Volunteer: Difference between revisions

Many people think that contributing to [[FlightGear]] requires writing C++ code or doing [[Portal:Developer/3D Modelers|3D modeling]], and therefore feel that they cannot contribute directly. Not so. There are a whole variety of ways to make a valuable and satisfying contribution to FlightGear without having to be a developer. This page is intended to provide a starting point for those wanting to contribute, but who don't know how.

To get a basic introduction on FlightGear core development, please see [[Howto: Starting core development]].

You can help fellow FlightGear users by telling us if FlightGear works with your hardware. Please see [[FlightGear Hardware Recommendations]], [[Problematic Video Cards]] and [[Notebooks known to run FlightGear]].

If you haven't done so already, please consider registering at the [http://www.flightgear.org/forums FlightGear forum], this is a very simple thing to do, but it makes it very easy to obtain and provide help and other support within the FlightGear community.

Taking extra care in your posting to avoid requiring the attention of the moderators is in some ways also a contribution. Doing so helps self-police the forums so that the moderators can spend their time doing constructive development.

{{Main article|FlightGear IRC channel}}

To talk to fellow FlightGear users in realtime, you may want to check out the IRC chat channel.

This is also an excellent way for getting and providing community help, or for getting the latest news about FlightGear.

If you think you have a good idea or feature request for improving FlightGear, the FlightGear forums and the IRC channel are also an excellent way for getting feedback.

Please feel free to add news about your own FlightGear related projects, or projects started by others to the newsletter.

You can find the draft of next month's newsletter at: [[Next newsletter]]

Another thing that can be easily done is reviewing FlightGear (or just certain parts of it, like for example scenery and/or aircraft) and submit your reviews to some of the flight simulation portals. Of course, you can also directly write your reviews using the FlightGear wiki.

You can easily register a new account and help improve the wiki, for example by editing existing articles or creating new ones.

Also, many articles could be greatly improved just by adding a handful of relevant screenshots for illustration purposes. Proof reading existing articles is also greatly appreciated.

After registration, you'll have to confirm your registration by clicking on the link sent to you by email.

Many wiki articles are [[:Category:Out of date|outdated]], or may simply need to be reviewed and improved for other reasons - your help in reviewing existing articles would be highly appreciated!

{{Main article|Help:Translate}}

You can also help localize the Wiki by translating important articles into different languages.

Also, FlightGear itself can be easily translated by updating the files in $FG_ROOT/Translations. For details please see [[Howto: Translate FlightGear|Translating FlightGear]].

Bugs are currently being reported at [http://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/ this tracker]. Feel free to contact one of the project owners to be added to the member list, if you would like to add a bug (or two). Reporting bugs accurately helps make bug fixing significantly easier for the developers.

Another thing that is very helpful, is reviewing posted bug reports and see if you can reproduce/confirm them.

One way you could easily contribute would be to submit patches to HEAD setting the "status" flag on each aircraft accurately. While it will require learning a bit about SCM, and XML, that would be a fine contribution. For a details on how the status should be arrived at see  [[Formalizing_Aircraft_Status]].

FlightGear has a built-in [[Tutorials|tutorial]] system that is based on its scripting language [[Nasal]], this system is very flexible and can be used for creating interactive tutorials (or even missions) for use in FlightGear itself, in other words these tutorials run directly in the simulator.  

Creating new tutorials, or updating and improving existing ones, is another great way for getting more familiar with FlightGear. For details please see [[Tutorials]].

The FlightGear project maintains a steadily growing repository of [http://scenemodels.flightgear.org/models.php 3D models] for adding some eye-candy to the scenery. The world has always enough room left for your [http://scenemodels.flightgear.org/contribute.php contribution]. Please take the time to investigate what is already there and enjoy populating your favourite area.

For example, placing objects in the scenery with the [[UFO]] and submitting them to the Scenery Objects DB is pretty straightforward and takes very little time. Even an hour spent doing this would make a difference.

FlightGear itself would not be possible without the contribution of various types of artwork:

* Often aircraft developers have to use different resources to accomplish the goal of realistically modeling a particular aircraft. Contributing photographs, images, sounds all have value.

* [[Shader requests]]

Various parts of FlightGear are currently not yet sufficiently documented, also available documentation is often not really suitable to be used by non-developers. This results in users being unaware of the wide range of features and possibilities that FlightGear supports already.  

Topics that could use some HowTos are listed in [[Article requests]].

As already stated on the Wiki main page, FlightGear comes with a set of illustrated documentation, notably "The Manual". This piece of documentation aims at being printed onto paper and being read as a reference while you're exploring FlightGear - or simply taken with you on a long trip. If you are a skilled writer and a little bit familiar with LaTex, please take the time to dig into the [http://mapserver.flightgear.org/getstart.pdf PDF] or

[http://mapserver.flightgear.org/getstart/ HTML] version. Instructions on how to get the source code are [http://www.gitorious.org/fg/getstart/ here].

If you intend to redo a major part of the current documentation, it is recommended that you first discuss this with the developers, to ensure that you do not end up documenting code that may also be subject to major changes or even removal altogether. Please contact the developers before launching into a major documentation effort.

Pre-release testers will be regularly offered the opportunity to test development code without having to build the corresponding binaries themselves, it will be expected of you to provide feedback about your experiences with experimental code to the developers, you should be able to provide details about your hardware and software setup, as well as being able to follow developer requests to track down any potential issues. You should also be willing to test run all aircraft that are by default included in FlightGear's base package on the platforms you have access to in order to ensure that all default aircraft are working properly.

Note: If you are interested in actually doing development for FlightGear, make sure to check out the [[Portal:Developer|Developer section]].

If you have access to a unix based server, another good opportunity for contributing would be to set up a multiplayer server for use with FlightGear, for details please check out [[Howto: Set up a multiplayer server]].