I've wanted a more accessible combat flight simulator. Something like DCS or Falcon BMS with realistic flight physics, but more arcade controls (the aircraft should handle realistically, but I shouldn't have to spend 20 minutes starting the aircraft and pushing simulated buttons and switches in the cockpit, even though I have a great appreciation for that level of detail).
I don't want my aircraft to have 99 missiles, and 9999 machine gun rounds. I want to have 2 bombs and 4 air-to-air missiles, and I want to fly a tense 15 minute mission into and out of enemy territory. Battle Royal games have shown players are willing to go 5 or 10 minutes between combat if the tension and possibility of surprise combat is there, and have perma-death, give me that in an air combat game.
+1 to this, and let me elaborate: Tiny Combat Arena focuses on a (somewhat fictional) version of the Harrier Jump Jet and opponents from around that era. Attractive low-poly graphics -- and I do mean attractive -- very good performance and the right balance between arcade and flightsim. There is a flight model to the game, and some weapons systems get simulated in simplified form.
Do you remember the flightsims of yore, like F-117? This is it, only with better graphics and flight.
I was skeptical when you said attractive low-poly graphics. I'd never seen such thing. But checking the link out, it is pretty.
Incidentally, why is it that so many flight simulators are low-poly? I've seen FPS with amazing graphics, why not make flight simulators with amazing graphics as well?
Yes, did you see the contrail effects? Pretty cool. And I own the game -- it's even cooler in action. And the explosions of cluster bombs raining on tanks... very satisfying!
> Incidentally, why is it that so many flight simulators are low-poly? I've seen FPS with amazing graphics, why not make flight simulators with amazing graphics as well?
For commercial games, I'm sure you know DCS and its amazing photorealistic graphics. I assume you mean indie games, and I think the answer is multiple:
- The authors want to recreate the experience from the flightsims of their childhood, which were all wireframe or flat polygons.
- Flat polygons can look pretty cool if well animated. They give a cartoon/retro vibe that many of us like.
- It's way faster to prototype and have something running on low-poly than having to deal with textures, shaders and whatnot, especially if that's not what the developer is interested in toying with.
- "Good graphics" in a flightsim can be very taxing! Developers probably just want to toy with their favorite planes, add some cool features, and have it running on a midrange computer. I can play Tiny Combat Arena at very high res with all effects maxed on a mid-range laptop from 2016! I think I probably wouldn't even be able to start DCS with this, let alone having it maxed.
The same reason why people love impressionist paintings or painting done with large strokes of pallete knive. Leave something for the human brain to fill in, do a small puzzle of connecting shape into something whole.
I still have the large binder from the original Falcon 4.0 in my closet. Those were great childhood memories. My machine couldn't run it at first though so I just had to read the manual and fantasize at the time (until I was able to afford a new processor) hahaha.
I have been enjoying Linux Air Combat for almost 2 weeks now and I have to say it's really good! It reminds me of the original Aces high from about 2005. Cockpit graphics are not at all realistic because it's all digital like a modern jet fighter. But the terrain graphics and clouds look as good or better than Aces High 2. Not as good as Aces High 3 by any measure but good enough to completely absorb my imagination.
The feeling of flight is what I really enjoy. It just feels right! And very smooth response to flight controls.
After several days studying online docs and practicing offline I finally tried the online missions yesterday. Wow. Very very fun and absorbing. When you're the only online player they automatically send in prerecorded enemies from earlier online battles so you get drawn into the war against them and you can shoot them down if your good enough. After a while another player joined in with me. At first he was on my side but later he switched to the enemy and we went after each other for a couple hours. I died a lot but I loved every minute of it and I learned a lot.
This is the most fun I ever had flight simming on Linux. They have text comms and voice comms in flight. So far I have only tried text but now I'm gonna activate the voice comms. It looks like Wednesday and Thursday are scheduled with regular online groups so will be there.
Hi, I am from Belgium and I have played LAC many times now since I discovered this beauty : A really fully Linux running Combat Flight Simulator .
