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.
Ehh, for this one in particular it seems to be heavily designed for HOTAS. I bought it last night and played through the first few trainings. There’s no horizontal/vertical thrust (EDIT: Well there is if you’re in VTOL mode, but that’s not the same as other 6DOF games where you can move in any direction at any time) so the default ship flies more like an airplane. I’m not sure if other ships are closer to 6DOF spaceflight but the fact that you can’t even bind controls to H/V thrust outside of RCS mode makes me think they aren’t.
It’s a cool game though. I really want for more non-combat Newtonian space flight games. I just want to fly ships around and not worry about “credits” and piracy and reputation. Like a BeamNG.drive for 6DOF space simulation.