I never expected this to be on the front page of HN, it brings back so many memories. I was big into this game when I was a teenager back in 2010, 2011 until 2015, also being very active in the community that made this page in that period. Sadly, even all those years back, the online scene was still what most would consider dead. I have a bit of a thing for "dead" games, I wouldn't really consider 1-2 full servers at night to be dead, which is what we had. In the following years, however, server population declined even more, to the point where I would really consider it to be dead. I'd love to be proven wrong though, but that was what I percieved.
If you really wanted to ride the wave, I'd tell you to get yourself a time machine and go all the way back to 2005, 2006 or 2007. Servers were ablaze with squadrons (~groups of people having their own paint schemes on certain aircraft, playing air-to-ground missions and air-to-air missions against other squadrons...) fighting and calling each other names. It wasn't pretty, but according to what I was told, passion wasn't exactly in short supply.
Fun fact: the game looks like that because it has no textures. Instead, every polygon is colored individually. Through a recent update did give the terrain textures. Aircraft still don't have them.
I feel your pain. Unique and interesting games are rarely the most popular.
I have come to realize that you need to grab a multiplayer game by the horns and jump right in when it's popular, because every game has a "golden era", before which it dies. These communities are all moments in time.
I know how that feels. It's so sad to see a game that once brought so much joy now has zero players. I have so many dead games. Sometimes I install one and join one of the empty servers. Maybe someone else will see me there and join too...
If time travel of information is possible we could send and receive packets back in time to play with players located in the years of 2005-2007. It would solve the problem of dead servers and allow us to play during the golden ages again for many games.
> Fun fact: the game looks like that because it has no textures. Instead, every polygon is colored individually. Through a recent update did give the terrain textures. Aircraft still don't have them.
Of course that description made me think of Red Baron[0].
Interesting what you say about textures, on the main page there are two commercial jets with decals including text on the side. Perhaps they did add them eventually? Or are they just very high poly and still coloured individually?
The polygon-based graphics remind me of Need for Madness! I played it in elementary school every day between 2008-2012. No multiplayer until a few years later though.
Interesting; I was not aware of their existence. They seem to be free as in beer; not as in speech. They seem to make money with shareware provided by the same company.
Nothing against closed source though. For example, I enjoy x-plane a lot which while not free (in either sense) of course has a large community providing both free and non free add-ons. This seems more of a game with a focus on combat and less on realism or looks.
An actual free, open source flight simulator that deserves mentioning is Flightgear. I've played with that a couple of times but always end up reverting to x-plane. But flightgear has some nice features and also a nice community. It just doesn't look and feel anywhere near as good as x-plane (which is a tall order because it is very good).
Anyway, I checked out some footage on Youtube. Visually, it has nothing on even Flightgear; which I'm pretty sure probably has some combat mods. Or even any version of that the last few decades or so, actually. It actually reminded me of some dos games I used to play in the early nineties. E.g. Jetfighter II (released 1990) was pretty awesome back in the day. It looks like that but with higher resolution. But e.g. the ground is a featureless green blob; just like in Jetfighter II, and clouds are white polygons hanging in the sky, etc. And Jetfighter II had a HUD that was about as feature rich as the one in this game. Of course it was way more pixelated than this. But they even managed a cockpit panel :-). I wouldn't call it photo realistic but it didn't look half bad for the time. There are probably better/later game that this thing is shooting for. But I just never really got into combat flight simulation.
I guess they are trying to recreate some of that experience. Not that it matters; but I guess the gameplay is more important than the looks for this. Actually looks like it could be a lot of fun.
BTW. I have nothing against MS Flightsimulator. The latest version looks great. But I just don't have any windows computers anymore at this point. Combat is not really something either of the other flightsims I mentioned are made for or even good at.
Yep, the most suitable classification for YSFlight is freeware, not Free Software. It's some old guy's personal project with LLC title that has been running since 1999. I doubt he's making much out of it, as the download page still says the website costs him $50 per month.
Being such an old game it runs on all-custom code he refers to as "YSFlight Kernel" that don't even support texturing, but the game is extremely lightweight and its flight model is at least bearably realistic. That casts contrast to many commercial games like Ace Combat franchises. It also has good keyboard support.
During 2010s the author followed open source movement and dumped some code on GitHub, but the core value of YSFlight remains its easy and compact nature. It's a worthwhile 20MB on your doomsday gaming console to bring to your designated fallout shelter.
The story of YSFlight is long, but FLYBY2[0] screensaver for Windows 98 is probably one of initial implementations of YSFlight flight engine (aircraft 3D models distributed with FLYBY2 are now distributed with YSFlight in same DNM-format).
