FlyDangerous FOSS Linux Opentrack Proton

Fly Dangerous

1.0 2.0 4.0

A very early version of Fly Dangerous alpha
A very early version of Fly Dangerous alpha

Primary Buffer Panel

What’s not to like about Fly Dangerous. It’s a FOSS 6dof racing game with a Newtonian flight model similar to Elite Dangerous, does HOTAS, Opentrack and a lot of other stuff, like VR. It even offers a UDP port to retrieve ship telemetry. A perfect candidate for a simulated cockpit and I’m with it for quite some time. Integrating it into my plumbing pipeline was a breeze.

There are a bunch of videos showcasing Fly Dangerous with my Primary Buffer Panel on my YouTube and PeerTube accounts.

Launch parameters

I usually play Fly Dangerous on Linux PC. The Linux version 5 defaulted to OpenGL and this resulted in like 25 FPS for me and the input of my X52 Pro (mapped as virtual gamepad) was so laggy that I could sip coffee during each course correction. This was when I remembered the magic parameter -force-vulkan from other Unity games and from here it was smooth sailing. Eventually I ended up with the game start options obs-gamecapture for recording, mangohud for some FPS info and -force-vulkan for… well, FPS.

obs-gamecapture mangohud %command% -force-vulkan

I switched to Proton because I was eager to see some upcoming changes, like head tracker support, on the public_beta branch. And while this works I was once more flabbergasted how complicated it is to set my desired display resolution of 5760x1200. I’m using a multihead setup with several displays and as usual the game engine would not let me simply set that. Even in windowed mode (I mean I get that this won’t work with fullscreen).

Like most games does this one also not detect a screen layout but only the primary display on a Linux PC so it won’t offer the maximum resolution possible e.g. with a triple head setup 🖥️🖥️🖥️. This can be worked around in multiple ways, e.g. with configuring a virtual desktop in the WINEPREFIX, by adding a virtual monitor to the system or simply by making use of gamescope, the SteamOS session compositing window manager.

Here is an example how games may be started from Steam by adding the following commands to the start parameters (That’s basically the same for e.g. Lutris btw).

gamescope -h 1200 -w 5760 -H 1200 -W 5760 -b -e – %command%

This is not needed if only one monitor is used for gaming.

There are several ways to work around this, especially with Proton, but I was looking for the prefs file I know from Linux. I found it in the end in the file compatdata/1781750/pfx/user.reg (that’s like the Windows registry but as plain file read by Wine) where the values are stored as dword under [Software\\StarGoat\\FlyDangerous]. In hex!

<pref name="Screenmanager Resolution Height" type="int">1200</pref>
<pref name="Screenmanager Resolution Width" type="int">5760</pref>
<pref name="Screenmanager Resolution Use Native" type="int">0</pref>
What is a screen anyway

Why games|engines in 2023 still seem to have ideas about screen layouts is frankly beyond me.

Head tracking

Just works with Opentrack because Fly Dangerous supports this via UDP port.