9 ms·

Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source

373 points by shakow 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shakow 5y ago
The Orbiter Space Simulator (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/) has been one of the major realistic-ish space simulators of the decade. Development has slowed down in the last years due to the obligations of its sole author, so seeing it be open-sourced with a free license (MIT) is a great opportunity to rekindle its development! It seems that the first priorities would be to upgrade the code to 64-bits and transition to a more recent version of DirectX.
- zardo 5y ago
  It didn't need to be open source for a DX11 graphics client to be developed. https://www.orbiter-forum.com/threads/d3d11client-download-and-installation-instructions.23925/ https://www.orbiter-forum.com/threads/d3d11client-download-a...
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    The Bitbucket link in that thread doesn’t work
- coptun 5y ago
  Should be vulkan or opengl to make it more cross platform.
fexed 5y ago
This is fantastic news! Been using it since 2006, can't wait to dive into the code and see what the community will output
dang 5y ago
Looks like one past thread: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator 2016 Edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12943028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12943028 - Nov 2016 (16 comments)
criddell 5y ago
Anybody know what's involved in moving from DX7 to DX11?
- roytries 5y ago
  It would be a huge undertaking, especially if the DirectX types leaked into the rest of the application. DirectX 7 is from 1999, games like Half-Life 1 used it. This is when GPUs were mostly fixed-function. While nowadays a GPU is almost as versatile as a CPU. The hardest/largest step would probably be to get it into this century, with the latest version of DirectX 9 (2005, Windows XP / Xbox 360 era). The step from 9 to 11 is also quite big, but a lot of APIs have stayed compatible.
  - Arwill 5y ago
    A viable solution for DX9 is using DXVK to emulate the old DX API under Vulkan, then add your own hooks into DXVK and transition to Vulkan in a more relaxed manner. Now DXVK does not support DX7, but a quick search found dgVoodoo2, which does emulate DX7 under DX11. Maybe that or a similar library can be used as a stepping stone. Regarding porting legacy apps to 64bit, the most problems i've seen were concerning old libraries (on Windows). That usually requires replacing old libraries with new a version, and fixing includes. I've seen only a handful of bugs arising purely from 32bit vs 64bit differences.
    - AstralStorm 5y ago
      Unfortunately the swapchain and rendering is vastly different from DX9 to DX11, the latter being now more similar to Vulkan. So maybe it could work to port the codebase to DX9 but no further really.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    How necessary is porting it, and for how long will old DirectX versions continue to work? Having no knowledge of the code, I imagine if you have a functioning graphics layer, most of the work would happen on the underlying physics models and high level drawing/scene APIs, not directly interfacing with DX.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AstralStorm 5y ago
It so happens that Orbiter is extremely well factored which should make implementing new graphics APIs reasonably easy. (Due to having a client-server version.)
marcodiego 5y ago
I wonder how hard would be to port it to linux. Maybe dxvk may help? Also, latest version is from 2016, so it looks like software that doesn't brings any money is finally open source because there is no hope to make any in the future. I'm sorry for them but glad they open sourced it. Would love if outcomes like this happened more often.
- space_fountain 5y ago
  I don't think there was ever any hint of an attempt to bring in money. I'm not entirely sure why the author choose to keep it closed source, maybe worries about others seeing "bad" code or something, but this is simply a case of someone no longer having time for their labor of love, not someone failing to monetize
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - VLM 5y ago
    Most of the discussion was decades ago. I've been playing around with Orbiter since it was new (and back then the hardware reqs to run were very expensive, not so much today). (edited: to emphasize, I've seen a lot and read a lot and played a lot, but am not an authoritative member of the orbiter community, none of this is private nor it is official, and its greatly summarized) The base game is workable but it really depends on 3rd party addons to do your planning and calculations and have somewhere to take off from and something to fly and somewhere to fly to. The 3rd party addons were often FOSS licensed and despite much noise about the glories of FOSS, never got much public help, typically. A 100 dev sized project benefits greatly if a 10 dev company releases it under a FOSS license and 500 people step forward to help. A 2 dev sized project where nobody steps up to help the original dev for some decades doesn't benefit much from FOSS despite in theory "it could have happened". There was a fear that the game being only playable with 3rd party mods, and FOSS being famous for forking, the overall project would die if the overworked single individual 3rd party devs were smacked with having to work against uncountable forked versions the 3rd party devs may have never seen or even have hardware to run (like a port to a phone maybe). The whole project can only move as fast as the slowest dev if its only usable in toto as a flotilla. Its not a game with DLC, its more like a API with a huge collection of compatible software that'll only remain compatible if nothing changes. If you're familiar with minecraft or rimworld or similar heavily modded games, imagine if you took "everything" out of those games and put it all into addons such that they were essentially unplayable without the addons. Like imagine if vanilla MC didn't have mobs or tools or blocks, it just rendered steve in an empty 3d world. So if FOSS didn't supercharge development, it would be useless to the overall project because pragmatically nothing happened despite the relicensing work, and if it did supercharge development, it would kill the project by wiping out the 3rd party devs whom are very handwavy the limiting factor. Ironically as "complete" or "finished" software the core project doesn't or didn't need