> Among the high-performing few written specifically for LINUX
> Furthermore, because LAC is intended as a realistic simulator and not as a mere game ... It’s all just history and science. If you already have a good understanding of the aerodynamic and air combat sciences, you won’t even need to read the instructions once you have your controls mapped to your liking!
> sim pilots willing to use a little imagination will easily fantasize that the experience is real
I'm not entirely convinced this is not a parody. The wording, the weirdly pompous adjectives, the game itself. I get that it's supposed to be a little retro, and that's fine, but at the same time they're comparing it to Combat Flight Simulator 2 and talking about realism with a straight face.
> Was there a flight simulator game for Unix with wireframe/vector graphics which perhaps dates from 70s/80s?
There are few actually active projects probably from mid 90s:
ACM 6.0[0] (fully open-source) — an extended fork of ACM 5.0[1] (MSFS 2.0-like).[2]
YSFlight[3] (freeware & partially open-source) — fully polygonal multipurpose 3D flight simulator. As a side project its developer also created Polygon Crest[4] app — open-source 3D polygonal editor on the same toolkit for creating addons for YSFlight.[5]
With a bunch of games requiring advanced graphic cards to emulate "retro CRT" effects on the market, it's refreshing to see software specifically written to be usable on low end machine
Now that the Panfrost driver is good enough for most desktop OpenGL, running it on a "underpowered" ARM SBC with NsCDE, may give thrilling feeling of an old SGI Indy running Certain Impact.
I want to try this on the pinephone. I'll report back...
EDIT: nevermind, I can't find the source. The site is full of links to binaries and videos but not any repos or source archives. I found something that looked like combined source and binaries but source forge wouldn't let me download it because "downloads aren't possible on this device" (how the hell do you fuck up file downloads like this? The default appache config would be an improvement! )
I'm very sorry to say this but your regular use of quotes to emphasize words makes the document very difficult for me to read. Quotes have many uses, but emphasis is not one of them.
Don't feel sorry for that. I'm not a native english speaker, so this is completely unintentional. Actually, any hint of how I could better express myself is welcome.
Oh... You mean quotes as in '"', right? In that case put it between quotes to note that it my be underpowered by today standards but have respectable specs compared to SGI workstations of the day. I have no benchmark to base my argument, but I do have a gut feeling.
I think they mean in the original document where a lot of words and phrases are unnecessarily within quotation marks.
I'd suggest removing pretty much all of the quotation marks to improve readability.
Edit: In the post in the thread here, the quotes around the word underpowered are being used as scare quotes [1] but the more you do that the less readable a document becomes because you're putting the cognitive load of inferring the intention of the punctuation onto the reader! I would recommend using quotes for quotations/speech only.
Edit2: PS Grammatical quibbles aside this is a good post, thanks for writing & submitting it!
Ah, I see. As you posted the link and as your post had a similar quirk to the original I assumed you were the author of that too. You can probably disregard my advice in that case.
I sincerely appreciate your humility! The other commented on the cognitive load of constantly changing contexts, and that was accurate. To provide a direct response, in all of the following cases, quotes should not have been used. There are likely more but these are the few I picked:
- can be run without a “gaming-class” video card.
- the three lower “graphic detail” levels
- -on ten year-old Intel “Core II Duo” or
- comprehensive “YouTube” playlists,
- well-known “AskMisterWizard.com” web site
- Microsoft "Windows"
- YouTube "PlayList"
This one is acceptable, because you're essentially defining LAC as an acronym for the first time, and a change of context is acceptable:
LINUX Air Combat (or “LAC”)
That's not to say it's' needed. I'd have written it:
LINUX Air Combat (LAC)
or
LINUX Air Combat (henceforth referred to as “LAC”)
In another section, you wrote the following:
Overall, LAC’s features compare favorably with Windows-based flight sims from the genre’s “classic” period, like “Combat Flight Simulator 2”, or “Air Warrior III”, or “Aces High I”, or “Warbirds”.
It could have been written this way:
Overall, LAC’s features compare favorably with Windows based flight sims from the genre’s classic period, rivalling such titles as Combat Flight Simulator 2, Air Warrior III, Aces High I, and Warbirds.
Although I do not claim grammatical perfection, It think the rewritten example is more readable. But, I've seen many native English speakers/writers who'd have done it this way:
Overall, LAC’s features compare favorably with Windows based flight sims from the genre’s classic period, rivalling such titles as "Combat Flight Simulator 2", "Air Warrior III", "Aces High I", and "Warbirds".
Again, I do not claim perfection. I only care about grammar as far as it affects readability, and I'm known to take Creative License with it when I feel like it. (See what I did there?)
More power to the author, hopefully they're having fun producing it. To me it's reminiscent of an N64 game; the gulf between this and War Thunder (which ran well a couple of years ago on Ubuntu via Steam installation), say, is rather wide.
It looks like their thing might be optimisation for low-powered systems (like RPi).
> Furthermore, because LAC is intended as a realistic simulator and not as a mere game ... It’s all just history and science. If you already have a good understanding of the aerodynamic and air combat sciences, you won’t even need to read the instructions once you have your controls mapped to your liking!
> sim pilots willing to use a little imagination will easily fantasize that the experience is real
I'm not entirely convinced this is not a parody. The wording, the weirdly pompous adjectives, the game itself. I get that it's supposed to be a little retro, and that's fine, but at the same time they're comparing it to Combat Flight Simulator 2 and talking about realism with a straight face.