This is a free Space Flight Simulator, which is highly realistic. That means you need to understand orbital mechanics to actually play this. You can't just point towards Mars, engage engines and expect to get there. I used to play this a lot some years back and decided to give it a go now through wine. You can find it here: Orbiter The project is still active, despite infrequent updates. The current version is over 3 year old, but still works great. I have set up a virtual drive with wine 1.7.6, and installed dxfullsetup and vcrun2005. I use the dx9 graphical client which is developed by independent people. Primarily because the OpenGL client is not as stable yet, and most addons for orbiter seem to prefer the dx9 graphical client. I have also installed Orbiter Sound, and the Delta Glider IV ship found here: DanSteph downloads Things seem to work very well and I might be doing this for next weeks guide with a detailed explanation that will include the Orbiter Sound package, dx9 client, and the Delta Glider IV ship. There are tons of addons for this for those who want to either recreate historical space flight, or those looking for more of a sci-fi feel. I prefer the near-future feel of the Delta Glider type ships. I only have one problem, my favorite addon ships are downloaded as a .zip archive, and when I unpack it using 7zip, it does not retain directory structure, because the archive is saved with backslashes instead of forward slashes. So instead of unpacking a file that goes into ./Textures2/XR2/etc.. I get a file named: Textures2\XR2\etc... If someone knows any archive extractor that is better at dealing with windows paths in archives that would be great. I suppose I could install 7zip in the virtual drive and try doing it there. The only other thing I could think of would be to either A: manually edit the file names and place them in the correct place, or B: write a script to do it for me, actually I don't think it would be too hard to write a Python script to handle it so I might look into that, and possibly include that in the guide if I get it working as I want.
This will definitely be this weeks guide as I got it working pretty well. It sometimes crash on exit, or if I start another scenario without exiting the game launcher, but apart from that it runs great. I also made a script that automatically renames all the extracted files correctly and moves them to the correct subfolder in the target directory. I will be posting this script along with the guide, but if anyone are interested to see it before I get the guide done, just let me know.
Wow, I've never heard of Orbiter, but I'm not surprised projects like this exist. I have to say... I'm not very "big" on simulators because they require a lot of patience and have high learning curves. I used to love racing simulators and would run practice laps for hours. I practiced so much that I never really did a real race. I'm glad there are communities (specially programmers) that like to keep games running and develop addons. Without these communities, such games would never really exist. Specially in this niche. I gotta say Orbital looks quite amazing! Look at the detail inside this ship:
