ETS2 with planes - making a game for FG

[ericolon]

Excuse me while I barge in without doing any reading. I have 0 programming experience, anyway. Title is pretty much the tl;dr of this post - Euro Truck Simulator but with planes, which I think is pretty cool, anyway

So I was recently playing the android game "Airplane!" which is a terrible game in itself, but with the cool premise of flying routes for money to buy aircraft to fly more routes and earn more money.

I know that flightgear is developed primarily as a simulation. But seeing that it is open source and in certain aspects pretty user friendly, can/is there a way to perhaps let there be a gaming aspect to flightgear?

Here's what I mean: You've got the planes, you've got the scenery, you've got a tried and true program that simulates proper physics etc.

I'm no programmer, but I'd imagine all that's lacking is a "bit" of developing a fg game module can be created for people to script things like a money system, price of planes, passengers, seating, component customization, paint jobs, range, tickets per route and based on distance, passenger satisfaction based on smoothness of flight and the weather conditions (which are randomized), as well as penalties for disobeying rules and regulations, fuel purchasing and efficiency, repairing flaps damaged in overspeeding, rating professionalism of the flight, as well as a basic gaming features such as difficulty levels, interface for the gaming actions, make the setting up of the game a little more user friendly etc, and with a bit of gameplay balancing you got yourself (well, ppl like me mostly) a pretty fun game for flight simulation fans to play.

Current flight simulation games are taking a real hit, and xplane, prepa3d and flightgear are "only" simulations in which pilots can only enjoy the fun of flying in itself, but I would imagine compared to developing a whole new game, only developing the gaming program for use with the existing assets is pretty simple, perhaps even "revive" the genre, dare I say?

It would also make the online multiplayer aspect much more attractive, attracting people to flight simulation as a whole as there is the competitiveness but without the explosions of games like war thunder, and actually get people interested in proper aircraft operation. besides, I can't be the only one who wants a modern sandbox game of civilian aviation

The possibilities seem endles for an aircraft based vehicular sandbox.

[Thorsten]

I'm no programmer, but I'd imagine all that's lacking is a "bit" of developing a fg game module can be created for people to script things like a money system, price of planes, passengers, seating, component customization, paint jobs, range, tickets per route and based on distance, passenger satisfaction based on smoothness of flight and the weather conditions (which are randomized), as well as penalties for disobeying rules and regulations, fuel purchasing and efficiency, repairing flaps damaged in overspeeding, rating professionalism of the flight, as well as a basic gaming features such as difficulty levels, interface for the gaming actions, make the setting up of the game a little more user friendly etc, and with a bit of gameplay balancing you got yourself (well, ppl like me mostly) a pretty fun game for flight simulation fans to play.

I thought this is pretty much what the various virtual airlines do. Here the aspects you mention are done by the various VA web interfaces and scripts and what not - doesn't have to be part of the FG core.

[Johan G]

The idea (though not comparing to ETS till now) have come up on the forum from time to time. See for example the topic FSEconomy and related wiki page FGjobs.

There is more examples, but I did not find them. There is many ways things like this could be implemented in FlightGear. It is very flexible.

[Hooray]

I'm no programmer, but I'd imagine all that's lacking is a "bit" of developing a fg game module

most of this could be done by a non-programmer within 5-8 weekends working through a handful of scripting tutorials in the wiki and using copy/paste to adapt things where needed.

For starters, see: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_Console
There's an integrated editor that allows you to write scripts:


http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_Hello_World