AKA FlightSimPro, ProFlightSimulator, FlightSimPro, Earth Flight Sim, FlightProSim, Real Flight Simulator

It seems there is a new player in the market of flight simulators.  Lets install and check it out.  Hmm it looks very familiar.  Oh my, could it be, yes it is, ladies and gentleman we have a commercial package of the OpenSource simulator Flight Gear! Here is what the folks at FlightGear have to say about it. (http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php/FlightProSim)

I’m going to go into my opinion about this but really it boils down to this; ProFlightSimulator is a branch COPY of FlightGear.  ProFlightSimulator has little NO in innovation over FlightGear.  Any way save your self a signficant amount of money and try flight gear first.  Available from http://www.flightgear.org/

Interesting marketing tactics and fairly obfuscated disclosures make this a very interesting situation.  The reality is, the “producers” of the ProFlightSimuator package are really doing nothing wrong.  They have downloaded a branch of the flight gear product, packaged it up with a large variety of freely available add-ons and aircraft, and basically called it their own. They have one very obfuscated page that lists a series of items why they are not flight gear buried quite deeply on their site, and this is also regurgitated through out several disposable blog sites.  But to be honest, I see nothing innovative in their claims.  And the vacuous promise of many major changes to the flight gear base in the future with their highly paid and diverse team of paid developers.  Did I mention they were paid?  We are assured many times that the developers that are now working on their code are paid.  Interesting.  We are also told that any comparisons between proflightsimulator and flight gear are incorrect and illegal.  I believe these are marketing scare weasel words in the extreme.

Lets look at their claims:

  • A plug and play system that works without the hassles of advanced customization
    Makes it easy to start playing the game without having the need to perform complex technical installation.
  • We offer a one stop launch system and makes it easy to add aircraft + scenery.
    No more fiddling with files and not knowing where to copy them. Its a one-click installation process.
  • The complete start up of the game was rewritten to help new users with this issue.

Ok, they wrote a launcher and configuration tool with common configurations. The “complete start up of the game was rewritten” is fairly nebulous. I, personally, installed flight gear and didn’t have a problem double clicking on the icon to launch the application. Maybe people have this issue?

  • There is better hardware and add-on software interfacing capabilities. (Eg: Joystick support)
  • We’ve incorporated More Photo-Realistic Scenery
    New updates are added monthly.
  • Reduce the lag effect in flying
  • New aircraft models are added on a regular basis.
    (FG does not provide new updates very regularly)
  • Customer support is only an email away
    (Open source products do not offer any support)
  • VATSim network integration! Fly with other pilots on aviation networks.
    (should be ready in 4 months time)

FlightGear has joystick support, not sure what they are claiming to have added here.  In fact, flightgear supports a wide variety of both consumer level and professional hardware.

More photo-realistic scenery.  The base package of flight gear doesn’t contain scenery that is photo realistic, this is true.  So it looks like ProFlightSimulator have gone around to the various venues for flightgear and downloaded and incorporated freely available scenery packages and detail packages into their own installer.

Reduced the lag effect in flying.  Ok, this is so vague as to be laughable.  Which lag effect would that be?  Did they optimize a configuration file for their video card?  This looks so random as to have just been slapped in there as if to say “Oh yea, we did say we worked on the flight gear code so um… we fixed the lag problem!”

New aircraft can be freely downloaded from a wide variety of flight gear community sites.  And this is exactly what the ProFlightSimulator folks have done.  Each of their featured aircraft appear to be some of the best aircraft already in the community.  Sometimes reskinned, sometimes not.

Customer support, at 130 dollars I should hope so.  Some how I feel their support will be along the lines of any typical sigma 7 support.  Can you reproduce?  Can you do a clean install of windows and the game?  If you cannot we cannot help you.

And the integration into vatsim.  4 months away.

So lets review the significant changes they have made to flight gear.

1. They’ve created pre-launch configuration tool and have created a launcher for FlightGear

2…

Well thats it.  Just a pre-launch configuration tool and a launcher.  Everything else seems to be either too vague to be of value, leg work in gathering already existing packages, or not really available.

I also noticed they have registered several variations of the flightgear domain and linked them to their main marketing website. For example, flightgear.us. Another nicely borderline unethical marketing practice.

I decided to attempt to download their source code. To comply with GPL they need to provide their source code for download. Unfortunately their server is so very throttled back to <1Kbit/sec and will drop your connection after 10-15 minutes there is NO way to get their source code. This would be a clever way to cover up the fact that there probably is no real innovation or changes to the source code.

Any way save your self a signficant amount of money and try flight gear first. Available from http://www.flightgear.org/