Few weeks ago Soji Yamakawa open-sourced[0,1] FLYBY2 and ported it also for FM TOWNS.
YSFlight sim used to be my jam! Back in high school (~2004), a few of my friends and I all had YSFlight sim loaded on some zip disks. Then throughout the week, our schedules would occasionally align so that we were all in separate classrooms but each had access to a computer and we could play the multiplayer combat mode over the schools network. YSFlight sim was also my first introduction to modding. I was able to take the F-22, give it unbelievable amounts of thrust (millions of lbf), zero mass, and virtually unlimited ammunition. It was great, I could fly across the entire map in a second, then loiter like a helicopter. I dominated for like a week until I gave the secret away...
This looks interesting, but the coolest part of this site is the forums. I had no idea that phpBB was still in active development/maintenance. It's surprising how ridiculously fast it is, and how much information is packed into each page. The topic pages are full of images and complex layouts, but it still renders completely in less than a second. Granted, Cloudflare and caching are a big help, but it goes to show what years and years of continued development and optimization can do.
This is why server-side rendering is making a comeback; for over a decade, ever since Chrome and V8 came out, the focus has been on making JS faster, but in the meantime rendering plain old HTML and CSS (especially without animations or other complexer calculations) hasn't stopped. Especially newer versions of rendering engines, employing 3D acceleration and tile-based rendering will make these things really fast.
Years ago we decided that vBulletin 3 was getting too old (it had been superseded by the slower 4 and 5 by then; slower because they did more 'tidy' coding in the back-end (object-oriented PHP) and tried to build a more JS-heavy front-end.). We first tried Discourse - we tried it for days, trying to migrate posts, but it was just so heavyweight, it seemed aimed at enterprise companies with a free-to-spend credit card linked to AWS, not some random fansite out on the internet. I gave up eventually.
Instead we went to Xenforo, which was built by the same people behind vBulletin up until v3, after which that company was bought out and the people left. They built Xenforo with similar goals as vB 3, just with a fresh start, and the result was an old-fashioned but fast forum software, suitable for mobile, some JS sprinkled here and there for e.g. instant posting without a full page reload, but other than that a pretty vanilla piece of software.
Wow, I've been flying in YSF for what feels like over a decade. Up until recently it was just a game I installed on my parent's computer and would play when I went home.
One thing I love about the game is that they nailed the F-22's thrust vectoring and supermanueverability. I play the game with a keyboard and a mouse (as opposed to a HOTAS setup), and after all these years flying the F-22 I'm proud to say I can execute stalls, a Pugachev's Cobra, and more maneuvers.
I'm not your typical gamer (I don't own a console, and I own 2 games on Steam that I never play), but YSFlight has been my "Come To Jesus" moment for recreational simulation. If you're on the fence about downloading it, I encourage you to do it. You will not be disappointed.
Intersting to see a flight sim post would make to the front page of HN lol. I'm also working on a free flight simulator lately, but focusing on drones/quadcopters/FPV and stick feel. It's browser based but can be played with gamepads or radio controllers. Give it a try if you are interested and let me know what you think, located here: https://dronesitter.com/sim
> I'm also working on a free flight simulator lately, but focusing on drones/quadcopters/FPV and stick feel.
Guess, it would be better post it in "Show HN" section[0], beacuse your flight sim is online/WebGL-based — it is probably has nothing to compare with YSFlight.
As side note, it is not good to launch WebGL-app immediately after user just visits your site — my PC near stuck with full CPU/GPU load; it would be much better give a user button "Launch now" instead to launch WebGL without permission by user/site visitor.
N.B. YSFlight could be used with RC-transmitters connected to PC as joysticks, and even more, there are already a lot of drones "aircraft" addons for YSFlight too — so you may combining it with something like Oculus or Google VR Cardoard to use YSFlight for playing in FPV-mode.
I found the calibration hard to use and it didn't give me much feedback to say if I was doing what it wanted or not. The end result seemed to get the axis extents correct but the mapping all over the place.
For Linux users who don't want to run the .py install script... The Linux binaries are hiding inside the MacOS .app dir, you can run them in-place without installation, e.g after unzipping, the 64bit GL2 one can be run with:
LGR recently did a Blerb about a floppy disk found in a computer from Lockheed Martin, that had a screen saver based on an old version of YSFlight on it. The screen saver would stage flybys of YSFlight's distinctive, untextured models of fighter jets.
Author, Soji Yamakawa[0], is not only active demoscene performer (few times winner of Demosplash Party) but also is a big fan of Fujitsu FM TOWNS[1] — in last few years he did an open-source emulator, "Tsugaru"[2].
