Free flying software for linux

Flying Saucer project is a pure Java XML/CSS 2 renderer whose aim is to provide spec-compliant CSS 2.1 rendering for any well-formed XML document.
The current codebase can render to Java2D-based canvases and to PDF via the iText library, and covers a great deal of the CSS 2.1 specification.
There are demos for rendering XHTML, rendering within Swing applications, and rendering to PDF. Direct rendering from DocBook or other XML formats is possible, provided the appropriate CSS is available.
Main features:
- Vertical margin collapsing; CSS 2.1 specification
- Z-index property and stacking contexts; CSS 2.1 specification
- Vertical-align: top/bottom; CSS 2.1 specification
- PDF rendering via the iText library; support for PDF bookmarks, pagination and breaks, and more
- Pagination support, automatic and explicit: CSS 2.1 specification
- Rewritten "float" implementation
- Improved list marker positioning
Enhancements:
- This release includes comprehensive table support, faster rendering, bugfixes, better image generation, near-complete compliance with the CSS 2.1 specification, including lots of improvements like better forms support, CSS counters, cursor property support, compliant font property handling, and so on.
- Theres even a completely new, fast, and compliant CSS 2.1 parser built-in.

The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

There are many exciting possibilities for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas.

FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

There are a wide range of people interested and participating in this project. This is truly a global effort with contributors from just about every continent. Interests range from building a realistic home simulator out old airplane parts, to university research and instructional use, to simply having a viable alternative to commercial PC simulators.

Flight Dynamics Models

With FlightGear it is possible to choose between three primary Flight Dynamics Models. It is possible to add new dynamics models or even interface to external "proprietary" flight dynamics models:

1. JSBSim: JSBSim is a generic, 6DoF flight dynamics model for simulating the motion of flight vehicles. It is written in C++. JSBSim can be run in a standalone mode for batch runs, or it can be the driver for a larger simulation program that includes a visuals subsystem (such as FlightGear.) In both cases, aircraft are modeled in an XML configuration file, where the mass properties, aerodynamic and flight control properties are all defined.

2. YASim: This FDM is an integrated part of FlightGear and uses a different approach than JSBSim by simulating the effect of the airflow on the different parts of an aircraft. The advantage of this approach is that it is possible to perform the simulation based on geometry and mass information combined with more commonly available performance numbers for an aircraft. This allows for quickly constructing a plausibly behaving aircraft that matches published performance numbers without requiring all the traditional aerodynamic test data.

3. UIUC: This FDM is based on LaRCsim originally written by the NASA. UIUC extends the code by allowing aircraft configuration files instead and by adding code for simulation of aircraft under icing conditions.

UIUC (like JSBSim) uses lookup tables to retrieve the component aerodynamic force and moment coefficients for an aircraft... and then uses these coefficients to calculate the sum of the forces and moments acting on the aircraft.

Extensive and Accurate World Scenery Data Base

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 DVDs. (Im not sure thats 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.

Accurate and Detailed Sky Model

FlightGear implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time and date. FlightGear can track the current computer clock time in order to correctly place the sun, moon, stars, etc. in their current and proper place relative to the earth. If its dawn in Sydney right now, its dawn in the sim right now when you locate yourself in virtual Sidney. The sun, moon, stars, and planets all follow their correct courses through the sky. This modeling also correctly takes into account seasonal effects so you have 24 hour days north of the arctic circle in the summer, etc. We also illuminate the correctly placed moon with the correctly placed sun to get the correct phase of the moon for the current time/date, just like in real life.

Flexible and Open Aircraft Modeling System

FlightGear has the ability to model a wide variety of aircraft. Currently you can fly the 1903 Wright Flyer, strange flapping wing "ornithopters", a 747 and A320, various military jets, and several light singles. FlightGear has the ability to model those aircraft and just about everything in between.

FlightGear has extremely smooth and fluid instrument animation that updates at the same rate as your out-the-window view updates (i.e. as fast as your computer can crank, and not artificially limited and chunky like in some sims.)

FlightGear has the infrastructure to allow aircraft designers to build fully animated, fully operational, fully interactive 3d cockpits (which even update and display correctly from external chase plane views.)

FlightGear realistically models real world instrument behavior. Instruments that lag in real life, lag correctly in FlightGear, gyro drift is modeled correctly, the magnetic compass is subject to aircraft body forces -- all those things that make real world flying a challenge.

FlightGear also accurately models many instrument and system failures. If the vacuum system fails, the HSI gyros spin down slowly with a corresponding degradation in response as well as a slowly increasing bias/error.

Moderate Hardware Requirements

The intention of FlightGear is to look nice, but not at the expense of other aspects of a realistic simulator. Our focus is not on competing in the "game" market and not on the ultra-flashy graphic tricks.

The result is a simulator with moderate hardware requirements to run at smooth frame rates. You can be reasonably happy on a $500-1000 (USD) machine (possibly even less if you are careful) and dont necessarily need $3000 (USD) worth of new hardware like you do with the many of the newest games.

