Superb old engineering simulation games, now open source and available on Linux (opens in new tab)

For the entrepreneurs among us, the business story here is that these fantastically detailed sims were expensive to make. The three 20-year-old sims at the github link, Grand Prix Legends (GPL), Mig Alley (MA) and Falcon (FF) were all bet-your-company high concept projects that expected a lot from their customers in 1999.

MA did OK in the market but that only encouraged it's creators to make a follow-on product that tanked their company. GPL and FF were commercial flops, and the companies that made them soon disbanded. Nevertheless, GPL and FF evolved into what are currently best-in-class sim products. The high ambitions and technical wizardry of all three sims inspired dedicated community groups that added content to the sims for years following release. The versions of the sims on the github page include these community-generated add-ons.

The FF project was a notorious business mess that somehow propelled itself through years of headwinds with a kind of prodigious creativity. Both the mess and the creativity are on display in the 1000 page volunteer-created FF manual on github.

Debates about which sim is more accurate bring up a philosophical question about sim design. My take is that designing a realistic simulation is like solving a physics problem, in that it's impossible to capture all of reality with a mathematical model, so the challenge is to first decide what you want to model accurately and what you can ignore. Doing that well requires insight. Case in point - although Rowan got overwhelmed by 1C in the flight sim marketplace, I would argue that Mig Alley is better than the IL2 product that covers the same material because MA is more accurate where it matters. IL2 has more realistic cockpits but Mig Alley does a much better job of modeling the physics of the Mig/Sabre asymmetry. That asymmetry is what makes MA dogfighting so unique. And once you've mastered that one-on-one duel, you find that the many vs many contest is completely different and involves little extended dogfighting- also true-to-life according to the history books I've read.

Grand Prix Legends was amazing when it came out and the modding/sim racing community kept it alive for an incredibly long time.

However, the version here is not open source, just a demo. Grand Prix Legends also had its share of quirky and odd physics, the fastest drivers sometimes achieved their record lap times with joysticks and took advantage of the differences between game physics and real life.

There have been significant improvements in racing sims accuracy since the GP Legends days, and most die-hard sim racers I know of (including some of the best GP Legends racers) lean toward iRacing as a competitive platform today.

> open source

> empty repo that points to a file on "mediafire" and is said to be binaries that are ran using wine

which is it?