Changelog 3.6

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Revision as of 13:12, 15 March 2015 by Hooray (talk | contribs) (copied from newsletter)
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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 Git commit history. 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!



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].

Core

Launcher

The built-in Qt launcher that is shipped by default with the Mac version of FlightGear v3.4.0+ will be used for other OSs[3]. FGRun will be removed in favor of this launcher[3].


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

There is currently (03/2015) heavy activity towards a new UI. There will be the HTML5 based version (called Phi), TorstenD is currently working on and an internal implementation based on well supported libraries using Qt5 (which James Turner is working on).

The parallel development of HTML and Qt based UI happens by intention and is not the result of missing coordination[4]. Most likely, both will use a common service layer to provide necessary data[5].

James Turner is currently prototyping (at the suggestion/encouragement of Curt, Torsten D & others) a GUI integration for FlightGear based on Qt 5. This would overlap some areas other folks are working on, so we felt it best to make an announcement to avoid anyone expending their time on areas that might be affected[3].

All of this would be a QtQuick 2 GUI, not a Qt widgets GUI. If you don’t know what that terminology means, don’t worry about it, the quick answer is it works the same ways as Canvas does at present (rendering to OpenGL).

To learn more, see Integrated Qt5 Launcher

Aircraft Modeling

JSBSim

Atmospheric Light Scattering

  • The addition of volumetric grass to the random vegetation system.

Environment Rendering

Performance

Usability

Internationalization

Scenery

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

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