Must have been a pain porting it to machine code…lol

Surely it would use Holy C.

To The CPU, The GPU and the Magic Smoke, we prey for n00bs.

Amazing how low the bar is for FOSS games on Linux.

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.

I believe it looks and feels like this because of limitations of SDL 1.2, and not because of the lack of art contributions.

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.

open source doesn’t really mesh well with artists, so most open source games just have terrible graphical assets

Yes, like Flare, sure.

Saying that it's like saying every AAA game it's like an unoptimized Ubisoft crap.

A handful of counter-examples don't change a statistical reality...

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_500:_The_Simulati...

Whether it looks like the real thing certainly also plays into whether it feels like the real thing.

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.

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.

MineClone2 is exactly what I was thinking of. It looks fine but the lighting/shading effects throughout it look visibly weaker than real Minecraft.

Thank you for making me aware of BattleBit.

It looks like Roblox Battlefield.

The only real complaints on an otherwise ridiculously overwhelmingly positive Steam page seem to centre around the anti-cheat.

The MinSysReq also suggests it'll run on a potato, so it sounds worth a shot!

But battlebit graphics while low fi is excellently executed, it's 90s in look but 2020 in functionality Anne concept.

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.

There's usually no bar for FOSS games. It's sort of the point, the makers are doing it for themselves.

It takes me back to the early 90s DOS flight sims I loved, like Aces Over Europe. It was the style at the time!

Also reminded me of European Air War and Total Air War. Loved how you could affect the campaigns, at least to a certain extent.

praise be