I couldn't agree more with your description, @DillardTheDread !
And I know what I'm talking about : I started playing Linux Air Combat
more than one year ago .
The only disadvantage that I have, is the fact that I live in Europe, so my time zone is CET (= UTC + 2) . This means that I have to play very late in the evening or at night to be able to fly when other, American users play .
But I can assure you, the man who developed the biggest part of it is very helpful and very polite : He has helped me through installing the game & the 'Mumble' voice comm client . And he explained step by step to configure this Mumble (there are some function keys setups : F1 = chatting with the members of your team, red or blue, F2 = chatting with all members playing the same mission , red AND blue, F3 & F4 for putting the voice comm volume up or down)
Now I am ready to do that myself, so when playing LAC for the first time WITH Mumble voice comm running, don't be afraid if I start talking to you with a foreign accent, okay ? (my Mumble name is "B-FORCE", which appears in one of the mission teams too when I am playing) I can help you out with the most stuff to do when playing Linux Air Combat .
"The feeling of flight is what I really enjoy. It just feels right! And very smooth response to flight controls."
Yes. This.
I am planning to try joining the group this Thursday evening. It looks like the best time is from 6PM Central Time Zone for a couple of hours. I can't start that early but I'll try to join about 7PM. I will probably be flying a Ki84. That was 1 of my best planes in Aces High and when I tried it in LAC it felt pretty much the same. Great plane.
Graphics in LAC are OK to me. I only fly aircraft sims and I dont do it for the graphics. As long as theyre good enough to fire up my imagination what I am after is the realistic feeling of flight and LAC has it. My limited experience in their online missions have been really engaging with lots of activity involving replay pilots. Actually the quality of those replay engagements is amazing. It's been a couple days since I was on but as I write this I think I'll go back into the desert mission one right away. I got my first kill there and had a blast. Just a constant drumbeat of targets trying to destroy my air field and I was constantly trying to keep up with the threats.
One thing I learned that helped me a lot was to press v for vocalize in flight which when you do that you hear a radio message directing you toward your target even if radar is out or if the target is flying below radar. Once I learned that the desert mission became my favorite.
I also tried the Peabody mission but that one was too hard and way to complicated for me until I get a lot more practice.
Welcome to LAC guys! Today's regular Wednesday LAC event is just winding down. Here's a brief, 8-minute video clip showing what it was like about an hour ago, as the "BlueTeam" was finally able to win the "desert mission" you ("FlightSimGuy") must have been exercising:
As you can see in that video, the LAC crowd makes good use of voice comms through the free, well-known, open-source "Mumble" VOIP application, which is deeply interfaced into LAC's cockpit for seamless use as the official voice radio. I highly encourage you to configure mumble and to get comfortable with its use, since it is also the "social hub" of LAC, where we meet up and arrange network flights.
We hope to see you with us for tomorrow's "Thursday Evening" gathering. We are a small group, but the best time to catch us in an organized activity is Thursday evenings Central USA timezone. Things tend to start up around 6PM CST and people will hang around, on and off, for at least 2 or 3 hours. Sometimes nobody shows up, but you can usually find at least 1 or 2 others. If you don't have mumble yet, just start flying in Network Mission 2 or in Network Mission 3 and somebody will probably find you there. Better yet, if you do have mumble, tune to the "root" channel at "LinuxAirCombat.com" and just start talking. We'll hear you and negotiate more fun than you ever thought was possible in a LINUX flight sim!
Nice video. Sorry I missed last Thurs. Couldn't be helped. I hope to join tomorrow about 7PM Central/ 8PM Eastern. I can't get home any sooner than that so I will miss the 1st hr or so.
I tried the Peabody mission again and again. Wow. Is it even POSSIBLE to win that one? I keep trying to defend against waves of bombers coming in high but I can't even get up to their altitude before they are blasting my base to bits. Then right after that waves of low alt strafers and raiders come in with rockets and they all have tail gunners that whack my plane to bits. Should I switch to something more rugged like a P47 to last longer when theyre shootin at me?
