Changelog 3.4

This changelog is a draft. This changelog is currently being written for the FlightGear 3.4 release. To see what is being worked on, check out Changelog 3.4. Feel free to help! If you are aware of any FlightGear related changes, please add them to the changelog. It's a good idea to check the newsletters since the last release, and the git commit history. To view the changelog for the most recent release, please see Changelog 3.2. We also encourage people to help by translating the changelog and appreciate all contributions, however please keep in mind that this changelog is not yet final!

Upcoming FlightGear Changelog

Major enhancements in this release

Core

I have just pushed a partial fix for the issue to SimGear. The event now uses property polling instead of attaching listeners to retrieve the values for the uniforms. Without the change, I was able to reproduce the crash locally within a couple of minutes. With this patch, I havn't seen a crash over a period of 3.5 hours constantly watching AI traffic over KSFO building up. This only changes the behaviour of scalar properties, arrays et. al. have not yet been changed. Also, this is still not thread safe - no locks have been implemented. If a getValue() for a property gets called from within the OSG thread while the main thread updates the same value, this might result in a wrong value for multibyte values.However this should be automatically corrected in the next frame and not crash the system. — Torsten Dreyer (2014-08-29). Re: [Flightgear-devel] crash in SGPropertyNode::fireValueChanged. (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

As a side effect, I have noticed that the load for the xml-property rule subsystem has decreased on my system significantly. This subsystem generates values for most of the environment properties responsible of the instantiated effects. Without the patch, thousands of listeners were triggered each frame resulting in an average of 1ms execution time per frame for the proprule subsystem. With the patch, this has decreased to an average of 0.07ms per frame. This is on a 3.5GHz 6 Core Xeon. Weaker machines might benefit even more. — Torsten Dreyer (2014-08-29). Re: [Flightgear-devel] crash in SGPropertyNode::fireValueChanged. (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

Aircraft Modeling

JSBSim

Atmospheric Light Scattering

Environment Rendering

Performance

Misc/Uncategorized

Usability

Internationalization

Scenery

Canvas System

FlightGear's fully scriptable 2D rendering system now includes improved APIs for creating maps and navigation displays amongst many other improvements. People no longer need to have programming experience to add a working ND to their aircraft, it can now be all done by copying and pasting 30 lines of text and customizing a few properties. The so called MapStructure back-end handles efficient updating of all ND layers transparently. Also, maps can now be mostly customized, including custom styling (colors, fonts, symbols etc).

• Nasal namespace Browser
• MapStructure is being ported to become a native Canvas Widget
• work has begun to port the airport selection dialog to use the MapStructure framework
• Tom has implemented keyboard handling support
• Text/Input field support
• Input dialog

Nasal Scripting

Documentation

Highlighted new and improved aircraft

Other

Bug fixes

• See our bugtracker for an extensive, yet incomplete, list of the bugs fixed in this release.