FlightGear glass cockpit

The Flight Gear Glass Cockpit Project

I'm proud to announce the official launch of the Flight Gear Glass Cockpit Project, short FGGC. The source is largely a dusted-off version of OpenGC by Damion Shelton. I'd like to thank Damion for leaving us a pretty solid, well-thought-out codebase and hope he will one day return to developing his own version of it. In this case, a re-merge is not out of question.

Where the project stands

So far, we have a dusted-off version of the latest release. I made several small design improvements and updated the interface code to match the current FG cvs code. Right now, the code compiles,runs stable, accepts input at udp port 5800 and processes it mostly correct. There is currently one working set of gauges, modelled after the Boeing 777.

Right now I'm calling the state of the project alpha, and that's not gonna change anytime soon.

The Boeing 777 PFD in action

News

• Alpha 3 is now available from the source forge project page
• The garbage data segfault mentioned in issues earlier has been found and hardened against.
• The heading indicator now correctly shows major headings by name
• Project updates will be slow until my finals are over, I'll try not to lose touch with the codebase too much...

Eagleson's Law:
         Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more
         months, might as well have been written by someone else. (Eagleson
         is an optimist, the real number is more like three weeks.)

-- From the fortunes database

• A SourceForge project has been created
• Resolved the remaining issues with the heading indicator

Issues

Currently there are no known issues

Roadmap

Near Term Goals

• Get a CVS resource online
• Improve code hardening to prevent ugly bailouts in FTGL and others
• Get the input processor to correctly convert elevation to barometric altitude
• Implement a command line parser to get rid of statically implemented arguments

Mid Term Goals

• Move the configuration to XML to match FG configuration
• Implement more gauges (everybody's invited needed to help there)
• Port the nav interface to work with FlightGear (currently it's only implemented for MSFS)
• Clean up and modernize the codebase
• Further harden the code against garbage data
• Improve codebase documentation
• Create a proper API documentation

Long Term Goals

• Create a working set of generic gauges
• Implement an XML gauge constructor to get away from having to code gauges in C++
• Integrate the code closer with fg
• Remove the necessity to share code between FGGC and FG
• Turn the codebase into a real library
• Improve the input parsing code
• Implement an upstream network interface to send input back to FG

Getting the Source

The latest source package can now be downloaded at the downloads section of the sourceforge project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/fggc

Contributing

Currently no version control resource exists. Until one can be set up, it is recommended to turn your changes into patch files and mail them to feyn at gmx dot de. Of course anyone is invited to help in any way he finds might be useful. Feature requests and bug reports are welcome as well of course, but I'll also need footage of the real-world flight displays FGGC is supposed to mimic if I am to get it right.

Contact

I'm available by mail to feyn at gmx dot de, or you can catch me in the FlightGear IRC channel under my screen name of Raazeer

Links

• FGGC Project at SourceForge.net