http://www.flightgear.org

anyone heard of this or tried it?

I tried it a long time ago, about 2005 or 6-ish. It was lacking and is no comparison to FSX, but it's free.

That's amazing! Can I use the time machine you used in order to compare FlightGear to a sim that didn't exist yet?

FYI, 2.0 is out and it looks great.

g.

So how is it?

BF

Easy, it was 100x more limited then FS2004, and that paled in comparison to FSX. I'd be willing to give 2.0 a try though.

I tried it back around the same time Exhausted but I had no means of comparison then or now. I'll check this out and see what the new version is like. Thanks for the link!

Mmmmhh ... free sauce. *drool*

I tried it but im not that much into flight. Didn't motivate me.
I have more fun "free flying" the uncomplex aero in IL2.

What do you mean by "more limited"?

FYI, here's what the new 2.x shader looks like:



This is a discussion on the developer list about the accuracy of the helicopter flight models: http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg27408.html

g.

I just watched the 65 screenshots, and it looks real good for a freeware.
Might try it this week if its not to difficult to install.

Sure it wont be as pretty as FSX, but there seem to have a wide variety of planes and some little details with it that may conpensate.

this game still has bad compatibility. i tried tweaking options only to see the OPENGL windows, sometimes i can't even get the GL windows. never got into a flight (before i deleted the game)

and loading data takes very long time - it takes like 10 seconds only to load an F-14 model.
the whole game folder is only 500MB and it loads much slower than an 2GB game.

i hope they will make the basic functions properly before they go further into the flight technology part.

You have to take into account the age of the project. Heck, there's still a 3DFX mode available on it in "game mode".

It's quite useful for academic stuff, but it's very rough. Over half the aircraft available are either glitchy or not finished, and have been like that for years. Flight models sometimes suck (fighters with roll rates of 20 deg/sec?). The interface is horribly clunky. It's buggy: keys changing out of the blue. Crashes. Horrendous load times, and that's without all the eye candy loading in the background. Turn that on, it gets slower and even more buggy. Yes, it's only half a gigabyte without all the scenary. Those lengthy screens are an indication just how lacking-in-elegance the coding is. Free and open source isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. It's great (and possibly the only option) for custom Matlab-based flight models, flight control system modeling, if you're a programmer, or you can mind the few dozen available nice aircraft. Sometimes a good one can be ruined, though, by a simple issue like the artificial horizons not working until you reboot.

A few of the complete and bug-free aircraft, if you can get past the interface and configuration issues, are top grade like the Beechcraft B1900D. Considering all the cons to FlightGear, it's startling how good some of them are. If you have a lot of time to kill and patience to spare, it's worth downloading for such a small footprint. Certainly DO NOT spend your money purchasing the whole DVDs with world scenery thing first without having tried it out.

I'll try to put together a list of aircraft worth downloading if you try it.

Here are most of the aircraft I have downloaded for FlightGear.

****Good:

A-10
B-1
F-14b
Eurocopter BO-105
Sikorsky S76C
Boeing 777-200ER
Beechcraft B1900D
Cessna C172P- see next
Cessna Citation X – both these Cessnas’ horizons aren’t working. Avionics off?
De Havilland Beaver
Moyes Dragonfly – fun
British Aerospace Harrier (yasim)
Racer Gee Bee - bit weird, but that might be accurate?
BF109 – roll issues and sound dropouts
Hawker Hunter GA11
Piper J3 Cub
Piper PA-22-160
Piper Comanche
Piper Cherokee Warrior II
Pilatus PC-7 (FSBsim)
Dassault Rafale (FSBsim)
Senecall P3c-700T
Sopwith Camel – work of art
Stieglitz Focke Wulfe FW44
Superwal Dornier
Zivko Edge 540
Zepplin NT07 – but this is a lot of work… and boring

*** Honorable mentions:

Bell UH-1 – pit is sparse, but the performance is supposedly accurate.
Ka-50 – lacking a pit, but lovely flight model when AFCS on.
AS-33211 – limited pit, beeps a lot, rotor rpm?
Boeing 727-230 – Good modeling, poor pit
Airbus A380 – needs better pit and startup shortcut
F-15C – no pit
F-18 – no pit
F-117 – no pit
EFA Typhoon – limited pit, no sound
J-22 – no pit
MD11 – no pit
Mig-21 – poor pit, no sound
Su-37 – needs roll/yaw dampening and 1G AFCS pitch hold when in DR mode, try it anyway.
Kawasaki T4 – pit incomplete, avionics power?
Cessna T-37 – no pit, seems to have poor thrust, good for learning to follow sideslip ball
Northrop T-38 – only a 2D panel, odd afterburner sounds all the time
Eurocopter EC665 – FM is close to other crude AFCS helos in FG, but no pit
V-22 Osprey – throttle/collective is backwards, tilt should be assigned mixture or prop
1903 Wright Flyer – I got a CTD with this and doesn’t seem too exciting, anyway. Select UIUC?

** These are misses or not ready for primetime, but may work and can be flown… sort of:

Ch-47 – sluggish
Ah-64 – totally weird performance
B-2
B-24
C130
Dauphin
Cessna 310 – cockpit issue
F-80c – sluggish
Hughes H1 racer
Honda Jet
Autogiro Hornet
Horten Ho iX
SR71 – crude and inaccurate
Me-262 – slow roll
Mig-15 – slow roll
Mig-29 – no sound, limited AoA
Mirage 2000C/RDI
Kawasaki OH-1 Ninja – strange flight dynamics
P-51D – bad take-off behavior

*Worst so far:

F-16 – Many CTDs, Buggy, No pit
747-400 – no graphics
787-8 – No load
A6M2 Zero – can’t get the speed up
YF-23 – can’t start it
Cessna 182 – not runway worthy, let alone flight worthy
Carreidas 160 – no load
English Electric Lightning F.1A
UH-60 Blackhawk – no load, which is ironic considering what Penn State’s doing with the FORTRAN-based mil-grade GENHEL FDM for this aircraft and Matlab.

I am downloding the new version i will put up a review of it on the forum as soon as I can

dam thing didn't work for me

Skipping the *awesome* trouble report there, what problem did you have?

g.

well the textaurs would not show up on the plane or the ground also i could not even role down the runway let alone get up in the iar grpahicks wise I was not expecting FSX or even X pane but I was looking for somthing like this
[img]http://http://www.flightgear.org/Gallery-v2.0/target58.html[/img]
inted i ended up with somthing that looks like flight simulator 4
bad times

I'd love to help you work this out, but I need to know more about your system. What OS, graphics card and driver are you using? What version of FlightGear did you download? What aircraft did you try? Please be specific.

thanks!

g.

i have a
i5 processer
windows 7
Dx 11 compatebel grpahics card can't remeber the name of it atm

that's all i know everything elese rusn fine on it

What version of FlightGear did you try? What aircraft did you try that showed up without textures?

Did you try starting at KSFO? If not, where did you start from?

PLEASE BE SPECIFIC. VERY SPECIFIC. MIND BENDINGLY, SOUL CRUSHINGLY SPECIFIC.

Without further information, there isn't much I can do for you.

g.

I tryed quite a few verious aircraftbinclubing a Sky hawk and 747 I alos tryed KSFO and so the textures worked there i was running V2 64 bit version sorry i don't know much more