FlightSimGuy
FlightSimGuy on Hacker News
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?
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?
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.
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.
My 2 cents.
"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.
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.
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.
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 didn't know the source code for ysflight was ever published. That's great news!
Is the source code for Tiny Combat Arena released too?
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.
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.
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/...
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.
Yes. I played it and I liked it. It reminded me very much of Aces High "classic" or its successor, Aces High 2.
But I certainly agree that Aces High 3 is magnificent on Micro$oft Windows.
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.
...only for LINUX, of course!
LAC looks and flies a lot like Aces High 1 (from back around 2005 or so).
Me too! And Aces High 1, Aces High 2, and Aces High 3....