Not just the first VA, but one of the first few people in the VA. I was tasked with "designing" aircraft for use with our VA. When FS5 came out, you could modify the looks as well, so I'd get the flight dynamics as close as I could and another guy would build the model of how it looked. I forget what that package was called, now. But it was a lot of fun. I don't think any of us had an idea that VA's would turn into a Thing. We were just teens having fun :)
I wonder how many are in a similar boat. I grew up playing a ton of MSFS, Fly!, Flight Unlimited, Falcon 4, Combat Flight Sim, etc... Every major MSFS version was a huge deal. I remember having a high school event the evening MSFS2k came out and couldn't wait to get home to play it.
I was part of a few VAs as well, the community was so nice. One of my first software projects as an optimal flight route planner using publicly available data sets. It was one of the key stepping stones to learning to code in my early days.
I played so much FS4 and was in awe with FS5, having never played a textured 3D game on my PC before. Spent countless hours tuning it so it would be playable on my 486
At one time, probably the early 80's when the first clones of the IBM PC came out, being able to run MS Flight Simulator was an indication of a clone's ability to run all other IBM PC software. I remember one clone manufacturer used a screenshot of FS in their ad at the time.
I came here to say the same thing, but I'm gonna be an optimist and say that we'll get it by the 50th anniversary, not the 80th. We'll have MSFS in a form of VR that is not ergonomically awkward so that this is all possible.
The adventure game "Day of the Tentacle" had the previous version of "Maniac Mansion" included. According to Wikipedia [1] it was the first time you could play the predecessor game in a newer version.
The whole original Maniac Mansion game can be played on a
computer resembling a Commodore 64 inside the Day of the Tentacle
game; this practice has since been repeated by other game
developers, but at the time of Day of the Tentacle's release, it
was unprecedented.
You can play Wolfenstein 3D in one of the recent Wolfenstein games. IIRC it's presented as an arcade machine, but it seemed like the whole game was there (I played quite a bit of it, but didn't finish before bailing back out to the "real" game).
Tried to find a TVTropes for this kind of thing, but couldn't. Surprised, seems like there'd be one.
Well, right, but that's not quite the same thing. Video games also do "show within a show", sometimes taking the form of an actual show (Address Unknown in Max Payne, and that other one that's plainly mimicking Lynch's Invitation to Love from Twin Peaks), or an actual play, as in Midsummer Night's(? I think it has the one with Thisby and such, right?) or Hamlet, which I wanna say at least one Final Fantasy has featured (9?), among other games, or sometimes, matching the medium, taking the form of minigames (dice or card games, or arcade games, say, in games that aren't primarily about those things but just have them in the world—even sports games in non-sports games, like Blitzball from FFX)
The purest form of this specific thing is more like having an entire episode of MASH play on a TV in the background during an episode of Trapper, MD.
Ah, embedded precursor is the right one. I tried to find the relevant page by looking through the lists of tropes for a couple that feature that, and failed.
I played Maniac Mansion the first time that way. I never got it originally, but played Day of the Tentacle and got side tracked finishing that game inside the game.
Fun, didn't know that. I recall both games, Maniac Mansion on C=64. Impossible Mission is the first game I recall with working terminals inside (but those terminals didn't play a full game although it likely could be done).
Not economical anymore, if you can instead slowly trickle them out to your paying subscribers at two games a month, to then end up at 10% of the library your previous console had when you discontinue it.
Not older versions of the game itself, but the entire gimmick of Lazy Jones is that you're an employee walking around a building and entering rooms to goof off playing mini-versions of various games on a lot of different computers:
Super Mario Brothers 3 had the original (non-"Super") Mario Brothers arcade game embedded in it. (If the second player tried to visit the same spot as the first player on the map, it would jump to the arcade game like a little competitive mini-game.)
I was 6 years old, 7 or 8 years away from acquiring a Commodore 64 and typing out my first code in BASIC from the back pages of a Compute! magazine... I'm an old man.
subLogic flight simulator is even older (first Apple II version in 1979) https://youtu.be/uvvfJ60gIf0 Microsoft licensed it to make MS FS.
Someone showed me (subLogic) Flight Simulator II, on a C-64 I think before I had a computer. I finally got a used IBM PC as my first computer (4.77 MHz 8088, CGA graphics, 20 MB hard drive) and MS FS version 3 and played the hell out of it, despite how badly it ran. When I installed it at my mom’s work on a 386 with VGA it was like a whole new game.
I read through Don Eyles apollo memoir Sunburst and Luminary- great book. In the book he describes their simulator for the lunar landing (essentially a test harness for the landing code) which consisted of inputs of coordinates and speeds, and gave printed output of thrust changes and expected position over time. Mind blowing for someone so used to visual representations.
This is actually correct. You don't need visual fidelity for a good simulation, nor physical fidelity. The important thing is that your mind and your body goes through the motions. You don't need to actually believe you're doing the thing, just practise the motions, cognitively and physically.
I'm pretty sure it was from Microsoft. I may have even the paper instructions, i'll search for them :-) Wikipedia: "FS1 Flight Simulator is a 1979 video game published by Sublogic for the Apple II. A TRS-80 version followed in 1980. FS1 Flight Simulator is a flight simulator in the cockpit of a slightly modernized Sopwith Camel.[2] FS1 is the first in a line of simulations from Sublogic which, beginning in 1982, were also sold by Microsoft as Microsoft Flight Simulator."
