Flightgear Flight Simulator

I rarely take time to play, but last week I had 30 minutes before I had to leave for an evening class. I'd been working hard all day and needed a quick break of fun before going off to more brain usage.

I decided to check out Flightgear Flight Simulator. It's a bit hard with the keyboard, but I was at a buddy's house and he let me borrow his USB joystick and it was so easy, just like flying a real plane. No thinking about keys to press, just all pretty natural.

Check it out and have some fun. They have downloads for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, SGI, and FreeBSD all for free. You can also purchased DVDs of the game, over 280 planes, and scenery for the entire world (over 13gb). There are some amazing screen captures online.

To install on Fedora, it's as simple as: yum install FlightGear

FlightGear on Fedora comes with js_demo which is useful to see what's going on with your joystick.

$ js_demo
Joystick test program.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joystick 0: "Logitech Inc. WingMan Force 3D"
Joystick 1 not detected
Joystick 2 not detected
Joystick 3 not detected
Joystick 4 not detected
Joystick 5 not detected
Joystick 6 not detected
Joystick 7 not detected
+--------------------JS.0----------------------+
| Btns Ax:0 Ax:1 Ax:2 Ax:3 Ax:4 Ax:5           |
+----------------------------------------------+
|0000 -0.4 +0.1 +0.1 +0.6 +0.0 +0.0   .   .   |