Orbiter is a spaceflight simulator based on Newtonian mechanics. Its playground is our solar system with many of its major bodies – the sun, planets and moons. You take control of a spacecraft – either historic, hypothetical, or purely science fiction. Orbiter is unlike most commercial computer games with a space theme – there are no predefined missions to complete (except the ones you set yourself), no aliens to destroy and no goods to trade. Instead, you will get a pretty good idea about what is involved in real space flight – how to plan an ascent into orbit, how to rendezvous with a space station, or how to fly to another planet. It is more difficult, but also more of a challenge. Some people get hooked, others get bored. Finding out for yourself is easy – simply give it a try. Orbiter is free, so you don’t need to invest more than a bit of your spare time.
Orbiter is now published as an Open Source project under the MIT License (see LICENSE file for details).
D3D9Client graphics engine is licensed under LGPL, see LGPL
Hardware requirements needed by Orbiter:
| Minimum requirements | Recommended requirements | |
|---|---|---|
| RAM: | 500 MB | 2 GB |
| CPU: | Dual Core | |
| GPU: | 50 GFlops | 100 GFlops |
| Disk: | 5 GB of free space | 10 GB of free space (80 GB if you want hi-res textures) |
Get the Orbiter source repository from github
git clone --recursive git@github.com:orbitersim/orbiter.gitor
git clone --recursive https://github.com/orbitersim/orbiter.gitTo configure and generate the makefiles, you need a recent CMake.
To compile Orbiter from its sources, you need Microsoft Visual Studio. Orbiter has been successfully built with VS Community 2019, but other versions should also work. Note that VS2019 comes with built-in CMake support, so you don't need a separate CMake installation.
Some configuration caveats:
- If you are using the Ninja generator (default for the VS built-in CMake), you may also need vspkg to configure the VS toolset.
- If you are using the VS2019 generator, you may need to set up Visual Studio to use only a single thread for the build. This is because some of the build tools (especially those for generating the Orbiter documentation) are not threadsafe, and the VS2019 generator doesn't understand the CMake JOB_POOL directive.
Orbiter is a 32-bit application. Be sure to configure vspkg and CMake accordingly.
If you want to build the documentation, you need a few additional tools:
- a filter to convert ODT and DOC sources to PDF, such as LibreOffice.
- a LaTeX compiler suite such as MiKTeX.
- Doxygen for building the source-level documentation for developers.
See README.compile for details on building Orbiter.
The Orbiter git repository does not include most of the planetary texture files required for running Orbiter. You need to install those separately. The easiest way to do so is by installing an Orbiter release. Optionally you can also install high-resolution versions of the textures from the Orbiter website. You should keep the Orbiter installation separate from your Orbiter git repository.
To configure Orbiter to use the texture installation, set the
ORBITER_PLANET_TEXTURE_INSTALL_DIR entry in CMake. For example, if Orbiter
was installed in C:\Orbiter, the CMake option should be set to
C:/Orbiter/Textures.
This path can also be set using ORBITER_PLANET_TEXTURE_INSTALL_DIR environment variable
Alternatively, you can configure the texture directory after building Orbiter
by setting the PlanetTexDir entry in Orbiter.cfg.
Help files are located in the Doc subfolder (if you built them). Orbiter User Manual.pdf is the main Orbiter user manual.
The in-game help system can be opened via the "Help" button on the Orbiter Launchpad dialog, or with Alt-F1 while running Orbiter.
Remaining questions can be posted on the Orbiter user forum at orbiter-forum.com.
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