FlightGear Newsletter December 2009

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Scenery Corner

Detailed landclassing

The island of Texel, with vmap0 data (left) and custom scenery data.

Ameland, with vmap0 (left) and custom scenery.

A small group of people is improving the FlightGear scenery, by creating detaild shapefiles. These shapefiles are used to generate the terrain for our scenery. The (current) terrain is largely generated from inaccurate (vmap0) data, which results in wrong coastlines, missing forests, missing lakes etc.

As you can see on the pictures, the difference is huge. Correct terrain enhances especially the VFR (Visual Flight Rules) flying experience a lot, as you are able to follow the terrain more closely. With OSM line date (roads, railroad and rivers) this will be even further enhanced, but we are still awaitening a license switch, in order to release the scenery under GNU GPL.

Your help is extremely welcome, as always. Take a look at Howto: Create custom scenery to learn how you can help.

And finally....

2009 Summary

What has happened in the year 2009?

• January: Microsoft reportes that the ACES Game Studio, the design team responsible for the MSFS series, will be shut down.
• January: A bug release for FlightGear version 1.9.0 is released.

Happy New Year everyone!