FlightGear Newsletter March 2010

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Welcome to the March 2010 edition of the FlightGear Newsletter.

From the developers

Shader experiments

The experimental urban effect. Notice how the 2D city textures appear to be 3D!

FlightGear developer Fred has been experimenting with the shaders recently. Although he is not yet completely satisfied with the results, the video examples below are worth watching.

Map Dialog

Basic map display

James is working on a GUI navigational map, which shows information from the GPS and navigation/airport database in a dialog box - similar to the map windows in other flight-simulators. The results aren't as beautiful as Atlas, but are useful for quickly finding a nearby airport or VOR, and for graphically showing waypoints from a route. The code is also a test platform for creating in-panel cockpit displays using similar technology in the near future, and it's already possible to switch the map to show the aircraft track (from the GPS) heading 'up' the screen. In the mode the map can be used as simple navigation display, to stay on a route or align with a localizer.

See this wiki page for further information on the current status (and bugs) of the code, and some basic instructions.

In the hangar

Scenery Corner

Wiki News

FlightGear wiki moved to a new server

Probably all of you have noticed the fast amount of 503 errors that showed up lately. The reason for this was that we received a lot of visitors each day, more than the server could handle. After three months, the wiki was finally moved to a new server on the 10th of March. From now on, there should be no more 503 errors popping up. Please contact the wiki admin if they do, or if any other problems arise.

Community News

Changes in the Forums

Gijs de Rooy has become an administrator at the FlightGear Forums. As well moderating the forums, Gijs has already made some significant improvements to the Forum organization.

Another multiplay server

Thanks to Charles Ingels (cbz026), there is another multiplayer server in France! This brings the total number of servers to 13, of which 10 in Europe, two in North-America and one in Asia.

Again, we would like to emphasize the importance of connecting to the correct server. The multiplayer servers are interconnected, so you do not need to connect to a specific server in order to see other pilots who are on that server. However, since server02 is overloaded (too many people use that one), not all pilots are shared between the servers. For best performance it is very important connect to the server that is geographically closest to you, has the lowest latency (ping time) or is the least busy.

The complete list of servers and more information about multiplayer is available in the Multiplayer howto.