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FlightGear Newsletter December 2013: Difference between revisions
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FlightGear Newsletter December 2013 (view source)
Revision as of 02:32, 11 December 2013
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== Development news == | == Development news == | ||
Note to all contributors: Please also copy your newsletter additions to the changelog for the upcoming release: [[Next Changelog]]. | Note to all contributors: Please also copy your newsletter additions to the changelog for the upcoming release: [[Next Changelog]]. | ||
== Wizard-based Aircraft Creation == | |||
[[File:Aircraft-template-wizard-intro.png|thumb]] | |||
One of the areas that people find frustrating is that features used by aircraft developers will be documented in the Wiki but the examples are so minimal that it can be difficult or nearly impossible to get something working because the published examples are lacking in detail or don't show important variations of how to code the feature. | |||
We've come to the conclusion, the best step towards fixing these issues is to have a set of templates for common aircraft configurations (single engine prop, multi-engine prop, single engine jet, multi-engine jet with co-pilot etc). These templates would have all of the minimal components to compose a "production" aircraft (according to the rating guide). | |||
We've been tossing around that idea for a while, i.e. coming up with project-maintained "templates" for things like aircraft, to ensure that people have some way to get guidance without overly relying on extensive copy/paste programming - we really only need someone to start with a "dummy" aircraft that, with lots of comments and options (Nasal, sound, canvas, help, checklists, tutorials). In fact, it would even be possible to provide wizards to help customize such templates, i.e. to change name/author/status, 3D models, file names (sound, textures). | |||
The idea is that we should have a set of standard aircraft templates, or some fancy means of generating an aircraft skeleton based on some user input. These templates would contain all necessary files and code to implement a simple but complete aircraft of a given configuration (single engine prop, multi-engine jet etc), and possibly stubs for common enhancements. | |||
Standard enhancements (checklists, autopilots etc) could be included as comments indicating where code needs to be added, This would make FG aircraft more consistent, but also help newbie aircraft developers to get of the initial obstacle of understanding how it all comes together. I think this would help us overcome the issue of having so many aircraft in various pre-production states of development. | |||
Continue reading at [[Aircraft Generation Wizard]]... | |||
=== Random Buildings === | === Random Buildings === | ||