FlightGear Newsletter December 2009

From FlightGear wiki
Revision as of 21:03, 19 December 2009 by Flughund (talk | contribs) (added 'visualization for yasim')
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Magagazine.png
Welcome to the FlightGear Newsletter!
Please help us write the next edition!
Enjoy reading the latest edition!


This is the draft of the next edition of the FlightGear Newsletter. Please feel free to edit and add your contribution.

What's new in CVS

In the hangar

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.

Community News

Virtual Airline News

Addons

Yasim FDM Visualization

caption

A very nice and helpfull Christmas gift arrived from Austria, a script for Blender to visualize Yasim fdms. This way it is possible to load both, the fdm and 3d model, into Blender and compare them to each other. Different types of objects/surfaces of the fdm, such as fuselage, wings, stabilizers and control surfaces, are displayed in different colours. Propellers, jet engines and rotors are each shown in a meaningfull manner and objects without size, like the landing gear's contact points, are present as well.
The script is available in FlightGear's source tree (source/utils/Modeller/yasim_import.py). A list with all features, how to install it into Blender, load fdm and align it with the 3d model (if necessary) and how to handle it in general is written as a comment on the top inside the file.

I am sure this is an addition that many fdm makers dreamed of, great work! ...and a happy new fdmodeller year ;-)

Useful links

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 bugfix release for FlightGear 1.9.0 is released, version 1.9.1.

Happy New Year everyone!