Flight sims

[arzgi]

Probably the only thing I've been missing from time I was a windows user, was good quality flight sim. Most of the 'sims' were just rubbish, but there were a few gems too.

Now the situation for linux flight sim fans is much better. flightgear
is in Buster's repo. This is for just flying, but does it very well. Many planes and air stations are modelled, even some military jets, but no combat. Learning to fly with this is a challenge, but fun.

After installing you can find docs in

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/usr/share/games/flightgear


Also flightgears web page is worth checking https://www.flightgear.org/

If you just want to 'shoot down those bastards', there is now LAC Linux Air Combat https://askmisterwizard.com/2019/LinuxAirCombat/LinuxAirCombat.htm

When you crash your plane, game ends. Hours of joy already. Lot's of info on the web page, and links to many tutorial youtube-videos.

This too has some effort to be real sim, many WWII fighters to choose from, some flying chrateristics modelled for each plane. There is even one jet, but that is not allowed in multiplayer sessions

Installation is documented fine on the LAC page, here just some points.
The author says these are needed packages.

libfreeglut3
libSDL1.2_0
libSDL_mixer1.2_0
libmesaglu1
mesa

Depends what you have on your Debian installation, I had to install these

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g++
freeglut3-dev
libsdl1.2-dev
libsdl-mixer1.2-dev


https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian is a good text for any Debian user, especially for novices. But this one is quite well bult, it makes one hidden (dot dir) and one regular directory to your home dir. Configurations are in .LAC, and the game-binary and libraries are in LAC.

I downloaded the installer to ~/Downloads, below is how I installed.

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cd /tmp
tar xvzf ~/Downloads/Lac07r92.tar.gz
cd Lac07r92/

make
make clean
make install
./install.sh


Last install scripts explains what it does.

LAC starts in quite low demanding mode, it was 480x400 if I remember right and coarse graphic. If you have a modern GPU, you can play run full screen with more detailed graphics.

EDIT:I always forget something. LAC author wrote, mumble is not required. but I could not it start, if mumble is not running.

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sudo apt install mumble

[stevepusser]

LAC is quite interesting! I'm thinking of packaging it for MX Linux, and then for Debian and Ubuntu in an OBS repository. Do you know if any other distros have packaged it yet?

[sunrat]

I'm impressed and must try this. And online multiplayer! Will have to dust off the old joystick. I spent many hours playing gl-117 from which LAC is derived but it has not had dev love for many years and would only work in a small window on my HD monitor last I tried it.
Hopefully it is easy to package, wishing you best of luck @Stevo.

[stevepusser]

Well, the source package is quite small compared to Flightgears huge data files. Maybe it generates the landscapes procedurally. Then I have to whether to call the package lac, linuxaircombat, or linux-air-combat, and then hope that the rest of the Linux world goes the same way.

It seems you can configure it so it doesn't require Mumble, too:

Changes in the mid November 2019 version (Lac07r92) include:

Users can now edit the "NetworkMode" field of their LacConfig.txt file to instruct LAC to ignore the presence of Mumble. This will be good for users with computers suffering incompatibilities when trying to use Mumble, or for users wishing to employ some other VOIP application.

[arzgi]

LAC is quite interesting! I'm thinking of packaging it for MX Linux, and then for Debian and Ubuntu in an OBS repository. Do you know if any other distros have packaged it yet?

No I don't. The author mentioned on his(/their?) LAC page, that he was a bit surprised it has not caught bigger interest. But was open for any co-operartion offers. GPL anyhow.

Playable, a bit too prone to crashing on my system, memory range overflow.

EDIT: And without mumble, yes I commented out every network related command from .LAC/LacConfig.txt. No multiplayer or net-missions. Worked, but LAC announced I'll loose lot of games functionality.

Oh, it really is possible to configure mumble out, overlooked that.

EDIT II: About source package size, all the sounds are in wav-format Wondered when installing, why not ogg?

[sunrat]

EDIT II: About source package size, all the sounds are in wav-format Wondered when installing, why not ogg?

I just looked at my gl-117 install. Sound effects are in .wav with a total of 132KB. Music is in .s3m format totalling 424KB. Not really a lot. Probably LAC inherited those. Are there other audio files in LAC?

[arzgi]

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 pwd
/home/arto/LAC
arto@debian:LAC$ du -sh music
36M   music
arto@debian:LAC$ du -sh sounds
12M   sounds
arto@debian:LAC$


All sound and music files are wav-files.

[arzgi]

LAC IMHO is exceptional os-project in that sense there is almost too much info

Lac07p94 is an experimental version. Changed to Lac07r92, which is a production release. Tried a few times, did not crash.

Updated the first post in the thread.

[stevepusser]

It really does compile very quickly, too. Probably took about 15 seconds on my laptop, using one thread, at the same time seven threads were occupied building a customized MX Thunderbird 68.4.2, which took about 25 minutes in comparison.

7.92 did crash for me, but only when I purposely augered my tutorial plane into the ground to see what would happen--almost a feature!

[sunrat]

Just installed it. The README file says there is a precompiled binary included so I tried that first and it works. Just extract the archive and run install.sh . I would prefer it to install in ~/bin/ rather than in ~/ but that's probably trivial to do.
Graphics froze when crashing into the ground here too but it still seemed to be running in the background and was able to Esc to the main menu. It has a Sidewinder 2 config file as well which is exactly my joystick model!
It seemed to run OK on this old system which has Nvidia GTX 560Ti running nouveau. Will test it soon on my other newer system with GTX 970 and nvidia driver on 4K monitor.

[arzgi]

Perhaps some terminology mismatch here.

When I dive my plane to ground or water, game ends, no error messages, to console where I started the game prints

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Info: LINUX AIR COMBAT HAS COMPLETED NORMALLY.

I thought maybe some 'game over' screen would be in place and then return to menu.

By crash I mean 7.94 would almost every time I started it end to memory area overflow. But when I started it again, it did run.

Also 7.94 sometimes hang, when crashing the plane, sound was on, but screen was halted. Had to kill from other workspace. This has not occurred once, after changing to 7.92.

But testing continues

[arzgi]

I would prefer it to install in ~/bin/ rather than in ~/ but that's probably trivial to do.

I moved the whole LAC directory to other place. Have not tested, but I guess Lac07r92 binary needs the same order of other dirs. You can use symlinks, or make a starter icon, LAC dir includes icon image lac.png

EDIT:

One possibility is to make a script to bin, which calls the game binary. Options are many.

[sunrat]

Also 7.94 sometimes hang, when crashing the plane, sound was on, but screen was halted. Had to kill from other workspace. This has not occurred once, after changing to 7.92.

I just downloaded from the Sourceforge "Download" link assuming I'd get v7.92. Nope it's 7.94 and behaviour is similar to what you describe although I can Esc back to the menu.
Just tried 7.92. It segfaulted when I hit the water during first tutorial. No more time for testing right now.

[arzgi]

Practicing landing on free flight. A bit harsh touch down to air field, and killed LAC, 4 xcfe-terminals, orage and gkrellm, all programs that were open on that work space.

Might be some influence, just before launching LAC did 10.3 update to Buster.

This is the ultimate record, other game sessions have ended mostly clean.