Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
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Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
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Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#2The 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 transition to a more recent version of DirectX.
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#3This is fantastic news! Been using it since 2006, can't wait to dive into the code and see what the community will output
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#4Looks like one past thread:
Orbiter Space Flight Simulator 2016 Edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12943028 - Nov 2016 (16 comments)
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#5Anybody know what's involved in moving from DX7 to DX11?
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#6[deleted]
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#7Anybody 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 to 11 is also quite big, but a lot of APIs have stayed compatible.
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#8Anybody 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.
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#9[deleted]
Re: Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is now open source
#10Anybody 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…
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 libraries (on Windows). That usually requires replacing old libraries with new a version, and fixing includes. I've seen only a handful of bugs arising purely from 32bit vs 64bit differences.