The Peabody mission is written to require teamwork, and in Realm 01 (which you were evidently using) it is populated by a vicious set of RedTeam "Replay Blokes" that fly as coordinated squadrons to ensure that it is very difficult to prevail on the BlueTeam. If you want to see what victory looks like, I suggest you just switch to the RedTeam.
It is POSSIBLE to prevail while flying solo for the BlueTeam. I've done it myself, but only after weeks of practice and my victorious session required more than two hours of white-nuckle, sweaty-palmed intensity. I was flying a P38 at the time (my favorite).
If you switch to one of the other Realms you won't run into Replay Blokes. In that case it's easier to prevail in the Peabody mission, but you'll still need to keep the pressure on in order to damage/destroy both enemy airbases faster than their ground crews can repair them.
A couple of months ago we had a goodly group flying one Thursday evening and we all decided to join Peabody's BlueTeam to battle the Realm 01 RedBlokes as a team. We were able to win in about 45 minutes. I think there's a video showing that session. Just a minute and I'll try to find it....
I couldn't find the exact clip I wanted, but that one shows what it's like to fly Peabody's mission with a wingman. We inflicted a lot of damage that time!
...And the clip includes a good example of how to deal with those high-altitude bombers. The trick with that is to notice them EARLY and to immediately start climbing as hard as you can. You get some warning whenever an enemy heavy bomber is detected beyond your current visual RADAR range setting. Your RADAR display's background color switches from the usual green to yellow. Whenever you see that, zoom your RADAR range out and check to see if there are high-altitude heavy bombers approaching from long range. Then climb up and shoot them. Even if you don't get them all you can usually weaken their formation and that will help your bases survive and give your repair crews a better chance to keep your side in the battle.
TODAY is Thursday, not tomorrow lol! We hope you join with us tonight. We usually get started around 6PM Central or 7PM Eastern. If you join about 7PM Central you'll probably still find activity going strong. Tomorrow (Friday) you might still find somebody, but there won't be the usual amount of organization.
BTW there is now a new web page showing who is online. It gets updated about every 60 seconds. It's a little tricky to interpret, so the page first shows instructions and a commented sample. You have to click a link at the top of the page to see the current report. Here's the link:
Yes, I think so. I mean I downloaded it and I think it's working right but I don't have much experience with it. They use mumble for voice and that's FOSS too. Do you have it working?
Config : Do mind that mumble starts up and puts you in the appropriate channel of the LAC free server channel the moment you choose a mission to play
(that's the start page of the chosen mission, you don't need to start the mission yet) On that mission page you can change the team you want to play with ; red or blue, the realm you play it in (best for now to leave it on 1 because it's the realm that has all the missions fully working)
To change the team, click on the "Blue" (or Red) team button, mentioned in the upper left part of the start page . DO NOT forget to click on "Update" to make the changes in the game and in mumble .
Once mumble is running in the LAC server and you are in the chosen mission and team, you need to configure the Mumble connection : click on Configure, then choose settings and click on shortcuts .
On that screen one has to add 4 function keys, being F1 talk to your team (Blue or Red), F2 to talk to all players in that mission (Red AND Blue),
F3 for mumble volume down 10 % and F4 mumble volume up 10% .
Follow these steps :
Click the ADD button, then click on the "unassigned" field under Title "Function" and choose Push to talk, then click under "Shortcut" and press the F1 key .
Click the ADD button, then click on the "unassigned" field under Title "Function" and choose Whisper/Shout, then click under "Shortcut" and press the F2 key . under the Data column , then click on the 3 dots on the right of "Empty" and change in the Whisper Target screen like this : on top, click on Shout to Channel, and at the bottom click on shout to subchannels .
For F3 : click on Add, choose "Volume down 10%" in stead of unassigned on click under Shortcut and press the F3 key .
