Eye Tracker 5, a $300 peripheral that presumably allows you to control the camera on screen with your eyes to improve the experience of driving virtual tractors, planes, and big rigs.
This is huge for America's VGDP; virtual gross domestic product! Think of the hours of virtual trucking and virtual piloting that such a device will improve!
More from the open-source #FlightGear flight simulator: a TCA DC-3 approaching the Northumberland Strait, enroute from Moncton, NB (CYQM) to Charlottetown, PE (CYYG).
A Piper PA-28-161 in #FlightGear just after take-off from Brantford, Ontario (CYFD), runway 05. The city is in the distance, beyond the frozen Grand River. The scenery is my FlightGear Americas Scenery.
This is all free (both as in "beer" and as in "speech"). Happy skies!
I learnt something important about Linux audio last night.
I noticed that I had no sound in X-Plane 12 (a flight simulator) while also being in a Discord call in Firefox. Apparently, certain FMOD applications check if PulseAudio is installed and fall back to ALSA if it isn't. Now, I have PipeWire installed to fix the mess that is Linux audio once and for all. So TECHNICALLY PulseAudio is not installed. And that's exactly what X-Plane detected, which then tried to gain complete control over the sound hardware through ALSA, which it couldn't.
The "fix" was to symlink /bin/pulseaudio to /bin/true to make it look like PulseAudio is available which tricked X-Plane into going through PulseAudio (and therefore through PipeWire) instead.
That was one of the weirdest problems I've ever encountered.
I hate when I have the perfect hardware for something, but software doesn't let me use it.
I love flight simulaton. And head tracking is a good way to make it more immersive without a big performance impact.
I have a TrackHat head tracker, but it's very inaccurate.
However, I also have VIVE Trackers which can track anything with sub-millimeter accuracy and no perceivable latency. They would be PERFECT!
But I can't use them. There are just so many software obstacles. For one, SteamVR requires a VR compositor for tracking; and the VR compositor requires a headset to be connected. Now, I have a headset, but it's an Oculus Rift that won't work on Linux. On top of that, the OpenTrack plugin for SteamVR seems outdated.
One of the things my #XPlane#flightsim never got right in my opinion was the brightness of landing lights. They have always been very dim, and at night you do not see the runway until damned near over the numbers.
Last night I finally found the settings for this and tweaked my usual #Cessna 172SP so now it has very wide and bright landing lights. Not real-world, but I can see the whole runway now.
Put Yourself In the Pilot's Seat with FLIGHT SIMULATOR II.
I love the whole aesthetic of this ad, a whole polygon world around you.
It wasn't until Flight Simulator 98 that I'd get my first taste of the series, so it's always a fascinating experience to go back to these early entries from SubLogic.
From one of Electronic Arts' early 90s brochures - the EA Airforce!
I love seeing ads for Electronic Arts' short-lived Airforce branding for games such as Desert Strike, LHX, and F-22.
For those unacquainted, the Mega Drive/Sega Genesis had a surprising amount of flight simulation games ported or created for it. And Electronic Arts in its pre-evil years put out enough that they wanted a brand for it, ala EA Sports. They're one of my favourite things in the whole wide world for how much effort and heart they put into making flight sims work on a 3-button joypad console.
And so EA Airforce was born... and then pretty much vanished right away. But lasted long enough for ads so much like this of their time to appear!
This week’s Screenshot Challenge winner is Twitter user CpuGeta486. If you’re interested in participating in our weekly Screenshot Challenges, check out the details in the Community section below!...
@thomasfuchs You're not counting the petabytes of server side spatial imagery, elevation models, and weather data that #FlightSim consumes. If those were transferred to the virtual pilots at 9600 baud…
Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition - World Update XIV: Central Eastern Europe Now Available! (store.steampowered.com)
World Update XIV: Central Eastern Europe is available FREE to all owners of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
July 6th, 2023 Development Update - Microsoft Flight Simulator (www.flightsimulator.com)
This week’s Screenshot Challenge winner is Twitter user CpuGeta486. If you’re interested in participating in our weekly Screenshot Challenges, check out the details in the Community section below!...