This and another highly upvoted site submitted yesterday were flagged by MWB. Giving it the benefit of doubt could be that user submitted content for the game may be the culprit but I am just guessing. Worst case there could be an active campaign to infect people in the tech industry just prior to a military engagement. I will assume and prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
spiritually similar, but single-player and cuter graphics. the release is in two weeks, but i've been following the dev for a year because the clips are so fun to watch.
I just tried it and I'm not impressed at all. There are many better, yet still free alternatives, so not sure I understand why this got on front page...
[+] [-] galcerte|4 years ago|reply
If you really wanted to ride the wave, I'd tell you to get yourself a time machine and go all the way back to 2005, 2006 or 2007. Servers were ablaze with squadrons (~groups of people having their own paint schemes on certain aircraft, playing air-to-ground missions and air-to-air missions against other squadrons...) fighting and calling each other names. It wasn't pretty, but according to what I was told, passion wasn't exactly in short supply.
Fun fact: the game looks like that because it has no textures. Instead, every polygon is colored individually. Through a recent update did give the terrain textures. Aircraft still don't have them.
[+] [-] ehnto|4 years ago|reply
I feel your pain. Unique and interesting games are rarely the most popular.
I have come to realize that you need to grab a multiplayer game by the horns and jump right in when it's popular, because every game has a "golden era", before which it dies. These communities are all moments in time.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
I know how that feels. It's so sad to see a game that once brought so much joy now has zero players. I have so many dead games. Sometimes I install one and join one of the empty servers. Maybe someone else will see me there and join too...
[+] [-] meheleventyone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_zoidberg|4 years ago|reply
Of course that description made me think of Red Baron[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_(1990_video_game)
[+] [-] Aethylia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] momothereal|4 years ago|reply
http://needformadness.com/
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|4 years ago|reply
Nothing against closed source though. For example, I enjoy x-plane a lot which while not free (in either sense) of course has a large community providing both free and non free add-ons. This seems more of a game with a focus on combat and less on realism or looks.
An actual free, open source flight simulator that deserves mentioning is Flightgear. I've played with that a couple of times but always end up reverting to x-plane. But flightgear has some nice features and also a nice community. It just doesn't look and feel anywhere near as good as x-plane (which is a tall order because it is very good).
Anyway, I checked out some footage on Youtube. Visually, it has nothing on even Flightgear; which I'm pretty sure probably has some combat mods. Or even any version of that the last few decades or so, actually. It actually reminded me of some dos games I used to play in the early nineties. E.g. Jetfighter II (released 1990) was pretty awesome back in the day. It looks like that but with higher resolution. But e.g. the ground is a featureless green blob; just like in Jetfighter II, and clouds are white polygons hanging in the sky, etc. And Jetfighter II had a HUD that was about as feature rich as the one in this game. Of course it was way more pixelated than this. But they even managed a cockpit panel :-). I wouldn't call it photo realistic but it didn't look half bad for the time. There are probably better/later game that this thing is shooting for. But I just never really got into combat flight simulation.
I guess they are trying to recreate some of that experience. Not that it matters; but I guess the gameplay is more important than the looks for this. Actually looks like it could be a lot of fun.
BTW. I have nothing against MS Flightsimulator. The latest version looks great. But I just don't have any windows computers anymore at this point. Combat is not really something either of the other flightsims I mentioned are made for or even good at.
[+] [-] numpad0|4 years ago|reply
Being such an old game it runs on all-custom code he refers to as "YSFlight Kernel" that don't even support texturing, but the game is extremely lightweight and its flight model is at least bearably realistic. That casts contrast to many commercial games like Ace Combat franchises. It also has good keyboard support.
During 2010s the author followed open source movement and dumped some code on GitHub, but the core value of YSFlight remains its easy and compact nature. It's a worthwhile 20MB on your doomsday gaming console to bring to your designated fallout shelter.
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
To be clear, YSFlight is partially open-source software.
Here is official repo[0] of its GUI toolkit (OpenGL-based) and various miscellaneous apps based on it.
PolygonCrest (aka `ysgebl`), an official 3D editor for addon making for YSFlight, based on the same toolkit as YSFlight, is fully free & opensource.
[0] https://github.com/captainys/public
[1] https://github.com/captainys/public/tree/master/src/ysgebl
[2] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewtopic.php?t=6374
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
There is large list of addons created by users, which highly extends YSFlight.[1]
Also, there are a lot of open-source utilities for addons makers.[2]
Read «YSFlight Handbook»[3] and «YSFlight Scientific Research»[4] papers for understand addons formats and some internals of YSFlight.