For F4 : click on Add, choose "Volume up 10%" in stead of unassigned on click under Shortcut and press the F4 key .
And that's it for mumble, but if your connection is bad or not working at all, click on configure and then on "Audio Wizard..." and follow through all steps .
Modern gaming in general lacks simulator type games. Falcon, Janes Combat Simulations, Silent Hunter, Wing Commander, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Strike Commander, Mech Warrior 2.
I used to need a throttle with a toggle, a hat switch, some buttons, a joystick with a couple of hat switches, trigger, a few thumb buttons and I still needed the keyboard for a few functions because I didn't shell out for a HOTAS setup. Now all games can be played on a console controller with less than half the buttons.
DCS has some shortcut keys to do things like automatically running the whole engine start sequence. But I think you'll still need to spend some time on the navigation part to be able to fly a mission.
Flying a low fi model like the F-15 on DCS was pretty realistic but arcadey at the same time. I could easily map most of the controls on my Xbox controller and have the keyboard ready for those rare cases
I got some voice software for windows (I forget the name now) that's much better for the rare cases. I mapped some stuff to it for DCS and Elite and it was great, I could say stuff and it would happen. It feels very futuristic to say "landing gear down" and have the gear start deploying.
There should be a prosumer game in the simracing genre. I don’t want to worry about refueling and tyre replacement, I just want to drive as realistically as a car can in a game.
BeamNG is as close as we’re getting but it’s still quite slow and janky
No idea if there is something similar native to Linux and Open Source, but back in the day I had lots of fun playing "Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers", which today works with WINE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48L16mmR19Y
You can find older games from the 90s that might hit the spot. VGA 320x200 graphics, though. Things like the Dynamix Air Combat series are great. Falcon 3/Mig-29 are also quite accessible, as are the Microprose games (although these tend to be a bit less realistic).
I don't know if it's memory failing but the old Microsoft Combat flight simulators (not sure about physics, it's 20years now) seemed to tick a lot of those boxes (+aircraft models were not thaaat shabby to look at).
Yes. That was Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator II and it was the best of the series IMHO. I spent a LOT of time with that classic old sim and I still have my copy. It runs on LINUX under Wine but not without a lot of tweaking and adjusting.
I wonder why you reference Onslaught Mode in Unreal. Does this game offer similar gameplay?
To those who don't play UT: it is a game mode where teams compete to connect a network of nodes from their base to the other team's base.
No joke here, if you have a VR headset laying around, give this game a try, it's made by a solo developer who used to make mods for KSP. It's insane how good it is, with lots of systems being pretty detailed yet approachable. You don't need anything more than a VR headset for it, in fact, not supporting external input devices like HOTAS is sold as a feature.
> New: LAC is now available in a special, precompiled, optimized version for Valve Corporation's fabulous "Steam Deck" portable gaming PC. All of the controls are configured by default for best use, and it's easy to fly in LAC's online, multi-player, server-based missions without ever needing a keyboard. Even voice comms among players are supported!
Anyone wanting to get into flight simulator programming, I found this little gem of a book "Flights of fantasy" https://archive.org/details/flightsoffantasy00lamp
It's old but some concepts still apply
You have just solved an issue for me that has, apparently, bothered me for 30 years. When I was a kid, I saw that book at a bookstore and was so enthralled with it, but I had just started learning C and it was way too expensive for my parents to buy. I have occasionally over the years tried to figure out what book it was but didn’t have any success… until today! So thank you!!!
If you want to feel happier about that time in my life a bit in the pre-Tony-has-Internet era, I basically learned to program using a Vic-20 and books available from the public library that was just down the block from my house. Once we had a slightly better computer (a Compaq XT-clone) and I was getting bored of BASIC, a guy at a local computer shop sold me a copy of Power C with the absolutely fabulous book that came with it for $20: http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm. From there, we had an amazing upgrade from the XT to a Pentium 133 and dial-up Internet, which got me into Slackware Linux, downloaded one 1.44MB chunk at a time until I had enough of the A- and N-series packages to bootstrap PPP and download the X-series of packages to get a GUI and a browser.