devs anyway. The "cool stuff" all happened in mods and addons. Want a new MFD? That's an addon. Want a new vehicle? That's an addon. Want a new system, like the complete model of an electrical system for some Mars thing I remember a decade ago? That's an addon. Want new planets and solar systems and stations and satellites? That's an addon. The base system is kind of a a window manager (yes I know its not "a window manager" per C++ code, but I mean conceptually it herds the cats of addons so they don't step on each other and generally cooperate and render to the screen). The base system needs significant development as the graphics APIs are two decades out of date, but for two decades there wasn't much to do that wasn't being done in mods anyway. If everything is an addon its not clear what the base system could evolve into anyway. You could add multiplayer and commo, but that's best done in an addon. You could add mission video recording but that's best done by the video card and OS. I guess you could tidy up some addon API issues causing mass incompatibility issues so would it be worth it? Much as the author originally feared, a dozen or two posts into the forum FOSS announcement and there's already talk about branches and forks and competing strategies for conversion to 64 bit that'll kill the 3rd party addons and mods that made the game usable, so the FOSS announcement is probably more an announcement of the death of the project than some kind of rebirth.
aero-glide2 5y ago
This is great news, hope to contribute, time permitting!
ekster 5y ago
Great news for Deltaglider pilots everywhere.
DarmokJalad1701 5y ago
This is great news! I have been a fan since around 2006 when I was just a teenager.
- ekster 5y ago
  Same, playing a lot of this game once gave me a sort of dizzy feeling while looking up at the blue sky, like I was looking forward/out rather than up. Only happened once, but I will never forget it.
  - DarmokJalad1701 5y ago
    Orbiter was one of the factors that pushed me into aerospace engineering. I definitely owe a lot to Martin Schweiger.
larodi 5y ago
another open source project is born only after it is basically dead or is about to die in its closed-source form. out of curiosity - which other open source projects do you know, that have not started as open source?
- jylam 5y ago
  Blender, Firefox and OpenOffice have, from the top of my head.
  - stackedinserter 5y ago
    Blender didn't start as opensource project.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      That's what the person you're replying to is asserting as well.
  - antod 5y ago
    Firefox is debatable. Netscape 6 which it descended from was a total rewrite and never really had much/any closed source release history to it (unlike earlier Netscape releases)
- outworlder 5y ago
  Better than just dying and taking the source with it.
- pabs3 5y ago
  Synfig Animation Studio
- starseeker 5y ago
  Well, there's a lot - a few I happen to be familiar with: Maxima: https://maxima.sourceforge.io/ https://maxima.sourceforge.io/ Axiom: http://www.axiom-developer.org/ http://www.axiom-developer.org/ OpenCascade: https://dev.opencascade.org/ https://dev.opencascade.org/ BRL-CAD: https://brlcad.org/ https://brlcad.org/ GRASS: https://grass.osgeo.org/about/history/ https://grass.osgeo.org/about/history/ illumos: https://illumos.org/ https://illumos.org/ Docker: https://github.com/docker https://github.com/docker Torque: https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D
dr-detroit 5y ago
what the... left-pad!?!?
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Oh, fond memories of it. It was the first time when I understood that when you fly to the Moon, not only you have to cross the Moon's orbit, but you have to do it when Moon itself is nearby. If you are 1/4 orbital period ahead of it, you are screwed. It also ruined space movies like "Gravity" for me, because pointing the nose to the space station in 50 km and applying thrust towards it turns out to be a sure way to NOT get to that station! Edit: fixed the thrust direction
- sabjut 5y ago
  I first discovered this game back in school at around 2010-2011 and it quickly turned into one of the defining games of my childhood. I wish I had some numbers but I am certain that I played hundreds of hours playing this game, installing countless mods, learning orbital dynamics, spaceflight history, and so much more. I flew to mars and back, landed on the moon, programmed flight computers (sometime catastrophically wrong), docked so many different vehicles in orbit and generally had the time of my life in this game. Dan's Orbiterpage and his world class mods for the game (including the excellent sound mod) really made this game (or sim, whatever you call it) shine. I probably also spent days of my life browsing orbithangar for the coolest new vehicles. At some point I discovered Kerbal Space Program and eventually got older and had less time for Space Sims altogether, but Orbiter (especially the 2010P1 version) will remain closest to my heart. I am really happy to see this game become open source.
- wedesoft 5y ago
  I think you meant to say "pointing the nose to the space station in 50 km and applying thrust towards it turns out to be a sure way to NOT get to that station" Edited: made mistake as well ;)
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Yeah, my bad english. Used word 'thrust' to describe a burn in the opposite direction, totally forgetting that thrust is a reactionary force. :-/
    - 5y ago
wedesoft 5y ago
Orbiter 2016 is a brilliant game. I am currently trying to do a small space simulator in Clojure (https://github.com/wedesoft/sfsim25 https://github.com/wedesoft/sfsim25) and I probably should take a look at the Orbiter source code.
tito 5y ago
Anyone who loves this kind of stuff should check out The Orbital Index, a curated weekly newsletter of all things space: https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com Run by two friends of mine who are avid HNers.
- jaytaylor 5y ago
  And they even provide an RSS feed! https://orbitalindex.com/feed.xml https://orbitalindex.com/feed.xml
- Cogito 5y ago
  I just subscribed a week or two ago, probably from a post here on HN. Can confirm it's been great so far - interesting content and the right length for a weekly newsletter.
jsrcout 5y ago
This is tremendous news! Orbiter is such a fantastic sim, and even better with the high quality addons. I've learned so much from "playing" Orbiter over the years. Much respect to Martin for doing this.

