FlightGear missions and adventures
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Note:
This project is currently under active development. And we're looking for volunteers interested in contributing.
Mentors: Hooray (get in touch to learn more) |
| Started in | 04/2014 |
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| Description | Interactive Missions & Adventures for FlightGear |
| Contributor(s) | Marius_A (since 04/2014), |
| Status | Under active development as of 04/2014 |
| Topic branches: | |
| fgdata | soon |
Targeted FlightGear versions: 3.10+
| This article is a stub. You can help the wiki by expanding it. |
Status / News
Background
FlightGear is especially interesting for people who already have some form of aviation or programming background. Most people without such a background, will probably find FSX/X-Plane much more enjoyable though - which comes down to usability issues. But also to lack of resources to get people easily started in an interactive fashion (tutorials, missions, adventures etc). Unlike FSX, we don't have an integrated "flight school" or other interactive features (missions/adventures):
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At the same time I first started messing around with FGFS I tried out Flight Simulator. To be honest, there was not much difference between the two, at least IMO. Only thing I saw that was there in FS that is not in FGFS is missions. I would love to see missions here in FGFS. Flying just for kicks and flying for Virtual Airliners is all good, but I would like something else to do besides these two things. — k33bz[1]
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I thought about a tutorial integrated with flightgear that when you start up for the first time it asks you if you wan't to do a tutorial on how to use flightgear. if you choose yes it will take you to a specific airport with(parked) a specific plane (something small and easier than the c172) and show you the controls of flightgear and then how to fly the plane this tutorial must be short however and also a bit fun or else they won't wan't to play it.
This is a long term project but it will encourage new players to keep flying and to have more veterans playing, and to have a less crowded KSFO. — Trez[2]
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There are also a bunch of forum threads on rescue missions, multiplayer stuff, virtual airlines etc - the glideslope tunnel script could be easily modified to check how well someone flies an ILS approach for example.
Otherwise, the bombable or the RedBull air race addons are most likely to qualify as "mission addons" with immediate feedback/interactive scoring.
I would suggest to favor those aircraft and airports which are generally considered "well developed" or actively maintained, and which are featured in "suggested flights" or "suggested aircraft" respectively. So the wiki should contain some good suggestions (i.e. see past newsletters).
In other words, I'd suggest to pick "ingredients" (airports, aircraft) which are unlikely to frustrate people due to some shortcomings and which are unlikely to be abadoned soon.
For instance, if you want to keep it simple, picking the c172p and some airport like KSFO or KOAK should be simple enough: people don't need to download/install additional stuff (aircraft/scenery), and one of the simplest tutorials could be flying straight and level, doing turns, doing standard rate turns etc.
Basically, most flight instruction stuff could be turned into tutorials. Obviously, one should start simple (engine start up, taxiing etc).
That doesn't mean however that your tutorials need to have a focus on flight instruction, the tutorial system could just as well be used to create missions or adventures.
But if you haven't created tutorials before, I'd suggest to keep it simple in the beginning - you'll learn quickly how to implement more complex missions.
Also, there's tons of existing stuff that you could learn/borrow from - take a look at aircraft which already have interactive tutorials, and see how they work - you could copy/paste and customize the XML stuff easily.
To make things entertaining and interesting, you could try to provide some incentive (scoring with points/percentage, best of, timing, precision during flight maneuvers etc). Just look at the tutorial.nas file, it already supports stuff like progress/completion messages - and it can be easily extended to also support scoring, high scores or whatever else you may have in mind - making a handful of modifications like these should be straightforward, even if you don't know a thing about Nasal scripting - there are enough folks around here who are happy to lend a helping hand to walk you through, or even post full snippets of code - afterwards, it just boils down to opening existing tutorials or creating new ones.
I suggest to read through these docs, and you'll see that creating simple missions is already supported - even without touching any code, just by editing XML files. So, that's not a real issue - unless of course you are asking US to create missions for you? :D
For starters, you could look at existing tutorials and see how they work - start by modifying them, copying snippets around - for example, change messages, numbers, targets - and it will all fall into place pretty quickly. Next, you can start your own little tutorial, such as flying a pattern at KSFO - it really isn't rocket science, and it doesn't require any coding either.
- ↑ k333bz (Thu Aug 29, 2013 12:49 am). Missions.
- ↑ Trez (Sat Apr 28, 2012 5:35 pm). A basic flightgear startup tutorial for noobs.