Hardware-wise I feel like there's a lot more very affordable kit that kids like me could use to get their feet wet, but software- and learning-material-wise, I'm not sure if there's anything quite as good as some of that old stuff. These books, for instance, were abundant at the public library and really got me going: https://usborne.com/ca_en/books/computer-and-coding-books
Thanks for posting Usborne link, the explanations and drawings in the books are very unique.
Just bought "Simple Basic" for my children, lets see if it's going to be more captivating than Scratch books.
Found this at a Saver's a few years back (amazing place to find odd books)! Great book to own even if only to see the history of serious flight sim dev from the early days.
The first entry of the Ace Combat flight arcade (as opposed to flight sim) series was released under the title of Air Combat, so I hope Namco ain't gonna bop them for trademark infringement.
Air Combat was the best jet game ever. It taught me all about how to lock on to targets and how to escape lock. I cant forget that beep-beep-beep sound in my head. Now my car makes that sound when I'm parking in a tight spot.
IANAL but trademarks are complicated and the more descriptive a trademark is the less protection it has especially for a decades old video game no one is selling anymore.
It provides mailing lists, forums and isn't locked to a single type of VCS (in fact it doesn't even need a VCS at all, you can just release files - or you can host the VCS elsewhere and use it only for releases as, e.g., Free Pascal is doing with having the code in GitLab but all releases in SourceForge). Also as a user it has reviews and the project pages are not frontloaded with the source code but instead a summary that tells you what the program is, review/scores about it and even provide options to get notified whenever new versions are released. Hell, it even has screenshots.
Of course it all depends on each project to use them and IMO the SourceForge UX is far from ideal (also the pages load slowly), but at least the functionality is there.
Goes to show how much better bad news travels, and/or how it sticks in the mind. I could have sworn that the DevShare thing was more recent than from 2013 to 2016, and until looking it up just now I was unaware SF had officially ended the practise (with the change if ownership in 2016).
That's a pretty sweet domain name right there. From the HP (as they say in Japanese):
> We're your online technology videomagazine, and we're different from other online magazines because we create all of our own content, and because most of that content is published in sequentially organized YouTube Playlists arranged for easy learning. We offer hundreds of hours of free, high-quality, technology-focused content, with subject matter ranging from how the Internet works through setting up and securing your own home-office network to writing high-performance online game/simulation software!
Way to go, there are actually a lot of interesting playlists in there. Even one on running Jane's flight sims which were a favorite back in the day.
LAC is not Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, but I've flown both and I get the same kind of thrill with both. CYAC was brilliant in its day and it was my fav for 3 or 4 years. But that was a long time ago! If your old enough to imagine CYAC with network support and graphics advanced about 15 yrs you get a pretty good idea of LAC. BTW it runs very smooth on my oldest laptop computer, a LeNovo T61p from about 2010. And with LAC you get full source code. Compiling it from source was easy.
Can't recommend VTOL VR enough. Started out with one semi-futuristic jet-pod VTOL aircraft, but has since added a camancheesque helo and an F15-like strike fighter. It does have _some_ pomp in the startup, but really just enough to get you immersed. Something really compelling about pulling the canopy down, waving to your gunner up front, and starting the rotor spinning before easing the collective up and heading to the first waypoint.
Weapons systems are similarly difficult-but-not-complex. Have had tons of fun in multiplayer with my kids dogfighting, doing missions, and even full-on wargames with randos online.
It's probably the best of its kind (mmo), but the number of players is constantly (slowly) decreasing. Mostly from players getting too old or dieing. Alternatives: Warbirds has even lower numbers. I'm not sure about the current state of the war in the air in WW2-Online.
Can an open source game of this kind find players? Probably not many, but possibly dedicated ones. The problem with that target group is that someone will reference the charts from the POH or from published test flight data and complain that the simulation does not match the numbers.