373 points by shakow 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shakow 5y ago

The Orbiter Space Simulator (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/) has been one of the major realistic-ish space simulators of the decade. Development has slowed down in the last years due to the obligations of its sole author, so seeing it be open-sourced with a free license (MIT) is a great opportunity to rekindle its development! It seems that the first priorities would be to upgrade the code to 64-bits and transition to a more recent version of DirectX.

zardo 5y ago
It didn't need to be open source for a DX11 graphics client to be developed. https://www.orbiter-forum.com/threads/d3d11client-download-and-installation-instructions.23925/ https://www.orbiter-forum.com/threads/d3d11client-download-a...
- codetrotter 5y ago
  The Bitbucket link in that thread doesn’t work
coptun 5y ago
Should be vulkan or opengl to make it more cross platform.

fexed 5y ago

This is fantastic news! Been using it since 2006, can't wait to dive into the code and see what the community will output

dang 5y ago

Looks like one past thread: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator 2016 Edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12943028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12943028 - Nov 2016 (16 comments)

criddell 5y ago

Anybody know what's involved in moving from DX7 to DX11?

roytries 5y ago
It would be a huge undertaking, especially if the DirectX types leaked into the rest of the application. DirectX 7 is from 1999, games like Half-Life 1 used it. This is when GPUs were mostly fixed-function. While nowadays a GPU is almost as versatile as a CPU. The hardest/largest step would probably be to get it into this century, with the latest version of DirectX 9 (2005, Windows XP / Xbox 360 era). The step from 9 to 11 is also quite big, but a lot of APIs have stayed compatible.
- Arwill 5y ago
  A viable solution for DX9 is using DXVK to emulate the old DX API under Vulkan, then add your own hooks into DXVK and transition to Vulkan in a more relaxed manner. Now DXVK does not support DX7, but a quick search found dgVoodoo2, which does emulate DX7 under DX11. Maybe that or a similar library can be used as a stepping stone. Regarding porting legacy apps to 64bit, the most problems i've seen were concerning old libraries (on Windows). That usually requires replacing old libraries with new a version, and fixing includes. I've seen only a handful of bugs arising purely from 32bit vs 64bit differences.
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Unfortunately the swapchain and rendering is vastly different from DX9 to DX11, the latter being now more similar to Vulkan. So maybe it could work to port the codebase to DX9 but no further really.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  How necessary is porting it, and for how long will old DirectX versions continue to work? Having no knowledge of the code, I imagine if you have a functioning graphics layer, most of the work would happen on the underlying physics models and high level drawing/scene APIs, not directly interfacing with DX.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