That said, the more hardware you throw at FlightGear, the better it looks and runs, so dont feel like you have to chuck your expensive new hardware if you just purchased it. :-)

Internal Properties EXPOSED!

FlightGear allows users and aircraft designers access to a very large number of internal state variables via numerous internal and external access mechanisms. These state variables are organized into a convenient hierarchal "property" tree.

Using the properties tree it is possible to monitor just about any internal state variable in FlightGear. Its possible to remotely control FlightGear from an external script. You can create model animations, sound effects, instrument animations and network protocols for about any situation imaginable just by editing a small number of human readable configuration files. This is a powerful system that makes FlightGear immensely flexible, configurable, and adaptable.

Networking options

A number of networking options allow FlightGear to communicate with other instances of FlightGear, GPS receivers, external flight dynamics modules, external autopilot or control modules, as well as other software such as the Open Glass Cockpit project and the Atlas mapping utility.

A generic input/output option allows for a user defined output protocol to a file, serial port or network client.

A multi player protocol is available for using FlightGear on a local network in a multi aircraft environment, for example to practice formation flight or for tower simulation purposes.

The powerful network options make it possible to synchronize several instances of FlightGear allowing for a multi-display, or even a cave environment. If all instances are running at the same frame rate consistently, it is possible to get extremely good and tight synchronization between displays.

Flight Gear and its source code have intentionally been kept open, available, and free. In doing so, we are able to take advantage of the efforts of tremendously talented people from around the world. Contrast this with the traditional approach of commercial software vendors, who are limited by the collective ability of the people they can hire and pay. Our approach brings its own unique challenges and difficulties, but we are confident (and other similarly structured projects have demonstrated) that in the long run we can outclass the commercial "competition."

Contributing to Flight Gear can be educational and a lot of fun. A long time developer, Curtis Olson, had this to say about working on Flight Gear:

Personally, Flight Gear has been a great learning experience for me. I have been exposed to many new ideas and have learned a tremendous amount of "good stuff" in the process of discussing and implementing various Flight Gear subsystems. If for no other reason, this alone makes it all worth while.

Kraptor is a classic shoot em up scroller game, where you must fight against tons of bad dudes.
The game offers high speed action, with massive destruction and lots of fun. Kraptor features a powerful engine for 2D shooter scroller games. Massive destruction, powerful weapons, all that you always wanted in this kind of games! It is also multi-platform (DOS, Win32, Linux and more!)
Main features:
- FULL SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE FREE (Under MIT license)
- Works on many platforms, including DOS, Windows and Linux!
- Supports all resolutions, like 320x200, 640x480, 1024x768, etc.; even those bizarre ones, like 160x120, 320x400, etc.
- Uses stereo positional sound (you hear the ships flying around you)
- Has a incredible particle system, that let all sorts of particle effects in the explosions, fire on the ground, the ships going down in flames,and the weapons can let a trail of smoke, beams, etc
- Has a dynamic fire, smoke and explosions system based on layers and on-fly rendering, that let show a massive destruction effect on the air and ground.
- Has a dynamic enviroment sub-engine to render rain, snow, etc.
- The ships explodes into pieces, and the builds on the ground blows up in a chain-explosion effect.
- Enemys of any size, and custom IAs and weapons.
- All kind of animated bad dudes, from tiny ones to big bad bosses.
- All the flying objects cast shadows over the background, with perspective correction.
- Support for animations and cinematic, with sound and subtitles.
- A on-fly translation system with UNICODE and UTF-8 support, that can translate on the fly all the GUIs to other language.
- Multiple weapons for player and enemies.
- Has original music sound-track.
- You can lower/raise the detail level, in low detail, the game runs good even on a 486 DX2!
- Original story, with cool movies.
- Realistic huge hi-res backgrounds levels.
- Original high quality stereo sounds and music
- Support for Spanish and English translation on-fly
- Black market shop to buy new weapons, upgrade ship, etc.
- GUI driven interface like the one used in Unre*l.
- You can Save / Load your game

HighMoon is a game similar to "Artillery" or "Worms" -- but it takes place in the universe. There is a planet system between two flying saucers. The gravitational fields of the planets and moons change inevitably each ballistic curve.
In HighMoon is not easy to eliminate an enemy. If you miss it, the shoots can change their direction and become dangerous to the attacker.
HighMoon can be played against a computer or a human opponent in many planet systems.
HighMoon was first release with Version 1.0 in January 2005. My hardware was an AthlonXP 1700+ on a Gigabyte 7DXR+ Mainboard with 512MB DDRam, a Radeon 7500/AGP 4x Videocard and painfull onboard Sounds of a lalala 1371...
HighMoon was coded with a GNU g++ 3.4.3 running on Gentoo Linux with a vanilla-Kernel 2.6.11.5 The Sources were edited with (g)Vim 6.3 and jEdit 4.2 (nice Editor!) both available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Later Versions werde edited using Eclipse 3.0.1 width CDT 2.1. I used the SDL-Library as Graphics- und Soundinterface. This library is available for Linux, Windows and Mac as well.
The Flying Saucers and the planets were rendered using 3DStudio MAX 5 running on Windows XP. I Used Gimp 2.0 und Photoshop CS to draw the Font and the other graphics.
Installation:
HighMoon uses the SDL-Library (including SDL-Image!) for Display, Sound and Keyboard functions. For compilation of the sourcecodes you need a GNU g++.
There is a Makefile, so you can compile with a simple
make
in the sources-directory. After successfull compilation the Executable is called "ufo".
./ufo
starts the game.
If you would like to install the Game, edit the Install Paths in the Makefile. Then type:
make install
Enhancements:
- This release adds Netherlands language support.

