FlightGear Newsletter May 2012

Welcome to the FlightGear Newsletter! Please help us write the next edition! Enjoy reading the latest edition!

We would like to emphasize that the monthly newsletter can not live without the contributions of FlightGear users and developers. Everyone with a wiki account (free to register) can edit the newsletter and every contribution is welcome. So if you know about any FlightGear related news or projects such as for example updated scenery or aircraft, please do feel invited to add such news to the newsletter.

Development news

Language Support

For a long time, FlightGear's multi-language support for the menus was broken. The language feature has been restored now, so it is again possible to translate the menu into different languages. Currently, only plain ASCII characters and its Latin1/ISO-8859-1 extension are supported though, which covers Western European languages only (Portuguese to German, Italian to Norwegian).

Please see Howto: Translate FlightGear if you are interested in helping to translate FlightGear. We're currently looking for someone volunteering to update the existing, but incomplete Spanish, French and Italian language resources. Also, you're welcome to add support for additional languages (e.g. Portuguese, Swedish, ...).

If your language isn't supported by FlightGear's limited character set yet (i.e. Japanese, Chinese, Russian, ...) then please be patient - a rework of the GUI library, which will also improve support for arbitrary fonts and character sets, is already in progress.

Interview with a contributor: Jon Berndt

• How long have you been involved in FlightGear?

For over ten years - maybe almost 15. I'm the development coordinator (and occasionally accused of being the BDFL) for JSBSim.

• What are your major interests in FlightGear?

Flight dynamics and control, but I really like the whole aspect of specifying a model in XML (and other) files - a truly data-driven simulation.

• What project are you working on right now?

Continued development of JSBSim. There are always things to tweak. Recently, I extended the PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) control component in JSBSim to support some work I have been doing.

• What do you plan on doing in the future?

Writing more documentation.

• Are you happy with the way the FlightGear project is going?

I really enjoy seeing the progress being made in the visuals - such as the Rembrandt project.

• What do you enjoy most about developing for FlightGear?
• Are there any "hidden features" you have worked on in FlightGear that new users may miss?
• What advice can you give to new developers who want to get started on their first aircraft/new feature/Nasal script?

More questions are being collected here: Interview questions.

Stay tuned for next month's interview, featuring FlightGear contributor XXXXXXXX

Snapshot releases

Every now and then, easy-to-install development snapshots are created (usually, twice montlhy). These snapshos depict a recent state of the development version of FlightGear. By using them users can test out features that will be included in the upcoming release. Testers are encouraged to file bugs at the issue tracker.

The snapshot can be download via the links at the bottom of this page: http://www.flightgear.org/download/. Updates and feedback can be found at the forum.

In the hangar

All the way back in May 2011, we addopted a new status-rating system for aircraft. So far, only a few have actually been rated, as can be seen in the list 'hockenberry' set up at Google Docs. If you're an aircraft developer and your aircraft is/are not on the list, please consider rating their status. All you'll need to know/do is described at Formalizing Aircraft Status. If you'd just like to get started contributing to FlightGear, this would also seem like an excellent way to get started.

Wiki updates

New articles

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New aircraft articles

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Most popular newsletters

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And finally ...

Contributing

One of the regular thoughts expressed on the FlightGear forums is "I'd like to contribute but I don't know how to program, and I don't have the time". Unfortunately, there is a common mis-conception that contributing requires programming and lots of free time. In fact, there are a huge range of ways to contribute to the project without needing to write code or spending days working on something.

For ideas on starting to contribute to FlightGear, you may want to check out: Volunteer.

Call for volunteers

• The OpenRadar project is looking for a new maintainer.
• The FGFSPM (FlightGear Package Manager) is looking for a new maintainer.