[0] https://forum.ysfhq.com
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1caVHoWU6g1YSB-G-W5Q-...
[2] https://github.com/YSFlight-opensource
[3] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewtopic.php?t=8172&p=92286#p92286
[4] https://sites.google.com/prod/site/ysdecaff/ysflight-scienti...
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
Few weeks ago Soji Yamakawa open-sourced[0,1] FLYBY2 and ported it also for FM TOWNS.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30214412
[1] https://github.com/captainys/FLYBY2
[+] [-] squidhunter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziggus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|4 years ago|reply
This is why server-side rendering is making a comeback; for over a decade, ever since Chrome and V8 came out, the focus has been on making JS faster, but in the meantime rendering plain old HTML and CSS (especially without animations or other complexer calculations) hasn't stopped. Especially newer versions of rendering engines, employing 3D acceleration and tile-based rendering will make these things really fast.
Years ago we decided that vBulletin 3 was getting too old (it had been superseded by the slower 4 and 5 by then; slower because they did more 'tidy' coding in the back-end (object-oriented PHP) and tried to build a more JS-heavy front-end.). We first tried Discourse - we tried it for days, trying to migrate posts, but it was just so heavyweight, it seemed aimed at enterprise companies with a free-to-spend credit card linked to AWS, not some random fansite out on the internet. I gave up eventually.
Instead we went to Xenforo, which was built by the same people behind vBulletin up until v3, after which that company was bought out and the people left. They built Xenforo with similar goals as vB 3, just with a fresh start, and the result was an old-fashioned but fast forum software, suitable for mobile, some JS sprinkled here and there for e.g. instant posting without a full page reload, but other than that a pretty vanilla piece of software.
[+] [-] lpcvoid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WFHRenaissance|4 years ago|reply
One thing I love about the game is that they nailed the F-22's thrust vectoring and supermanueverability. I play the game with a keyboard and a mouse (as opposed to a HOTAS setup), and after all these years flying the F-22 I'm proud to say I can execute stalls, a Pugachev's Cobra, and more maneuvers.
I'm not your typical gamer (I don't own a console, and I own 2 games on Steam that I never play), but YSFlight has been my "Come To Jesus" moment for recreational simulation. If you're on the fence about downloading it, I encourage you to do it. You will not be disappointed.
[+] [-] mosfets|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
Guess, it would be better post it in "Show HN" section[0], beacuse your flight sim is online/WebGL-based — it is probably has nothing to compare with YSFlight.
As side note, it is not good to launch WebGL-app immediately after user just visits your site — my PC near stuck with full CPU/GPU load; it would be much better give a user button "Launch now" instead to launch WebGL without permission by user/site visitor.
N.B. YSFlight could be used with RC-transmitters connected to PC as joysticks, and even more, there are already a lot of drones "aircraft" addons for YSFlight too — so you may combining it with something like Oculus or Google VR Cardoard to use YSFlight for playing in FPV-mode.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/show
[+] [-] meheleventyone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomxor|4 years ago|reply
For Linux users who don't want to run the .py install script... The Linux binaries are hiding inside the MacOS .app dir, you can run them in-place without installation, e.g after unzipping, the 64bit GL2 one can be run with:
[+] [-] bitwize|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
Here is already comment[0] on this with links to related HN thread.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30299850#30301403
[+] [-] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
BTW, I think YSFlight is more related to ACM[2] & Vertigo[3] flight simulators, instead of GL-117/LAC.
As for more advanced open-source flight simulator than LAC, take a look on Marek Cel's[4] Mscsim and FightersFS.[5]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27073052
[1] https://forum.ysfhq.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=8496
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22549969
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598269
[4] https://github.com/marek-cel?tab=repositories
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/marek-cel
[+] [-] nonbirithm|4 years ago|reply
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=72288
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=in.coocan.jp
[1] http://ysflight.in.coocan.jp/FM/e.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269460
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
YSFlight RIAT 2021 – The Marine's Rally: A Tribute to Gunny [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28845160 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
Announcing YS Flight (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27047041 - May 2021 (1 comment)
YS Flight Simulator 20th Anniversary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303825 - June 2019 (1 comment)
[+] [-] jker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superfunny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malwarebytes_Anti-Malware#Secu...
[+] [-] nyolfen|4 years ago|reply
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1347550/
spiritually similar, but single-player and cuter graphics. the release is in two weeks, but i've been following the dev for a year because the clips are so fun to watch.
[+] [-] MrBra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3z|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] punnerud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
So, it under macOS BigSur with M1 it works if "give permissions to listen to key-input", right?
[+] [-] rideontime|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scionthefly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|4 years ago|reply