TANSTAAFL!

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch when you're flying in space.

Tanstaafl will ultimately be a free space flight simulator, written in Common Lisp. Tanstaafl is modeled on Orbiter. It exists mainly because Orbiter is closed source, and is Windows only (neither of which make me happy).

Something to be aware of before you begin:

At the moment, Tanstaafl has no way to know where your OpenGL libraries (libGL.so for example) are. You need to edit gl-bindings.lisp and hard code the paths to these libraries. Otherwise bad things will happen (freeglut will complain about things, for one). This will be fixed in the future.

At the moment, I'm making no attempts at cross-platform compatibility at all. My first priority is to make it work. I'm using CLISP, and I have no intention of switching or trying to support another CL implementation at the moment, though nobody knows what the future will bring. Obviously, anybody else is welcome to help with that (and anything else).

I'm developing tanstaafl on a system running Fedora 13. This is as complete a list of dependencies as I can think of (with dependencies of the listed packages included implicitly): X11 clisp gcc freeglut glx-utils mesa-libGLU # or some other implementation mesa-libGL # of OpenGL

For more information, see the wiki at:

http://wiki.github.com/nforrester/tanstaafl