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Open Source Simulator FlightGear Releases v2.4
mikejuk writes "The latest version of FlightGear, 2.4, has just been released — and it has some significant improvements. Now it simulates weather so that you can ride the up draft from a range of hills and seek out thermals — but watch out for the simulated fog! For the future the implementation of an HLA interface means that you can build clusters of interacting simulators and perhaps even work with commercial flight simulators." The FlightGear website has gotten a long-deserved upgrade, too.
Can I fly across Mars now? It'd be cool if they could integrate the NASA(?) maps...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
There are a handful of different HUD modes, the one the harrier is using has been bouncing around like that for a few years now, so I guess it's an issue within flightgear itself rather than the flight model, OSG, or what have you. It only tends to happen when you are yawing around at a fairly low airspeed. It's particularly annoying in the helicopters at times.
Most likely the model. Most of the models are user generated, so some are very pretty with a bad cockpit interface, some are ugly with good physics, etc etc. The real pity is the fact that there have been some awesome flightsims from the Atari ST (F19), through 486 machines and all the way up, but these days they all rely on high-end graphics cards and processors far too much. Come on, give me a good military flightsim like F19 that will run on my netbook, I know you can do it! (OK, yes, an emulator plus F19 does the job very nicely, but come on, I shouldn't have to resort to that!). Get the physics right first, then make "pretty" an optional extra.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
How does it stack up against X-Plane or MS Flight Sim?
Does it support things like the Saitek Pro Flight Yoke, Pedals and switch panels?
The "features" page doesn't really cover stuff like that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Well that is the thing about volunteer made software isn't it? While I have nothing against Open Source I've found when it is volunteers like the user generated models in something like Flight Gear you run into the age old "Nobody pays for the boring stuff so that don't get done" problem.
Lets be honest folks, bug fixing in software is like cleaning the shitter, it is a long boring nasty thankless job. Nobody volunteers to clean your shitters at the office right? Nope you have to pay someone to get that done or they will look like the shitters at a truck stop in Alabama pretty soon. That is the problem with the community model. It is simply more fun to make something new than it is to go over old code, especially someone else's old code, and fix the messes.
How do we fix it? Fucked if I know, the only way i know how is to either pay someone to clean the shitters or maybe take donations so you can offer a bug bounty, ala Google? because checking out software made by the community i've noticed that pattern is pretty consistent, someone reports bug, users confirm bug, bug gets ignored for years while new versions come out that add....well more bugs.If you don't pay someone to fix the bugs they just don't get fixed, it is more fun to create than to clean. it is just human nature.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I tend to wonder why they're introducing massive new features like weather when they haven't even solved basic bugs like the HUD rendering issues.
Because people who want a realistic flight simulator probably care more about weather simulation than HUD bugs?
Uh, no they don't. The new "Flight" product is apparently written from scratch and doesn't use the add-ons of the old Flight Simulator.
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While there isn't a lot of research on the topic, what there is seems to indicate that open source software and "commercial" (i.e. not open source) software have similar defect densities. Here's a paper on the topic:
http://www.reasoning.com/pdf/MySQL_White_Paper.pdf
I've worked on both "commercial" projects and opens source projects. My personal experience has been that willingness to fix bugs is much higher on the open source teams. Usually the authors actually use the product in their everyday life and bugs affect them personally. They are highly motivated to fix them. On "commercial" software projects, my experience is that the authors of the software rarely use it in their every day life. Selection of bugs to fix usually comes from a project manager.
Both open source and "commercial" projects usually have large backlogs of bugs that never get fixed. The difference is that open source projects usually fix bugs that directly affect the authors, while "commercial" projects fix bugs that directly affect customers who have bought enough units to gain the right to complain (i.e. thousands of copies). However, with an open source project, if the authors decide not to fix a bug you usually have a number of options. You can complain on the developer's mailing list and plead your case. If that doesn't work, you can fix the bug yourself, or hire someone else to do it. With "commercial" software once you file your bug you usually don't even know if they will decide to fix it. You usually don't even know if it was fixed in the next version without buying it and trying it for yourself. If the program manager decides not to fix your bug, you have no recourse at all unless you have already bought thousands of copies of the software and can threaten not to upgrade to the next version unless they fix your bug. Even then they might decide not to.