Thank you Sebastian for building this game in the first place. Every I'm sitting in an airplane waiting to take off on the runway, it takes me back to my childhood memories. I'm putting myself in the pilot's seat, imagining I'm adjusting the flaps (F7), increasing thrust (F3), and taking the brakes off (.) and we have lift off!
Yes, I was not informed about it. But I think that's fair. I didn't ask them either before I published the project. Please, don't make it a license issue. I developed it for fun.
Most likely, it is included in some kind of ThirdPartyNotices.txt that ships with the game. It's actually pretty hard to sneak third party F/OSS under the radar in the company of this size - there's automated code scanners, among other things, and while they can't catch everything, they sure can flag a copy of a public project on GitHub.
I'm pretty sure that declaring https://github.com/s-macke/FSHistory/tree/master/data to be MIT-licensed does not actually make it so... (these are disk images of the relevant FS releases, which are still under copyright as well as provided under a proprietary MIT-incompatible license)
TL;DR: A Microsoft contractor basically endorsed piracy, in a weirdly-recursive-enough-to-be-legal way...
Unfortunately, all things must become a license issue if licenses are to be taken seriously. License compliance is a binary condition, you either comply completely or fail.
I don't really know the scope of easter eggs, is the whole team supposed to know about them or just the few programmers that introduced them? Maybe they didn't want to spoil the surprise (?)
In any case, congratulations to op for having their project reach the original franchise. It's a sign of a job well done!
No credit is owed, no thanks are due. This is an unavoidable effect of usuing the MIT license over something like GPL.
Andrew Tanenbaum on choosing MIT for the MINIX project, which was used by Intel + the IC as a base for the Intel Management Engine (emphasis mine):
"The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all."
If you'd like to avoid a large company profiting off your work without attribution, don't use MIT.
You can put that clause in your license! Something like:
If you use this software in a commercial product, you are required to
make an attempt to send me an e-mail letting me know about it,
because it's just nice to know.
Of course that would piss off the lawyers because now if a developer uses your software and doesn't e-mail you, you could sue them. But it's not like big companies always respect licenses anyway :)
Credit is certainly owed under MIT, a copyright notice must be included.
(I wonder where Intel shows this copyright notice; in principle, it should come with every processor or product based on the processor. Probably in the same place where IME itself lives…)
Considering they fully own all of the IP present in the OPs work, I would imagine they are within their full rights to just take it without asking.
OP is lucky not to get a takedown notice and judging by his attitude he knows it.
Good to see people playing nicely together :)
The games were already playable online on archive.org [1]. My project is just focussed on the old flight simulators.
Especially I wanted to have a very light-weight emulator which starts within milliseconds. The major part of the emulator downloads with just 24kB compressed. I suppose I have reached the goal.
This is kind of the nature of open source though; I use tons of open source software and libraries every day, also for my clients, without letting the maintainers of the software and libraries know.
That said, I do advocate for companies doing financial contributions to open source where possible.
Why can’t I view GitHub on mobile without having to sign in to the app. I don’t want to sign in to the app; I don’t remember my password; I can’t be bothered to authenticate. Bad UX.
OctoDroid[1] letsyou do most of things you would expect to on GitHub in a browser without logging in and always seems quicler than using website to me.
And if you do this on iOS, it remembers it for the next time you click a link for that domain, so you can stop apps automatically opening links. Was delighted when I found that as for some things (e.g. Amazon) the app is occasionally useful but I don’t want every Amazon link to open in it
> Always when I start a new project I wonder what programming language I should use. Most of the time the requirements are the same. It must be fast, typed and the result must presentable on a website. Especially I would like to keep it as simple as possible. C is usually my language of choice when the logic doesn't get too complicated.
Exactly, I mean more "strongly typed". The opposite is JavaScript, which is weakly typed. When speed matters and every bit is important, it is a bad idea to write an emulator in a weakly typed language.
"Strong" and "weak" are ambiguous terms for typing. OP is using it one way (static typing is "stronger" than dynamic typing; static typing is "strength"). I'm assuming a little bit here, but I think you're using it another way (allowing type casting is "weak"; type safety is "strength").
I thought Easter eggs had been deprecated years ago; non-functional code, increased bloat, increased attack surface. To link in a complete game emulation as an EE seems - stupid.
It's apparently not the OP's fault; he just wrote it, he didn't link it into the product.
I'm fine with being downvoted; I don't post for popularity. But I appreciate it if there's some comment about what I said wrong; like, perhaps my opinion was mistaken, or used inappropriate language, or was off-topic.
If I had to guess, it's probably because most people love a cute easter-egg and this story was someone excited to have had their project noticed and implemented by Microsoft, off whom it was based; and your comment on the matter is that easter-eggs are stupid and outdated.
Also, I'm new here: how do you downvote a comment?
Heh :-) By not being new here! If you've got 500 points, you see a down arrow next to a post. But I don't like that button; clicking it feels a bit caca.
In fact, in the early 90's, I was one of the first people in a Virtual Airline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_airline_(hobby)
Not just the first VA, but one of the first few people in the VA. I was tasked with "designing" aircraft for use with our VA. When FS5 came out, you could modify the looks as well, so I'd get the flight dynamics as close as I could and another guy would build the model of how it looked. I forget what that package was called, now. But it was a lot of fun. I don't think any of us had an idea that VA's would turn into a Thing. We were just teens having fun :)