I wonder if Aces High 3 works well on LINUX thru an emulator like WINE. And I wonder if you'd need a monster computer to get a smooth frame rate through emulation like that.
LAC, BTW runs very very nicely on cheap laptops and even does pretty well on Raspberry Pi 4b.
This reminds me of a super lightweight flight simulator I played circa 2014 - I cannot remember the name for the life of me, but unlike LAC and GL117, it was only a few hundred kb in size, but was well featured with joystick and network multiplayer support.
Yes. I just compiled and ran it on an M1. You need to fetch SDL and SDL_mixer from homebrew and fiddle with the Makefile. Thats the easy part. The sucky part is the data is expected in in /usr/share which i do not want to pollute. The sources are (sorry guys) a disaster. If I find an elegant solution to easily set the datapath I will push it to github and rename it to OpenAirCombat....
Disclaimer : I have not yet played LAC, but I used to play GL117 (which LAC is heavily based on).
Though visually it's bit behind what we've been used to, I found some of the fun I had when much younger in F22 Retaliator. And at least, in GL117 (and LAC, I guess) we have a bit of height variation in terrain ;)
I guess it would be kind of nice if I would still be playing F-19 Stealth Fighter on MS-DOS, or F/A-18 Interceptor on Amiga, but for modern systems, not really, unless I am on retro mood.
Right now one of the most hyped Battlefield alternatives is Battlebit which looks not very modern but apparently plays so much better than whatever EA put out in recent years that people happily play it.
Amazing how low the bar is for AAA games in terms of gameplay and fun.
Battlebit and Minecraft (which was mentioned in another reply here) won't ever actually be mistaken for a game from the 1990s, there's way too much detail into the far distance, the lighting is too good, and the UI looks relatively modern (especially in Battlebit).
Linux Air Combat on the other hand really does look the way games looked 30 years ago, and the UI looks worse.
It's fine, we don't need good graphics in everything. But it will hurt its popularity in a way that Battlebit is not hurt, because people can tell the difference between intentionally making a game with a retro look vs. just not having the art resources for good graphics.
I've been playing with minetest a bit and the lighting really is the thing that stands out. The animations are noticable when you really watch something, but the difference in how cubes are shaded jumps out at first sight as the thing the commerical game has that really makes it look polished.
Have you tried MineClone2 which is built with minetest? The minetest guys claim they are only an engine providing tools and are not trying to recreate the minecraft experience. MineClone2 wants to provide an authentic experience and then MineClone5 is the "new features branch" but is unstable. Then there is Mineclonia which aims for stability and performance in neglect of MineCraft parity.
Great point & example, but I'm curious how well that translates to simulation games, where immersion is a large part of the selling point, as opposed to fun & tight game mechanics full of balanced flow & fiero.
Isn't one of the main aspects of immersion that it feels like the real thing?
That's far harder to do right than graphics and it's going to have a bigger impact on how immersive the game is. You can always improve graphics down the line but getting the mechanics and handling right is a lot more important and will be a lot harder to change later on.
I got absolutely immersed in Indianopolis 500 back in the day[0]. The graphics were pathetic by modern standards but the long races felt like you had to manage a variety of things (tire wear etc) and you really had to commit to it. So I would agree graphics are secondary to the immersion experience.
Oh absolutely however the "feel" matters far more. If the graphics look super dated or minimal but it plays great, you'll still get lots of players however if it looks stellar but plays poorly, you won't retain very many players.
I watched my younger cousing playing the new Rainbow Six. Compared to the fist one,
they are completely "arcadized". Just a narrow step down from Urban Terror on "cinematic gameplay". "Realist", but not so much.
Graphics, yes. But the actual gameplay... a joke compared to the first Rainbow Six and tactical matches on SWAT3.
Except battlebit uses perfectly modern rendering techniques, technologies, and features, just with cuboid player models. It looks rather nice. This on the other hand is rendered clearly with 90s systems, it looks phong shaded.