AstralStorm 5y ago

It so happens that Orbiter is extremely well factored which should make implementing new graphics APIs reasonably easy. (Due to having a client-server version.)

marcodiego 5y ago

I wonder how hard would be to port it to linux. Maybe dxvk may help? Also, latest version is from 2016, so it looks like software that doesn't brings any money is finally open source because there is no hope to make any in the future. I'm sorry for them but glad they open sourced it. Would love if outcomes like this happened more often.

space_fountain 5y ago
I don't think there was ever any hint of an attempt to bring in money. I'm not entirely sure why the author choose to keep it closed source, maybe worries about others seeing "bad" code or something, but this is simply a case of someone no longer having time for their labor of love, not someone failing to monetize
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- VLM 5y ago
  Most of the discussion was decades ago. I've been playing around with Orbiter since it was new (and back then the hardware reqs to run were very expensive, not so much today). (edited: to emphasize, I've seen a lot and read a lot and played a lot, but am not an authoritative member of the orbiter community, none of this is private nor it is official, and its greatly summarized) The base game is workable but it really depends on 3rd party addons to do your planning and calculations and have somewhere to take off from and something to fly and somewhere to fly to. The 3rd party addons were often FOSS licensed and despite much noise about the glories of FOSS, never got much public help, typically. A 100 dev sized project benefits greatly if a 10 dev company releases it under a FOSS license and 500 people step forward to help. A 2 dev sized project where nobody steps up to help the original dev for some decades doesn't benefit much from FOSS despite in theory "it could have happened". There was a fear that the game being only playable with 3rd party mods, and FOSS being famous for forking, the overall project would die if the overworked single individual 3rd party devs were smacked with having to work against uncountable forked versions the 3rd party devs may have never seen or even have hardware to run (like a port to a phone maybe). The whole project can only move as fast as the slowest dev if its only usable in toto as a flotilla. Its not a game with DLC, its more like a API with a huge collection of compatible software that'll only remain compatible if nothing changes. If you're familiar with minecraft or rimworld or similar heavily modded games, imagine if you took "everything" out of those games and put it all into addons such that they were essentially unplayable without the addons. Like imagine if vanilla MC didn't have mobs or tools or blocks, it just rendered steve in an empty 3d world. So if FOSS didn't supercharge development, it would be useless to the overall project because pragmatically nothing happened despite the relicensing work, and if it did supercharge development, it would kill the project by wiping out the 3rd party devs whom are very handwavy the limiting factor. Ironically as "complete" or "finished" software the core project doesn't or didn't need devs anyway. The "cool stuff" all happened in mods and addons. Want a new MFD? That's an addon. Want a new vehicle? That's an addon. Want a new system, like the complete model of an electrical system for some Mars thing I remember a decade ago? That's an addon. Want new planets and solar systems and stations and satellites? That's an addon. The base system is kind of a a window manager (yes I know its not "a window manager" per C++ code, but I mean conceptually it herds the cats of addons so they don't step on each other and generally cooperate and render to the screen). The base system needs significant development as the graphics APIs are two decades out of date, but for two decades there wasn't much to do that wasn't being done in mods anyway. If everything is an addon its not clear what the base system could evolve into anyway. You could add multiplayer and commo, but that's best done in an addon. You could add mission video recording but that's best done by the video card and OS. I guess you could tidy up some addon API issues causing mass incompatibility issues so would it be worth it? Much as the author originally feared, a dozen or two posts into the forum FOSS announcement and there's already talk about branches and forks and competing strategies for conversion to 64 bit that'll kill the 3rd party addons and mods that made the game usable, so the FOSS announcement is probably more an announcement of the death of the project than some kind of rebirth.

aero-glide2 5y ago

This is great news, hope to contribute, time permitting!

ekster 5y ago

Great news for Deltaglider pilots everywhere.