CinePaint is painting and retouching software primarily used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching and dust-busting. CinePaint has been used on many feature films, including THE LAST SAMURAI where it was used to add flying arrows.

CinePaint is different from other painting tools because it supports deep color depth image formats up to 32-bit per channel deep. For comparison, GIMP is limited to 8-bit, and Photoshop to 16-bit.

CinePaint is free open source software. The generosity and commitment of its developers, users and sponsors make CinePaint possible.

SDL Sopwith project is a port of the classic flying game Sopwith.
SDL Sopwith is a port of the classic flying game Sopwith to modern operating systems and toolkits.
It was originally a port to the LibSDL toolkit, but there is now a GTK+ version also.
Main features:
- Modern native application - will run under Windows, GNU/Linux, BeOS and probably most modern operating systems supported by LibSDL
- Working sound (emulated PC speaker through the sound card output)
- Working Multiplayer
- More configurable than the original (options from Sopwith 2/ The authors edition can be turned off)
- Vastly cleaned up and portable code
Enhancements:
- Fix some compilation errors due to an error in swinit.c
- Fix networking which got broken somewhere.

Meeting Room Booking System (MRBS) is a free, GPL, web application using PHP and MySQL/pgsql for booking meeting rooms. This project is similar in concept to Netscape Calendar, but much cheaper!
Main features:
- Web/Intranet based - Available from any workstation through a Browser
- Simple to follow, Web based options and intuitive presentation
- Flexible Repeating Bookings
- Authentication with your existing user database (eg Netware, NT Domain, NIS etc.)
- Ensures that conflicting entries cannot be entered
- Reporting option
- Selectable DAY / WEEK / MONTH views
- Multiple auth levels (read-only, user, admin)
- Multiple languages supported (translated to Czech, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish)
- Stable and in use at many organizations
- mySQL and Postgres support
MRBS is very reliable at this point. All the features that are needed in day-to-day operation are included. Its very intuitive for users, so very little or no instruction is needed. It is in production use at many large organisations around the world for uses as diverse as its originally intended meeting rooms to restaurant tables and aeroplanes at a flying school!
Different languages are supported, there are translations for many languages available (currently Czech, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish). If your language is not supported it is very easy to customize as all strings are stored in language-specific files.
Enhancements:
- Extra options were added to the LDAP authentication scheme.
- You can now configure the cookie path used by the cookie and PHP session schemes.
- A short PHP start tag was fixed.
- Meeting duration can now use , as the decimal point.
- The Swedish translation was updated.
- AIX support was added.
- The language preference code was improved.
- Some bracketing in the month view was corrected.

Tanky project is a tank shooting game for 2-3 players.
Tanky is a tank shooting game with old-school graphics (lines and flying pixels in 16 colors). It can be played by 2-3 players on one keyboard.
The main goal is to shoot your opponents down. You have one tank, five shots, and a shield which can take five points of damage.
Every time, there are different bonuses flashing around.
Collect them and gain faster weapons, more shots, recharge your shield, etc. The best-scored player wins.
Enhancements:
- Better starting screen, with nice key layout.
- Game is no more limited to 11 levels.
- New engine improvements allow blinking walls - moving wall effect is avaiable. Tiles can blink at different speeds. Until now, only small mines were blinking.
- Changed scoring system. Points earned not only for victory, but also for successful hits. And now, you earn different amount of points for Flawless and UF victories. Also after-level-statistics screen is improved
- Levels now have names. Name of the level is shown at the beginning with exciting pixel effect.
- Shots are now 2x2 pixels large. This greatly improves their visibility.
- Multilanguage support added. For now, EN and SK languages are avaiable. English is default. Just run TANKY.EXE SK for Slovak language.
- Walls can be destroyed
- And the most exciting improvement : You can collect bonuses. They appear randomly at random locations, as flashing multicolor boxes. They can be destroyed by a single shot. Only one bonus on screen at once. Player can use only one bonus at once - collecting new bonus will deactivate the old one. Avaiable bonuses are : Gauss - ultra fast shots ; Wide - 3-way fire, with 15 shots! ; 15x - gives you 15 shots! ; Back fire - rear fire ; Death - transforms you to an invincible mobile mine ; Shield - shield regeneretion ; Quick reload - regenerates ammo immediately after the shot disapears ; 2-way - bidirectional front+rear fire with 10 shots.