"Well that's the thing with volunteer made software isn't it?" is what you wrote. Yes. That's the thing with volunteer made software. You have direct access to the developers to report your bug. You get informed whether your bug when your bug is being looked at. You can make a case for having your bug fixed. And if that doesn't work, you can fix it yourself. What is there that needs fixing again?
Essentially what X-Plane does could be considered an extremely crude, low-density real-time CFD (computational fluid dynamics.) The problem is that even extremely well done CFD's that run offline on super computer clusters can't compute all the effects and aerodynamic interactions of an airframe. X-Plane is pretty good for what it does, and it's been tweaked and refined over the years to account for a lot of different effects ... but at the end of the day, "blade element theory" is a fancy word for "really crude CFD".
On the flip side, I don't know why people knock table driven models (except for maybe that Microsoft game them a bad name.) Very serious aeronautical engineers seem to prefer this approach because it's a way you can deterministically represent everything you know about exactly how an airplane behaves.
The problem with things like blade-element theory is that after punching in all the physical geometry of the airplane, if it doesn't fly right what do you do? Basically you start fudging the mass and geometry and using other tricks to try to get it to fly right ... not exactly science.
Blade-element theory might be decent if you have a brand new design and you have no idea how it will fly and you want to see approximately what might happen. But then if you decide to stake your life on the results, good luck to you!
There is a lot of FUD that gets spread about different simulators and how they model flight dynamics.
Here is another thing to consider ... blade element theory is kind of a cookie cutter approach ... it makes many assumptions and often you end up with all the airplanes flying roughly the same, just with the speeds and weights scaled differently. Once you get the hang of flying one of them, all you have to do is scale your basic piloting strategies to the speeds of the other aircraft and you pretty much have them handled. It's really hard to account for specific bad habits and flight regimes that cause specific problems for specific airplanes. Table driven models can actually account for the idiosyncracies of individual aircraft if you know what you are doing.
Remember, table driven models are just as physics based as blade element theory. There is a physics engine at the heart of them that is integrating forces and accelerations and computing velocities and rotations and positions ... all based on accurate physics and sometimes some very advanced numerical integration schemes. The difference is that the tables represent how to compute what the actual forces and moments are in any situation, rather than estimating them the way blade element theory does.
Anyway, I don't want to take away from the effort that X-Plane has put in to creating a nice sim, but much of the hoopla about blade element theory is exactly that ... marketing hoopla that gets repeated over and over and over again so many times I almost want to believe it myself! :-)
There exist partial solution for that problem, such as TrackIR, which tracks your head movement and thus allows you to look around in the cockpit without awkward keyboard shortcuts. Also most advanced flightsims support multiple monitors, so throwing a bit of money at the problem can help as well.
Uhhh...what EXACTLY does that have to do with bugs and how nobody likes fixing them? it isn't like the developer, whether volunteer or not, said 'I need X number of bugs per LOC" no what happens is the bugs are found later by which time the original developer has done moved on or is working on something new and don't really care.
So you are back to my analogy. you have code that may have worked perfectly on the developer's system that for whatever reason is sucking the big wet titty now. Maybe he only had a single core CPU, maybe he was on Intel and the bug only pops up on AMD, maybe he was running "hey lets all be admins!" XP and not an OS like 7 where there is data sanity, who the hell knows why.
I just don't see how your suggestion helps shit. he could have wrote code so clean and tidy it makes baby Jesus weep and that still don't change the fact that when bugs are found someone has to fix them just like you need someone to clean the shitter. By your analogy it may be a NICE shitter, with stainless steel faucets, but that don't make the job any less nasty or unwanted.
Oh and for the other poster that said "Commercial has as many bugs"? yeah but the difference is when bugs are found someone is paid to fix them whereas with the FOSS model if the developer has moved on or just don't give a shit tough luck buddy, hope you are a coder or you are SOL. look at the post that started this, the bug has been known for at least 3 releases now yet it is still there. that means the guy who made the original models isn't there anymore and nobody wants to clean the shitter, so it don't get cleaned JUST AS I SAID.
I really don't know why this surprises anyone, it is simply human nature. Nobody likes the lousy jobs, you don't see kids saying "I want to clean shitters when I grow up!" but the job still needs doing which is why we pay someone to do it and while RMS and wax on about communist ideals it don't change the fact that humans don't like crappy jobs. That is why in the USSR they had to order soldiers to work in the fields for so many months. they called it "potato duty". No money? no clean shitters. it really don't need Kojack to solve the case.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.