I had the chance to play Flight Of Nova (https://flight-of-nova.com/) for the first time today. This was on my wishlist for quite some time now. Dived in blind and had no idea what to expect. 3 tutorial missions later: Oh boy… this is hard. I can see myself sinking many hours in this. Anyway, as usual, my focus is on interfacing with my home cockpit (or simpit) and while there is no ship telemetry [yet?] I was able to get it running just fine via Proton and with my DIY headtracker using OpenTrack. Hats off, seldom that I see a game that detects my joystick just fine, has great ingame calibration, offers me a windowed mode and a bunch of ultra width resolutions without having to resort to hacking config files or use gamescope to resize it ❤️ Head tracking is, as usual, TrackIR only so far (I guess the native Linux PC version does not have UDP in place here but I couldn't check due Steam refusing to download another version today). Anyway, you can see me fooling around with the buttons and do an A+ crash landing in the end - sunny side up 😆 Not too shabby considering that this was my 3rd landing at all.

This is the raw presentation I prepared for the “Knowledge Talk on Sunday” for the Stellanebula Project by @[email protected] at youtube.com/watch?v=wmaj-MyRkPs - it's in German so enable subtitles for English. This was uploaded here as convenient reference for participants of the talk, that happened in Discord, but we decided to make it public in the end. Since it is without intro or music here I can released it as CC-SA. The talk and the open discussion took 2 whopping hours in the end but I didn't manage to cut a video of that [yet?].

This presentation was made for absolute beginners as intro into the topic "Gaming On Linux". It may not be accurate in detail and glance over various concepts in a very quick way to not overwhelm the targeted audience. It's focus is mostly on Space Pew Pew games, namely Elite Dangerous, as this is the focus of the Stellanebula Project, but Star Citizen or X4: Foundations are mentioned here and there too.

In 2020 I checked some old backup disks of mine and found to my utmost joy a copy of my former UT2003 installation. This is a Linux native 32bit build that is now over 20 years old. Well, LinuxGaming is hard because who can support 500 distributions, right? This worked just fine in 2020 on Fedora 31. Today I gave it another spin in 2024 on Fedora 38 on Wayland with PipeWire 😀

Hell yeah, the muscle memory is still there 🤘🤓🤘

(tbf the SDL1.2 compat lib rocks most of this but it's really all still there)

Visited the abandoned silver/copper/barite mine in #Hallwangen, 72280 Germany. It’s a rather interesting one as it dates back to #medieval times and is still excavated by voluntary workers. The earliest record found dates back to 12C and the upper mining gallery “Himmlisch Heer” shows markings that are the result of hand tools while the second gallery “Irmgardsglück” has holes for explosives drilled with machines powered by compressed air. That part also has wider tunnels while the upper part is mostly crawl spaces.

The mine was abandoned and reopened several times for different reasons. The last activity was in 1912 and some stuff like an old rail for push carts and parts of electric installations can still be seen to this day.

I can totally recommend a tour. We got to see a lot of interesting stuff packaged with fascinating stories and explanations [on another visit]. Been to some mines in my life already but seldom did I get to see so many details in such tiny tunnels. Granted, most mines were rather modern and huge drilled exclusively with modern machines.

If you visit don’t forget to greet the tunnel at the entrance with the classic “Glück auf!” shout of the local miners for safe passage and fortune.

Mine Hallwangen: https://www.bergwerk-hallwangen.de/

This is a first person demonstration of my DIY simulated home cockpit built on a budget: https://SimPit.dev

It's design is based on a VF-1 Valkyrie cockpit of the Macross franchise - or Robotech as it is known in some parts of the world (but we don't talk about this here).

It is mainly used to play Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, X4: Foundations and plenty of other Space Pew Pew.

Features:

[1] Not active in this video because the motion sickness is bad enough already

Oh and ignore the Primary Flight Display. This version of my app has currently a bug where it's stuck when it should not display at all. It should only display near a planetary.

Music "Running and Burning (Single)" by "Desert Eagles" is released under

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Just finished my proof of concept to implement the FaceTrackNoIR (or OpenTrack) protocol into FreeSpace 2 Open on Linux PC. Apparently only TrackIR and FreeTrack (both Windows only) were supported so far. Still needs some fine tuning but I'm really happy with today's coding frenzy considering that I didn't touch C++ in years.

Stumbled over this X4: Foundations mod that adds some BSG to X4: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/1167

Just taking the Viper out for a spin around the Galactica 😃

If you enjoy SimPit|s (or any home cockpit / simulated cockpit) and Battlestar Galactica make sure to also check the awesome builds of https://www.youtube.com/@projectcolonialviper2094 and https://www.youtube.com/@BuildsByBaz 🤘

Programmed my Primary Flight Display over the last evenings. It's mostly designed to play Elite Dangerous or X4: Foundations so there is not much going on at the screen with Fly Dangerous. It was however a breeze to connect it to my SimPit because it's simply dumps ship telemetry to UDP port 11000 (default) and listening to that and integrating it into my Node-Red plumbing pipeline was like stealing candy from a baby. Kudos to @jukibom for granting access to this sort of game data easily.

Curious?

Read more on https://beko.famkos.net/tag/simpit/

Crimped roughly 250 connectors and did lots of soldering. Still WIP but I rolled the first successful button tests!!1eleven

Ignore the wobbling, there are almost no supporting frames behind for easier access to the wires.

Originally noted at https://beko.famkos.net/2023/08/13/macross-simpit-first-button-test/

BekoPharm's Space Pew Pew Cockpit "Primary Buffer Panel" inspired by a VF-1 Valkyrie cockpit ( 🤘 Macross 🤘 )

Simpit on a budget mainly used to play Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen and plenty of other Space Pew Pew.

This is work in progress.

It's mobile and can be completely removed because my battlestation is, unlike most gaming rigs, also my workstation and has to move a lot. It's also frequently occupied by my kids who also love clicky buttons and compete with me for stick time 😄

It features:

Primary Source (RSS-, JSON-, ActivityPub-, Webmentions-Enabled)

Federated Social Media:

Corporate Social Media:

📼 https://www.youtube.com/@BekoPharm

📹 https://twitch.tv/bekopharm

🎮 http://discord.famkos.net

☠️ https://hackaday.io/bekopharm