Flight Gear v3.4 with decent F-14B released as of Feb 17th

[+streakeagle 871]

I haven't tried flight gear in ages. It never ran well on my hardware and didn't have much to offer as a non-combat civil sim when I already have FSX and X-Plane.

I saw previews of what the F-14B would be like for v3.4, so I have been waiting for its release ever since then.

I just checked again last night, found v3.4 was available, and downloaded from here: http://www.flightgear.org/

Tonight, I installed it.

 

I went straight to the F-14B and runway 10R at San Francisco International, summer afternoon. Out of the box, the graphics are still very dated, but the F-14B cockpit looks interesting. You can sit in the pilot or rio seat. Apparently, multiplayer with a pilot and rio in the same aircraft is possible, which makes this a unique sim as far as I know. At first, I couldn't figure out how to get my stick setup to work. I looked up the location of the joystick menu in the instruction file and also read that it should automatically recognize my stick setup and try to make basic assignments. So I restarted the game and sure enough, my complex stick setup was detected and automatically configured. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it came up with mostly valid assignments despite my unusual stick arrangement.

 

I have a real B-8 grip and stick assembly from an F-4 Phantom that is integrated into Windows via a Bodnar Bu0836X USB stick interface board, a Thrustmaster Warthog Throttle, and Saitek rudder pedals. Everything was assigned 100% correct! The B-8 had the correct roll and pitch axes, the throttle had the throttle axis, and the rudder pedals had the toe-brakes and rudder. The only problem was dual assignment of the roll and pitch axes to the throttle's little cursor stick which were easily cleared to "none".

 

The aircraft was on the runway with engines running. "Brake" light was red for wheel brakes (parking brake?), <shift><b> released the brakes per the "Common Aircraft Controls" summary. Throttle forward (single axis only, I didn't see any option for dual throttles on a twin engine aircraft). Rotated, lifted off, retracted gear <g>, and... got a master caution due to exceeding vne -> never exceed speed for the current altitude. Apparently, full throttle in an F-14B results in extremely quick acceleration, at least as modeled in this sim.

 

Upon flying around just a minute or two, I figured out real fast that I needed to get TrackIR enabled to really enjoy this aircraft. This is where I hit the brakes! TrackIR is not inherently supported in any way after all of these years. Someone got creative and came up with a basic dll/config that allows use of TrackIR in Windows and someone else revised it to improve it to some extent, but I haven't had the guts to download and install this little hack. TrackIR is compatible with a library for Linux that also works in OSX: so you can easily use TrackIR in Linux or Apple OSX but not Windows! If the hack is actually still available for download (two years from the time the links were posted in a forum), it might work well enough for me to go further in exploring the F-14B in FlightGear v3.4. But as it stands now, this pretty much kills my interest in this sim.

 

[+streakeagle 871]

Downloaded the TrackIR hack. Very basic. You run an exe in place of the TrackIR software that communicates between TrackIR and FlightGear using a pair of UDP sockets.

Better than nothing, but almost unconfigureable with limited field of view and only support for the hat reflectors.

 

The out-of-box graphics are generally uglier than early SFP1/WoV, but the cockpit is quite clickable and overall systems modeling may be somewhat detailed. Absolutely impressive for a 100% free application. But no substitute for DCS or even SF2NA.