It sounds like an excellent platform for artists who might not have a lot of coding skills to contribute graphics toward. Kind of the point, in my mind.
SDL 1.2 could call GL just fine. And it does. No, the game was done like that on purpose, on being light and playable.
Any serious libre gamer with a big graphics card to test would just launch Flightgear at 4K with the ALS effects on, real time weather and a crazy draw distance over 30 kms with all the shading FX' on. And lots of tweaks that made clouds looks like clouds and not fancy textures or barely recreated shaders.
One of the most sold games ever has blocky graphics not much better than a boosted SNES on 3D.
Do you realize this graphics settings are done on retro purposes?
Go check Flightgear videos with ALS settings and graphics to the max. It might not be MSFS, but for something that also runs under an HD3000 iGPU/UHD600, the graphics are astounding for a community based project.
Also, MSFS gets rendered assets and maps from Bing maps, something Flightgear did with Google Maps with a custom build... 10 years ago.
The same problem occurs with almost any of the hundreds of "rev-share" or "lets build a game together" projects that show up, its quite difficult to find motivated professionals to work on some else's idea especially long term.
Games require a lot of consistent output and theming in their assets to make it work, not exactly suitable for piecemeal contribution built with different asset pipelines and quality.
What is interesting to see is how a lot of fan remaster projects have this problem to a much lesser degree. Having the touchstone of a shared love for the original makes it much easier to organize and get people to stick around and agree to someone's vision.
>What is interesting to see is how a lot of fan remaster projects have this problem to a much lesser degree. Having the touchstone of a shared love for the original makes it much easier to organize and get people to stick around and agree to someone's vision.
Well that makes sense: in a remaster, the "vision" is really just "let's modernize this old game". So everyone knows what it's supposed to look like, basically, because they can just look at the old game itself.
But… why? There are so many other competent, detailed, graphically rich flight sims that I think would run on that and not look like the Star Fox 64 alpha tech demo.
Sure it is. Nothing in the word "lightweight" implies stellar graphics. If anything, it implies that heavy and nonessential things (like cutting-edge graphics) are totally out of scope.
Yes. It does look surprisingly good for such a small AppImage. Digging around on their forums, I found this thread describing their struggle to thrive in spite of the old-school graphics. It includes three embedded YouTube clips that make it easy to compare LAC with some other famous sims like Aces High 2 from about 10 years ago, Aces High 3 (current), and Aces of the Pacific from 1992. Here's the link: https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/general/...
If this is a reference to the gameplay of LAC then I want to get my view in here. LAC has very very very good gameplay. You can't build your own character, but you can just jump into 1 of their many airplanes and then into 1 of their many missions and fly combat with or against real people or replay people that are devious and skilled. Go to YouTube and search for Linux Air Combat and you will see like Hundreds of video clips where people get deep into this and keep coming back for more. Theyve got fighters, bombers, fighterbombers, offense, defense, strategy, tactics, voice and text comms, and free 24/7 missions and free published source code. What else do you expect for free?
One more thing. When your selecting an airplane in LAC it always has an extra menu button for every plane that will play a YouTube documentary vid clip about that plane. Some of those clips are really good. It's like spending the day in a warbirds museum where you can learn about the planes, select your favorite, and then hop in and fly it.
I think some of the people that can't stand LAC graphics are just upset that it looks as good for people with a $50 graphics card as it looks for people with a $500 graphics card. Get over it people! You didn't waste $450. You get even better graphics on other games. Just not on LAC, where everybody gets the same pretty good graphics that will never be spectacular graphics.
Untill you play it.
I said the same in ~2003 with the first Deus Ex. Dull graphics, not the best usage of the first Unreal engine, cliché conspiacies almost straight from the X-Files series
and common urban legens.
Yet the emergent gameplay and the semi free-roaming playability made it better than most FPS crapware being shold from 2002 to 2009 save for Half Life 2 and Crysis.
This might not be the best game on the flying combat genre, but don't forget that these games are built for fun and if they work on multiplayer, for quick matches quickly forgetting the rest.
