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Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
11–20 of 77 posts
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be a huge undertaking, especially if the DirectX types leaked into the rest of the application. DirectX 7 is from 1999, games like Half-Life 1 used it. This is when GPUs were mostly fixed-function. While nowadays a GPU is almost as versatile as a CPU. The hardest/largest step would probably be to get it into this century, with the latest version of DirectX 9 (2005, Windows XP / Xbox 360 era). The step from 9…
A viable solution for DX9 is using DXVK to emulate the old DX API under Vulkan, then add your own hooks into DXVK and transition to Vulkan in a more relaxed manner. Now DXVK does not support DX7, but a quick search found dgVoodoo2, which does emulate DX7 under DX11. Maybe that or a similar library can be used as a stepping stone. Regarding porting legacy apps to 64bit, the most problems i've seen were concerning old…
Unfortunately the swapchain and rendering is vastly different from DX9 to DX11, the latter being now more similar to Vulkan.
So maybe it could work to port the codebase to DX9 but no further really.
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#13Anybody know what's involved in moving from DX7 to DX11?
There are multiple DX7 to something else translators ( https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag and https://dxgl.org/ ): I wonder if they're 64-bit compatible if that's a higher priority than a modern graphics API.
Neither is a translator, they're actually emulators - implementing the older API using newer calls.
That does not help in porting either.
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#14It so happens that Orbiter is extremely well factored which should make implementing new graphics APIs reasonably easy.
(Due to having a client-server version.)
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#15Anybody know what's involved in moving from DX7 to DX11?
It would be a huge undertaking, especially if the DirectX types leaked into the rest of the application. DirectX 7 is from 1999, games like Half-Life 1 used it. This is when GPUs were mostly fixed-function. While nowadays a GPU is almost as versatile as a CPU. The hardest/largest step would probably be to get it into this century, with the latest version of DirectX 9 (2005, Windows XP / Xbox 360 era). The step from 9…
How necessary is porting it, and for how long will old DirectX versions continue to work?
Having no knowledge of the code, I imagine if you have a functioning graphics layer, most of the work would happen on the underlying physics models and high level drawing/scene APIs, not directly interfacing with DX.
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#16The Orbiter Space Simulator ( http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ ) has been one of the major realistic-ish space simulators of the decade. Development has slowed down in the last years due to the obligations of its sole author, so seeing it be open-sourced with a free license (MIT) is a great opportunity to rekindle its development! It seems that the first priorities would be to upgrade the code to 64-bits and transitio…
It didn't need to be open source for a DX11 graphics client to be developed.
https://www.orbiter-forum.com/threads/d3d11client-download-a...
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#17Anybody know what's involved in moving from DX7 to DX11?
It would be a huge undertaking, especially if the DirectX types leaked into the rest of the application. DirectX 7 is from 1999, games like Half-Life 1 used it. This is when GPUs were mostly fixed-function. While nowadays a GPU is almost as versatile as a CPU. The hardest/largest step would probably be to get it into this century, with the latest version of DirectX 9 (2005, Windows XP / Xbox 360 era). The step from 9…
Hm.. I would have thought getting to DirectX9 would be easier, as directx9 still had some support for the fixed function pipeline.
What I'm sure you were getting at is a proper conversion to DX9 making use of the shader based pipeline.
That said, looking at the code I don't think porting to proper shader based DirectX would be terribly difficult for anybody experienced in setting up directx in a shader based pipeline. Nothing looks too fancy.
Of course it could be made more complicated by actually making use of shaders to improve over the fixed function design, but that is not required for an initial port.
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#18I wonder how hard would be to port it to linux. Maybe dxvk may help?
Also, latest version is from 2016, so it looks like software that doesn't brings any money is finally open source because there is no hope to make any in the future. I'm sorry for them but glad they open sourced it. Would love if outcomes like this happened more often.
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#19I wonder how hard would be to port it to linux. Maybe dxvk may help? Also, latest version is from 2016, so it looks like software that doesn't brings any money is finally open source because there is no hope to make any in the future. I'm sorry for them but glad they open sourced it. Would love if outcomes like this happened more often.
I don't think there was ever any hint of an attempt to bring in money. I'm not entirely sure why the author choose to keep it closed source, maybe worries about others seeing "bad" code or something, but this is simply a case of someone no longer having time for their labor of love, not someone failing to monetize
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#20This is great news, hope to contribute, time permitting!