NOTE:
It's construction day here at the Flight Gear web site. Please excuse
the mess. You can preview the new
page right now if you like.
| Flight Gear Flight Simulator: A
free, open architecture, multi-platform flight simulator
developed cooperatively over the internet.
Our primary goal is to become a serious
contender in the civilian flight simulator world by creating a
free, multi-platform, open, user supported, user extensible flight
simulation extravaganza.
| 
|
| We are building a ``developer friendly'' flight simulator and
are making the source code freely available so that it is ``easy''
for others to extend, fix, change, improve, and experiment with.
We have support for multiple platforms so as many people
as possible can share in the fun.
|
(To avoid confusion) These are scanned photos and not screenshots
... yet. :-)
This page has been accessed
times.
Most recent news
- Jan 24 97: Check out the
Macintosh Division of the Flight Gear Flight Simulator.
- Jan 23 97: Check out the
Flight Gear networking proposal by Pepijn Schmitz.
- Jan 23 97: Ryan Connon has been talking to Apple
Computer, and they are giving him all the input devices for joysticks,
flight pedels, etc... in a program called Input Sprocket, which he has
tested and seems to be doing really well.
- Nov 5 96: Flight model code is now working. Low
level graphics and win32 support are progressing nicely.
- Nov 4 96: I have added the preliminary
Flight Gear Documentation to
this web page.
- Oct 30 96: Check out v3.0 of the Flight Gear
proposal. While you are at it, have a look at a proposed
Flight Gear logo.
- Oct 22 96: We now have some keyboard support. We
also have some simple font drawing capabilities with a simple "clock"
module to demo this feature.
Current Development Summary
We are just beginning development of the Flight Gear Flight Simulator.
The following items are working or in various stages of completion:
- Dynamically loadable module architecture for multiple platforms.
- 2-D graphics routines and "below" (everything needed to draw
lines, polygons, bitmaps, fonts, etc.) also for multiple
platforms.
- Initial color palette support. Starting to look at 24bit color
support
- Keyboard handling routines.
- Low level math routines for handling (lat, lon, elev) coordinate
systems and for handling various conversions, etc.
- Support is in place for the following platforms:
DOS DJGPP/Allegro, OS/2 EMX/DIVE, and Unix gcc/X11.
- Support is planned for Win.xx, Macintosh, and Linux/SVGA.
Detailed Project Status
Immediate Help Needed
If you'd like to get involved with the Flight Gear project, we could
use assistance in the following areas right now:
- Bitmaps: We could use some help in coding a few
routines to lay down 2D bitmaps. Click
here for some more information.
Contact: Eric J. Korpela
(korpela@ssl.Berkeley.EDU)
if you'd like to help.
Related Web Sites
Developer's Mailing List
This mailing list is used by the flight-gear developers. We don't
mind if other interested parties listen in, but be aware that this is
primarily a list for the developers. You will most likely see
periodic bursts of highly technical material -- well at least it is highly
technical to us -- intermixed with other stuff. Feel free to join in and
contribute your thoughts and ideas, but realize that we are not yet quite
ready to see reams of highly detailed wish lists.
To subscribe to the developer's mailing list, send a message to
flight-gear-request@infoplane.com
with a message body of subscribe
To unsubscribe, do the same thing, except send a message body of
unsubscribe
-
flight-gear@infoplane.com -- [Mailing list address]
- Mailing list archives
Current Development Team
Supported Platforms
One of the goals of FlightGear is to be portable and support as many
platforms as possible. For starters, we plan to support the following
platforms.
- DOS - with DJGPP as the compiler and Allegro
for the low level graphics routines.
- OS/2 - with EMX and DIVE.
- X11 (SunOS, Linux, etc.) - with gcc and X11.
We also would like to support these platforms
- Win95 - Matt Pickering
(mattp@worldchat.com) is
looking into adding support for Win.xx.
- Linux/SVGA - The SVGA graphics libs should allow
us to combine full screen graphics with the power and networking
of Unix.
- Macintosh - Ryan Connon
(techie@midcoast.com)
will be heading up the team to build in Mac support.
Initial Design Material
Design Issues
Here I would like to keep a list of various design issues people run
into and how we have solved or plan to solve them. I will start by
sketching in a few things. I welcome your comments, changes, and
additions.
- Code organization. We will need to come up
with a scheme to organize our source code into subdirectories.
This isn't a pressing issue yet, but something to keep in mind.
- World Modeling. I recommend that we start out with
Lat/Lon/Elev c
--
http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt
