Volunteer: Difference between revisions

Many people think that '''contributing to [[FlightGear]]''' requires writing C++ code or doing [[Portal:Developer/3D Modelers|3D modeling]] and that it takes lots of time, 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.

Another easy way for getting started contributing is to create nice FlightGear screenshots. You can upload these to the wiki where they can then be used to illustrate articles and to highlight articles via the [[:Category:Picture of the week|picture of the week]] on the main page.

Many users like to capture their flights in FlightGear as a video, YouTube is for example an excellent way for sharing such videos with fellow FlightGear users. YouTube videos can also be directly embedded in forum postings and wiki articles.

The FlightGear project is looking for people who are willing to help maintain the FAQ (which is quite out of date). If you you would like to get involved, please subscribe to the FlightGear Developers [[mailing list]] in order to discuss the details or simply start editing the [[FAQ|wiki FAQ]].

Over time, wiki articles can become [[:Category:Out of date|outdated]], or may simply need to be reviewed and improved for other reasons - your help in reviewing existing articles would be highly appreciated!

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].

 

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  [[Aircraft status indication]].

Note that you don't have to create any models yourself. You can simply [[Howto: Place 3D objects with the UFO|place existing models using the UFO]]. For example, placing objects in the scenery with the [[UFO]] and submitting them to the datanase is pretty straightforward and takes very little time. Even an hour spent doing this makes a difference.

Bugs can be reported to [http://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/ this tracker]. 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 on your system.

Prior to a release, release candidates are provided to the community. By directly providing feedback about your experiences with FlightGear's development code, you will become a crucial part of the development process and you will basically serve as quality control for FlightGear, your experiences will determine whether FlightGear's development code is ready for a next official release or not. See the [[Release plan]] to find out when release candidates will be distributed.

If you have access to an 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]].