Changelog 3.6

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This changelog is a draft.

This changelog is currently being written for the FlightGear v3.6 release. 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 commit histories for all main repositories:

FGData commit log
FlightGear source commit log
SimGear commit log

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!


Cquote1.png As many people have noticed, the v3.6 release has been slightly delayed. The main reason is that too many key developers have been out of town for work or holiday this month. We are currently hoping for a mid-September release. We will post further updates once our release manager returns and we can regroup from all the end of the summer (northern hemisphere) :-) activities. Thank you, Curt.
— Curtis Olson (Aug 26th, 2015). [Flightgear-devel] Release v3.6 update.
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Major enhancements in this release

Project Organization

After lots of hard work by Torsten D, a new, more compact fgdata repository (base package) has now been created. Located at http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/fgdata/, this new fgdata has had all aircraft (except for the C172p and UFO) stripped from it, as well as the histories of the Scenery, AI, and Models directories[1]. This has reduced its size to about 1.3 GB[2].


Cquote1.png FlightGear has completely moved all its gitorious based material over to< sourceforge. But it's nice to know a historical record will remain at gitorious.org as well as several other public locations not to mention on a myriad of personal computers.
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Cquote1.png I have just added hooks to our our flightgear, simgear and fgdata

repositories that send a message to the flightgear-commitlogs mailinglist
for every commit (hopefully).

Those who are subscribed to that list should get an e-mail for every
commit. It will include the commit log message, the diff and more.


— Torsten Dreyer (2015-04-15). [Flightgear-devel] flightgear-commitlogs revived.
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Core

Launcher

The aircraft page of the Qt launcher for FlightGear 3.5 as rendered on Windows 7.

The built-in Qt launcher, developed by James Turner shipped by default with the Mac version of FlightGear 3.4, will be used for other OSes[3]. In addition, FGRun will be dropped in favor of this.

Note In future FlightGear releases, there will be an additional HTML5-based version (Phi, developed by Torsten D), and the Qt launcher, based on well-supported libraries, will be used as the main launcher (replacing FGRun). This parallel development is intentional[4], and it is likely that both will use a common service layer to provide the necessary data[5].

To learn more, see Integrated Qt5 Launcher

Aircraft Modeling

JSBSim

Atmospheric Light Scattering

  • The addition of volumetric grass to the random vegetation system.
  • Interior cockpit shadows
  • Interior glass reflections and shadows.

Environment Rendering

Performance

Usability

Internationalization

Scenery

Cquote1.png It adds a 4th layer to the sun (next to disc, inner halo and outer halo). While the inner/outer halos change with atmosphere conditions, the new layer is supposed to represent the effect of blinding brilliance - ideally it adds a suitable ray structure to the sun. The effect is most prominent in space (where I'm most keen on seeing it admittedly) because there all atmospheric halo effects are absent and we end with a really unrealistic white disc. Some screenshots and discussion there http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=27216
— Renk, Thorsten (Aug 26th, 2015). [Flightgear-devel] Sun brilliance SG patch.
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Canvas System

  • Canvas-based maps now support a new property for child elements to be automatically rotated/aligned with the heading of the map, to avoid redundant Nasal code doing this. This has the advantage of better peformance, as it is now done in C++. Commit
  • artix's Canvas/MapStructure and NavDisplay improvements[1]
  • Canvas failure manager GUI dialog (by Necolatis) [2]

Nasal Scripting

Documentation

Highlighted new and improved aircraft

Misc/Uncategorized

Bug fixes

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