Re: Direction of Linux games...

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Veljko Krunic wrote:

> 1. Space combat hard-core simulation: BC3000AD (http://www.bc3000ad.com)
> based on the story of the original author was published by Take Two in
> the unusable form, regardless of the  of the original author strong
> dislike (the complete story is somewhere on the site or maybe in the
> download of the version 1.0, and is a great look at the some of the
> worst things that could happened to the game in development).

I believe there are a couple of these in process - the problem is that
the more realistic you make a space combat game, the more you realise
that actual combat in space would be VERY, VERY BORING!
 
> 2. Hard-core military flight simulator: Flanker 4.0
> (http://www.flanker4.com) was relaesed with tons of bugs, not completly
> usable (see first review at http://www.combatsim.com), and was patched
> for months to be brought in the stable form. As company said: "if we
> don't release it now in the incomplete state and patch it later, we will
> be forced to shut down complete project".

Well - this is something I know a LOT about.  I design (real) military
flight simulators in my 'day job'.  A typical flight simulator would
contain at least a million lines of code - maybe two million.  Ironically,
a 'game' would probably be even more complex than that.

The FlightGear flight sim for Linux (www.flightgear.org) is slowly working
towards a truly awesome effort...however, it's a HUGE task.  They are
doing the smart thing which is to learn to walk before they try to run.
They will start with simulating simple civilian light aircraft like
Cessna's and such - and perhaps later work up to more sophisticated
aircraft, add combat routines, enemy plane AI, missions, etc, etc.

But that is a MASSIVE amount of work...I'd be very suprised if anyone
else will attempt a credible simulator without relying on the FGFS
code-base.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)