
Superb old engineering simulation games, now open source and available on Linux - fifteenth
https://github.com/bencaddigan/esports-for-engineers
======
fifteenth
For the entrepreneurs among us, the business story here is that these
fantastically detailed sims were expensive to make. The three 20-year-old sims
at the github link, Grand Prix Legends (GPL), Mig Alley (MA) and Falcon (FF)
were all bet-your-company high concept projects that expected a lot from their
customers in 1999.

MA did OK in the market but that only encouraged it's creators to make a
follow-on product that tanked their company. GPL and FF were commercial flops,
and the companies that made them soon disbanded. Nevertheless, GPL and FF
evolved into what are currently best-in-class sim products. The high ambitions
and technical wizardry of all three sims inspired dedicated community groups
that added content to the sims for years following release. The versions of
the sims on the github page include these community-generated add-ons.

The FF project was a notorious business mess that somehow propelled itself
through years of headwinds with a kind of prodigious creativity. Both the mess
and the creativity are on display in the 1000 page volunteer-created FF manual
on github.

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fifteenth
Debates about which sim is more accurate bring up a philosophical question
about sim design. My take is that designing a realistic simulation is like
solving a physics problem, in that it's impossible to capture all of reality
with a mathematical model, so the challenge is to first decide what you want
to model accurately and what you can ignore. Doing that well requires insight.
Case in point - although Rowan got overwhelmed by 1C in the flight sim
marketplace, I would argue that Mig Alley is better than the IL2 product that
covers the same material because MA is more accurate where it matters. IL2 has
more realistic cockpits but Mig Alley does a much better job of modeling the
physics of the Mig/Sabre asymmetry. That asymmetry is what makes MA
dogfighting so unique. And once you've mastered that one-on-one duel, you find
that the many vs many contest is completely different and involves little
extended dogfighting- also true-to-life according to the history books I've
read.

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antiterra
Grand Prix Legends was amazing when it came out and the modding/sim racing
community kept it alive for an incredibly long time.

However, the version here is not open source, just a demo. Grand Prix Legends
also had its share of quirky and odd physics, the fastest drivers sometimes
achieved their record lap times with joysticks and took advantage of the
differences between game physics and real life.

There have been significant improvements in racing sims accuracy since the GP
Legends days, and most die-hard sim racers I know of (including some of the
best GP Legends racers) lean toward iRacing as a competitive platform today.

~~~
fifteenth
I agree completely. The other two games in esports-for-engineers are open
source, while the GPL demo is free but not open source. (I didn't have enough
space to explain this distinction in my one-line hacker news post.)

iRacing is certainly more accurate than GPL, but that's an apples to oranges
comparison because these sims have different goals, and both are great at what
they do. If you are preparing to compete in real-world car racing, by all
means sign up for iRacing (after reading the excellent and funny book "You
Suck at Racing"). If you are an engineer, and like to learn about car physics
by adjusting the car settings in GPL Race Engineer and then seeing the results
in GPL Replay analyzer (both included at the github link), then GPL is a fine
choice. There's a lot to be said for a simple, elegant game design that
provides an immersive experience; By that measure I submit that all three
games on the esports-for-engineers github page deliver.

------
justinsaccount
> open source

> empty repo that points to a file on "mediafire" and is said to be binaries
> that are ran using wine

which is it?

~~~
fifteenth
The source code for Mig Alley is here:
[https://github.com/gondur/mig_src](https://github.com/gondur/mig_src)

The source code for Free Falcon is here:
[https://github.com/FreeFalcon](https://github.com/FreeFalcon)

The link to the tar file containing windows binaries that run under linux/wine
is in the Readme.md file of the repository linked to by the hacker news submit
here: [https://github.com/bencaddigan/esports-for-
engineers](https://github.com/bencaddigan/esports-for-engineers)

