-a-time being a "small-sized-cheese" in the MS Train Sim community to the point of a) contributing to stuff on the shelves of Game and b) getting a good way down writing my own engine in VB consuming MSTS assets. (sadly the better ORTS rewrite of the same ilk has been done in C# otherwise there could have been a port option)

Not so small Steve - help is at hand if I can get my pi into a reasonable state

(Also a keen flight sim modeller and 3D programmer)

Paul

Hi Paul - really good to hear from you again. Fancy rewriting/recompiling your viewer in C or C++ and OpenGL ES for the Pi?

FlightGear:

Thanks for the useful info! I issued
sudo fgfs
with no result, then I fired up a LXDE LX console, started Midnight Commander there, performed a full search and found a few fgfs* files, the main one in /usr/games. So I issued
sudo /usr/games/fgfs
and after about 5 seconds I got the following reply:
Error: :0.0 has no GLS extension.
getdefaultwindow: failed to create GraphicsContent
I was then back to the console prompt.
It looks as if the available version we are installing in the RPi is not GLE compatible.
Any ideas?

Joe

Hi Paul - really good to hear from you again. Fancy rewriting/recompiling your viewer in C or C++ and OpenGL ES for the Pi?

I re-wrote it once with DX9 and .NET to read FSX models, it can't be too hard to convert to Open GL ES.
Time to start reading.

The Pi is missing a decent "sim" of any sort

FlightGear:

It looks as if the available version we are installing in the RPi is not GLE compatible.
Any ideas?

Joe

I am afraid that is about as far as I got.
I believe someone with some programming skill will be needed to sort this out.

Thanks TheRobster!

"somebody with programming skills"...

Indeed. I only have Fortran, Visual Basic, VBA, DOS batch, VBScript, HTML, a bit of Java and am now learning Python. IMHO all these are useless and we need somebody versed into advanced game programming, with 3D Glide environments. All I can forecast is that, rather than patching FlightGear for the RPi (most likely a mammoth task) what is needed is to patch Raspbian for common Glide. If this has not been done so far, it is probably because it is almost impossible. Let us hope there will be some improvement.
Good luck everybody.

Not any progress, but now I have the details in case somebody found a solution:

- issuing the necessary search and install statements I found that by default Raspbian installs in the RPI freeglut3, the "OpenGL Utility Toolkit".

- running FlightGear's gl-info I find that FlightGear needs instead a "GL Utility Toolkit" which "is not installed in this system".

The above shows that FlightGear needs a different GL than the one in Raspbian. I also guess that the "GL Utility Toolkit" is incompatible with Raspbian, or else it would be installed, or at least available for download and install.

Best
Joe




searching I got that the GL for the RPi is freeglut3

Flight Gear installed a few executable utilities, not only the already-mentioned GL checker, also a Joystick checker and the "metar". Issuing metar EIDW gives you the weather in Dublin airport, metar EGLL in London Heathrow and so on all over the world.

Thanks TheRobster!

"somebody with programming skills"...

Indeed. I only have Fortran, Visual Basic, VBA, DOS batch, VBScript, HTML, a bit of Java and am now learning Python. IMHO all these are useless and we need somebody versed into advanced game programming, with 3D Glide environments. All I can forecast is that, rather than patching FlightGear for the RPi (most likely a mammoth task) what is needed is to patch Raspbian for common Glide. If this has not been done so far, it is probably because it is almost impossible. Let us hope there will be some improvement.
Good luck everybody.

Don't bet against my mate decapod. He's done some amazing things in the PC sim world. If he can port his viewer we'll have the basis for something to build on. I have a VB code base which I may also be able to port. . . watch this space

Sure I will!
Best
Joe