DarmokJalad1701 5y ago

This is great news! I have been a fan since around 2006 when I was just a teenager.

ekster 5y ago
Same, playing a lot of this game once gave me a sort of dizzy feeling while looking up at the blue sky, like I was looking forward/out rather than up. Only happened once, but I will never forget it.
- DarmokJalad1701 5y ago
  Orbiter was one of the factors that pushed me into aerospace engineering. I definitely owe a lot to Martin Schweiger.

larodi 5y ago

another open source project is born only after it is basically dead or is about to die in its closed-source form. out of curiosity - which other open source projects do you know, that have not started as open source?

jylam 5y ago
Blender, Firefox and OpenOffice have, from the top of my head.
- stackedinserter 5y ago
  Blender didn't start as opensource project.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    That's what the person you're replying to is asserting as well.
- antod 5y ago
  Firefox is debatable. Netscape 6 which it descended from was a total rewrite and never really had much/any closed source release history to it (unlike earlier Netscape releases)
outworlder 5y ago
Better than just dying and taking the source with it.
pabs3 5y ago
Synfig Animation Studio
starseeker 5y ago
Well, there's a lot - a few I happen to be familiar with: Maxima: https://maxima.sourceforge.io/ https://maxima.sourceforge.io/ Axiom: http://www.axiom-developer.org/ http://www.axiom-developer.org/ OpenCascade: https://dev.opencascade.org/ https://dev.opencascade.org/ BRL-CAD: https://brlcad.org/ https://brlcad.org/ GRASS: https://grass.osgeo.org/about/history/ https://grass.osgeo.org/about/history/ illumos: https://illumos.org/ https://illumos.org/ Docker: https://github.com/docker https://github.com/docker Torque: https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D

dr-detroit 5y ago

what the... left-pad!?!?

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Oh, fond memories of it. It was the first time when I understood that when you fly to the Moon, not only you have to cross the Moon's orbit, but you have to do it when Moon itself is nearby. If you are 1/4 orbital period ahead of it, you are screwed. It also ruined space movies like "Gravity" for me, because pointing the nose to the space station in 50 km and applying thrust towards it turns out to be a sure way to NOT get to that station! Edit: fixed the thrust direction

sabjut 5y ago
I first discovered this game back in school at around 2010-2011 and it quickly turned into one of the defining games of my childhood. I wish I had some numbers but I am certain that I played hundreds of hours playing this game, installing countless mods, learning orbital dynamics, spaceflight history, and so much more. I flew to mars and back, landed on the moon, programmed flight computers (sometime catastrophically wrong), docked so many different vehicles in orbit and generally had the time of my life in this game. Dan's Orbiterpage and his world class mods for the game (including the excellent sound mod) really made this game (or sim, whatever you call it) shine. I probably also spent days of my life browsing orbithangar for the coolest new vehicles. At some point I discovered Kerbal Space Program and eventually got older and had less time for Space Sims altogether, but Orbiter (especially the 2010P1 version) will remain closest to my heart. I am really happy to see this game become open source.
wedesoft 5y ago
I think you meant to say "pointing the nose to the space station in 50 km and applying thrust towards it turns out to be a sure way to NOT get to that station" Edited: made mistake as well ;)
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Yeah, my bad english. Used word 'thrust' to describe a burn in the opposite direction, totally forgetting that thrust is a reactionary force. :-/
  - 5y ago

wedesoft 5y ago

Orbiter 2016 is a brilliant game. I am currently trying to do a small space simulator in Clojure (https://github.com/wedesoft/sfsim25 https://github.com/wedesoft/sfsim25) and I probably should take a look at the Orbiter source code.

tito 5y ago

Anyone who loves this kind of stuff should check out The Orbital Index, a curated weekly newsletter of all things space: https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com Run by two friends of mine who are avid HNers.

jaytaylor 5y ago
And they even provide an RSS feed! https://orbitalindex.com/feed.xml https://orbitalindex.com/feed.xml
Cogito 5y ago
I just subscribed a week or two ago, probably from a post here on HN. Can confirm it's been great so far - interesting content and the right length for a weekly newsletter.

jsrcout 5y ago

This is tremendous news! Orbiter is such a fantastic sim, and even better with the high quality addons. I've learned so much from "playing" Orbiter over the years. Much respect to Martin for doing this.