Flight sim is a hobby supported by thousands, usually most spend quite a bit keeping up with all the software and hardware... but what about the Free Flight Simulators, who ever mentioned them? In this article, we include a few popular free flight sims for those who like FREE! Click here for more information and to see the free simulators.
FlightGear
FlightGear is an open-source project free flight simulator. This means as long as you abide by the terms of the GPL license you may freely download and copy FlightGear. Anyway can have easy and open access to the latest development source code. Being an open-source free flight simulator project, we have made our file formats open and easily accessible. We support standard 3d model formats and much of the simulator configuration is controlled through xml based ascii files. Writing 3rd party extensions for FlightGear (or even directly modifying the FlightGear source code) is straightforward and doesn't require a large amount of reverse engineering. This makes FlightGear an attractive option for use in private, commercial, research, or hobby projects.
- Totally free flight simulator
- Over 20,000 real world airports included in the full scenery set.
- Correct runway markings and placement, correct runway and approach lighting.
- Taxiways available for many larger airports (even including the green center line lights when appropriate.)
- Sloping runways (runways change elevation like they usually do in real life.)
- Directional airport lighting that smoothly changes intensity as your relative view direction changes.
- World scenery fits on 3 DVD's. (I'm not sure that's a feature or a problem!) But it means we have pretty detailed coverage of the entire world.
- Accurate terrain worldwide, based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data.) 3 arc second resolution (about 90m post spacing) for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
- Scenery includes all vmap0 lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, etc.
- Nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and headlights visible on major highways. This allows for realistic night VFR flying with the ability to spot towns and cities and follow roads.
- Scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread to minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas.
To view more description, view screenshots and to download this FlightGear for Windows and Mac OS X, click here.
Click here to Download Now! (Windows)
Orbiter
ORBITER is a free flight simulator that goes beyond the confines of Earth's atmosphere. Launch the Space Shuttle from Kennedy Space Center to deploy a satellite, rendezvous with the International Space Station or take the futuristic Delta-glider for a tour through the solar system - the choice is yours.
But make no mistake - ORBITER is not a space shooter. The emphasis is firmly on realism, and the learning curve can be steep. Be prepared to invest some time and effort to brush up on your orbital mechanics background. Good starting points are JPL's Basics of Space Flight, and R. Braeunig's Rocket & Space Technology.
- Realistic physics. Planetary motion, gravitation effects, free space and atmospheric flight are accurately modelled.
- You can land your ship at a space port on a planet surface, or dock to an orbital station.
- High resolution planetary maps provide some nice visual effects.
- Configurable environment. Users can add planets, space ships and space stations to the existing universe, or design a completely new solar system from scratch. The Orbiter Software Development Kit contains libraries and sample C++ code for addon developers who want to write plugins.
To view more description, view screenshots and to download Orbiter for Windows, click here.
Click here to Download Now! (Windows)
Screenshot from Flight Gear, one of the most popular Free Flight Simulators
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