The advanced flight simulator X-Plane 11 [Steam, Official Site] is now available and the developers put out day-1 Linux support.
It does look pretty good and simulates a ridiculous amount of things at once. I love the way you see the heat coming off the engines, looks fantastic. A game that would probably be immense with the right flight stick setup, can't imagine it being as fun on a mouse and keyboard.
It's not cheap at £44.99, so unless the developers plan on getting in touch it's not one I will personally cover in any more detail. It does have a demo though, so you can properly try it before buying. The demo can also update to the full version, which is neat.
Features
Will any of you be picking up a copy? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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It does look pretty good and simulates a ridiculous amount of things at once. I love the way you see the heat coming off the engines, looks fantastic. A game that would probably be immense with the right flight stick setup, can't imagine it being as fun on a mouse and keyboard.
It's not cheap at £44.99, so unless the developers plan on getting in touch it's not one I will personally cover in any more detail. It does have a demo though, so you can properly try it before buying. The demo can also update to the full version, which is neat.
Features
- A completely redesigned, intuitive user interface that makes setting up and editing your flight a breeze.
- Consistently usable 3-D cockpits and stunningly high-resolution exterior models for all included aircraft.
- A new effects engine for lighting, sounds, and explosions.
- Realistic avionics: all planes are IFR-ready right out of the gate.
- Busy, “living” airports with pushback tugs and roaming fuel trucks, able to service both your aircraft and the simulator’s AI planes.
- New buildings & roads to better simulate European cities
- And more!
Will any of you be picking up a copy? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: GuestYou get 15 minutes in the demo. I read if you let the AI fly the plane then it lasts longer.
Well, I got 0. It refuses to launch (see above). Is there some way to override a vendor string?
Last edited by Shmerl on 31 March 2017 at 2:56 am UTC
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OK, you need to use
And there are apparently some crashes reported on the Mesa bug tracker.
--force_runAnd there are apparently some crashes reported on the Mesa bug tracker.
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Thanks for covering this, Liam -- I think a couple of us have had the beta for a while now but it's a standalone game. I'll have to look through my email but I think the developer said that the Steam version was a different build, which makes sense if they have to meet whatever outdated libraries the Steam run time is using vs. what Arch is shipping ATM.
My one-liner review: Kick everything up to turbo on your CPU and GPU. Required should be i7, 1070/80 even if they say lower. will get you around 50ish max fps on 1920x1080p. 2160p didn't seem to improve much so i just run the 1080p.
This is movie quality graphics and FAA quality physics. Someone told me the last part who would know and I didn't believe them until I played. It was like being a kid again discovering MS Flight Sim for the first time... I digress and went over one line :| sorry
If you feel like your Linux life is not complete without a realistic flight sim.. give yourself about 40Gb (I'm at 32 on this folder) of space. I noticed a few frames drop moving it onto a second Nvme drive.. if that gives any indication as the the level of buffers and throughput this requires. With that said, for my settings, it's always go big or .. well you get it. I don't want a $60 game only to run at half throttle (pun intended :p) So my 50fps is at everything maxed out, I'm sure it could be pushed higher but I can't see any tearing or stuttering.
They actually mean ultralight. These guys are flight fanatics. They had an email tutorial going too where we got weekly, I think, emails with various tips and tricks. So a few sites to bookmark if you own this or would like to explore the community before investing..
http://developer.x-plane.com/ The dev blog and news - good source of information and has other links from there. I laughed just now when I read the latest title.. they definitely have a sense of humor too.
http://forums.x-plane.org This is the one you really want to sign up for. The tutorials are from pilots or others who way further into how everything comes together than the in game tutorial. If the in game one is say a 6/10, the forums are 10/10. Also, once you've signed in you can load up on as many free planes as you like. (my favorite for buzzing my metro area is one of the ultralights..) I do recommend using the rating system as a sanity check - they are very picky so if you find a highly rated one you know it's good.
***If it doesn't launch the first time, run objdump -p $GAME.sh | grep -i need and see if you recognize any missing libraries. If you're comfortable with running ldd, run that as well, just and make sure everything on the left points to a library on the right, indicating the binary is linked. Don't worry if you see linux-vdso.so.1 at the top not linked, I forget why but some kernels this isn't linked for me, I think something about relocatable memory? Anyways, check that out if it doesn't launch, remedy the missing libraries in your $PATH and give it another go.
Cheers --
My one-liner review: Kick everything up to turbo on your CPU and GPU. Required should be i7, 1070/80 even if they say lower. will get you around 50ish max fps on 1920x1080p. 2160p didn't seem to improve much so i just run the 1080p.
This is movie quality graphics and FAA quality physics. Someone told me the last part who would know and I didn't believe them until I played. It was like being a kid again discovering MS Flight Sim for the first time... I digress and went over one line :| sorry
If you feel like your Linux life is not complete without a realistic flight sim.. give yourself about 40Gb (I'm at 32 on this folder) of space. I noticed a few frames drop moving it onto a second Nvme drive.. if that gives any indication as the the level of buffers and throughput this requires. With that said, for my settings, it's always go big or .. well you get it. I don't want a $60 game only to run at half throttle (pun intended :p) So my 50fps is at everything maxed out, I'm sure it could be pushed higher but I can't see any tearing or stuttering.
Quoting: Mountain ManI'm not sure what you mean by "ultralight planes", but there is a selection of general aviation aircraft, including the legendary Cessna 172 which is small and easy to fly. But this isn't a video game, it's a flight simulator, so you have to know something about real aircraft operation to get the most out of it. To that end, X-Plane 11 does, for the first time in the series, include some basic flying tutorials.
They actually mean ultralight. These guys are flight fanatics. They had an email tutorial going too where we got weekly, I think, emails with various tips and tricks. So a few sites to bookmark if you own this or would like to explore the community before investing..
http://developer.x-plane.com/ The dev blog and news - good source of information and has other links from there. I laughed just now when I read the latest title.. they definitely have a sense of humor too.
http://forums.x-plane.org This is the one you really want to sign up for. The tutorials are from pilots or others who way further into how everything comes together than the in game tutorial. If the in game one is say a 6/10, the forums are 10/10. Also, once you've signed in you can load up on as many free planes as you like. (my favorite for buzzing my metro area is one of the ultralights..) I do recommend using the rating system as a sanity check - they are very picky so if you find a highly rated one you know it's good.
***If it doesn't launch the first time, run objdump -p $GAME.sh | grep -i need and see if you recognize any missing libraries. If you're comfortable with running ldd, run that as well, just and make sure everything on the left points to a library on the right, indicating the binary is linked. Don't worry if you see linux-vdso.so.1 at the top not linked, I forget why but some kernels this isn't linked for me, I think something about relocatable memory? Anyways, check that out if it doesn't launch, remedy the missing libraries in your $PATH and give it another go.
Cheers --
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Regarding space. Why are they using WAV for audio? That's really wasteful.
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Mountain Man Mar 31, 2017
Quoting: ShmerlWhat engine do they use? I'll test the demo shortly.It's their own proprietary engine. They've actually been building on the same base for many, many years, but with each major release, they'll throw out whole chunks and rewrite them from scratch. In v11, the lighting and effects rendering got some TLC and are dramatically improved over v10. They've also worked hard to make the engine more efficient for more stable framerates, and by all accounts, they've succeeded. Now that the XP11 code has been "locked" for final release, they can start the process of optimizing the code to turn it into a well oiled machine.
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good catch, surely there is a reason. Maybe to keep build times down during beta with so many platforms and they haven't switched over or had a chance to test it. I want to check at some point how much space is used for the wavs. It still doesn't hold a candle to the disc space required for Hitman (70GB) or DiRT Rally (43 GB). I'm a little scared to do so.. but I really want to nuke the Windows branches they ship with those. Thanks for reminding me. I remember seeing those folders and thinking, tF?
To the point re: the community, here's a funny one I found about the sound (player, bc). The top post may or may not answer your question but the feedback that guy gives is awesome. Also, if compressed, wouldn't it eat more cycles to play the audio? Some people were struggling to get above 30fps.. it may be for players on ChromeOS :p
http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/43928-sound-in-x-plane/
PS - did anyone notice the new music you received for Hitman? I'm not familiar with how Steam distributes music.. will they delete a random game if I copy to a USB for the car? Oh wait.. Not going to get into it tonight, but I have a random game missing too *poof* no longer mine. I better see an email apology saying it was a bad and early April Fools joke, explanation that their entire QC dept up and quit, or something. Reddit / the windows side is freaking out too b/c it's not everyone.
To the point re: the community, here's a funny one I found about the sound (player, bc). The top post may or may not answer your question but the feedback that guy gives is awesome. Also, if compressed, wouldn't it eat more cycles to play the audio? Some people were struggling to get above 30fps.. it may be for players on ChromeOS :p
http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/43928-sound-in-x-plane/
PS - did anyone notice the new music you received for Hitman? I'm not familiar with how Steam distributes music.. will they delete a random game if I copy to a USB for the car? Oh wait.. Not going to get into it tonight, but I have a random game missing too *poof* no longer mine. I better see an email apology saying it was a bad and early April Fools joke, explanation that their entire QC dept up and quit, or something. Reddit / the windows side is freaking out too b/c it's not everyone.
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Using some modern codec like Opus, allows efficient audio decoding. It's not an issue really, and surely not a reason to use uncompressed audio.
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Quoting: GuestQuoting: ShmerlUsing some modern codec like Opus, allows efficient audio decoding. It's not an issue really, and surely not a reason to use uncompressed audio.
They are changing to FMOD:
http://www.x-plane.com/2016/11/fmod-sound-x-plane-11/
However I don't think all default planes have been switched yet and the documentation is still being put together for 3rd parties to use.
I had completely forgot that was an audio thing. I've noticed that Rising World uses it, I think.. it has threads allocated to it. But its also a Java game so it has a thread for all the things.
Yeah, I've seen where some people have worked on planes for over a year. Idk why they don't use GitHub for version control/modifications from forks.. it seems like version control is "save as _v1, _v2..." The little one I fly around DFW in is amazing - I plan on going back to the dev who built it and leaving a tip on his pp page, it's a nice build.
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qptain Nemo Mar 31, 2017
Quoting: ShmerlRegarding space. Why are they using WAV for audio? That's really wasteful.No loss of quality, no decompression overhead, potentially reduced latency as the result.
It comes down to one's priorities of course, but I think it's a valid choice and no more of a waste than not using JPEG compression for textures for example.
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