Heck, a lot of pro FPS players put the texture settings at the core mininum and with a 1920x1080 resolution at best so they can spot the rest of the players at a quick glance...
Yes. I've been playing it for about a week and it is surprisingly good once you get past the simple tutorials. The online missions are deep even if you're the only one. The flight is credible and feels really smooth on my xubuntu desktop with Intel core 2 duo and Nvidia Quadro graphics. Two or 3 times I have had other players show up but I am not ready to tangle with experts yet so when I see others I just switch to a different mission lol. I fly the spitfire mostly cuz I always loved that plane and it seems to fly very close to what I expected.
Not LAC, but it's "dad" GL-117, yes. Flightgear was much better, (and today FG graphically curb-stomps LAC) but as a quick match against the CPU, it was fine.
Xonotic and Red Eclipse 2 began as quick, improved Q3A FPS clones and now they are pretty well known in lots of places with their mechanics being utterly ripped to set fakely placed as novelties and "revolutionary gameplays" into propietary AAA games.
Yes. Only LAC's improvement is even more because GL-117 didn't even have any network support. It was all offline. LAC is fundamentally an online, multi-player rewrite of GL-117 with vastly improved flight models and a lot more airplanes.
They have a new version out for beta testing. It looks like they've had recent complaints about compatibility. Like people that didn't have a joystick. And some people that applied recent OS patches were having problems. The new beta test one purports to solve those problems. I didn't try it because the version I got a few days ago works great on all of my machines. But if you had trouble you might try the beta. It's at https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxaircombat/files/Choose...
I haven't played Tiny Combat Arena but their video promos look very much like ysflight, which I have played a lot. I mean Tiny Combat Arena really looks very very much like ysflight. I wonder if it's a fork of the ysflight code. I don't think ysflight ever published their source code and Tiny Combat Arena is a sold-for-profit app, so we'll probly never know.
But I have played LAC and LAC looks better to me. Especially the terrain graphics and clouds.
For the record, TCA is 243MB as of right now. I think the smallest it ever was, was ~120MB on launch, and ~90MB in early pre-release versions. The audio files alone are ~60MB. I was sad to see it hit >200MB, but it can't be helped.
TCA looks like a fine piece of software. I'm going to try it. But I prefer WW2 airplanes over modern ones. And I'm have a BLAST learning LAC. There is a lot of depth here. And LOTS of airplanes to try. I haven't spent much time in the online missions yet but I am almost ready to give that a try. I'll probably get murdered there by some bushwacker!
I will try TCA after I get tired of LAC. If I ever get tired of LAC.
Still having a blast with LAC in the tutorial and offline missions. I fiddled around mapping my controls but after a lot of changes I just went back to the defaults. Had to get used to it but now its GREAT. Smooth flight rock solid 60FPS with 1080p graphics on most of my machines. Really smooth. I hadn't realized the little hickups Windows inserts into my other flight sims until I got into this LAC. It's noticably smoother. The feeling of flight is just THERE.
OTOH the enemy AI isn't very good. The bots in the training missions don't ever do anything fancy and after awhile its finally getting easy to mow them all down. But I mean that in a good way. In a fun way.
Ground handling is primitive too. Taxi on the runway and take off and landings seem playful and not very realistic once your wheels hit the pavement. But once in the air its magical. For FOSS this is surprisingly good.
And say what? Minecraft has always had a much nicer look than this game, without talking about the musics, etc. And even to this day it's only around 600MB.
Yes, let's compare it to Minecraft. It looks like crap compared to Minecraft.
I don't want my aircraft to have 99 missiles, and 9999 machine gun rounds. I want to have 2 bombs and 4 air-to-air missiles, and I want to fly a tense 15 minute mission into and out of enemy territory. Battle Royal games have shown players are willing to go 5 or 10 minutes between combat if the tension and possibility of surprise combat is there, and have perma-death, give me that in an air combat game.