FlightGear Newsletter May 2015

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Revision as of 17:30, 1 June 2015 by Dg-505 (talk | contribs) (remove {{draft}} + link for Project Venezuela)
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Enjoy reading the latest edition!
Please help us write the coming edition!
May 2015

Development news
Exhaust flames
Automated checklist execution
Submodel enhancements
Sound position fixes
Nasal/Canvas: A simple tiled map
New ATC-pie release
Cross Compiling FlightGear

In the hanger
Amphibious variant of the C172p
Scenery Corner
Scenery Project Elba
Community News
The Festival of FlightGear 2015 (1/2) - 2 & 3 May

Contributing
Translators required
FlightGear logos
Screenshots

Development News

Exhaust flames

The latest addition to the Atmospheric Light Scattering framework is a procedural shader effect to render thruster and afterburner exhaust flames. This effect integrates over a 3d-distribution of glowing emitters in a bounding box, which means that it doesn't generate sharp edges in the visuals.

Flame color, density, distribution of shock diamonds and widening in thin atmosphere are all runtime configurable, allowing to account realistically for changed thrust or ambient pressure.

Here's an example application for the Space Shuttle main engine - note how the exhaust plume is narrow early on and shows pronounced shock diamonds while it widens in the thin upper atmosphere:

Space Shuttle main engine flames during early ascent Space Shuttle main engine flames during late ascent


See the ALS exhaust flame effect for details.

Automated checklist execution

Cquote1.png As part of the development of the Lockheed 1049h Constellation, I created a comprehensive set of checklists based on the crew operating manual with other items added sufficient to take the aircraft through all stages of flight. Rather than hand-code an autostart script I wrote a more generic script to run checklist bindings in sequence. This script is now available in FGDATA and can be used on other aircraft:


Wiki: Automated Checklist Execution

If you are thinking about writing an autostart menu, you might want to consider using this script and driving the autostart from the checklists. It's not restricted to autostart, you can essentially run any sequence of checklists from any piece of Nasal code.

You can see the script in action in the latest Lockheed 1049h. Note that you need a recent copy of FGDATA for this to work. The autostart in this case is intelligent enough to run different checklist sequences depending on whether you are starting on a runway, at the terminal or in the air and also uses automated checklist execution to run an "After Landing" checklist from a keyboard shortcut during that busy time of rollout and taxi.


— sanhozay (Fri May 01). Automated Checklist Execution.
(powered by Instant-Cquotes)
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Submodel enhancements

It is now possible to adjust various offsets, including heading and pitch, during runtime. Furthermore, the x, y, and z offsets can be defined in metric units. Finally, the randomness of the azimuth (heading), elevation (pitch), Cd, and life can be defined. See http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Add_submodels#Step_2_of_6:_Define_the_position_and_orientation

A Phalanx CIWS shooting at an extraterrestrial weather balloon. The orange tracer bullets are submodels. The red line is a scaled model representing the aiming orientation of the Phalanx.

Sound position fixes

The sound subsystem has been given some fixes so that the distance between the position of the current view and the sound's position is correctly computed.

Nasal/Canvas: A simple tiled map

Using the Canvas GUI, you can make a simple tiled map using images downloaded on the fly You can view the code behind the map at Canvas Snippets#A simple tile map.

A simple, canvas based tile map which is centered around the aircraft.

New (4th!) ATC-pie release

ATC-pie logo.

ATC-pie now provides a solo training mode for ATCs. Using the same interface as the multi-player game mode and an additional instruction pane, you can choose to play offline and control virtual aircraft as Tower, Approach, Departure, or any combination of those positions. As MP traffic still can be scarce in many occasions on our network, this new game mode can be a solution for you not to give up on a planned session and give yourself some challenge. Also, you may learn from it enough to make your own MP sessions more popular over the network!

The main features are:

  • Free combination choice of APP, TWR and DEP control positions for custom training
  • Handovers to/from virtual ATCs
  • Instruction interface and pilot read back
  • Adjustable difficulty (traffic density)
  • Departure–arrival and ILS–visual balance options
  • Configurable runways in use, entry and exit points

See the wiki page for more!

Cross Compiling FlightGear

Cquote1.png During the last two weeks, hamzaalloush and saiarcot895 have been making lots of progress using mxe/mingw to build Windows binaries on Linux. The mid-term goal here is to provide FG/osgEarth binaries for Windows end-users via cross-compiling on Linux, so that end-users no longer need to be able to patch & build FG from source, but can just download pre-compiled binaries for 3.4 (and probably 3.6 in a few months time).

We're looking for people with access to Linux/Windows to help with testing/developing cross-compiled binaries for Windows on Linux using the mxe toolchain.

If anybody wants to get involved, please leave your system specs (OS, distro) here - so that we can grow a list of people familiar with both, Linux and Windows (alternatively, emulation/virtualization via VirtualBox/Qemu etc) - for now, we are primarily looking for people familiar with building FG from source, and ideally also familiar with using git.

Note that most testing/development is currently taking place on Ubuntu 14.04 - so people on a different distro should be prepared to do some integration/porting work (e.g. matching packages etc).

Currently, we're able to cross-compile OpenSceneGraph and osgEarth on Linux for Windows and run most OSG/OsgEarth examples:

The next steps ahead are getting osgEarth.mk to compile/link via mxe, and creating corresponding simgear.mk/flightgear.mk for mxe, at which point we will investigate porting poweroftwo's autobuilder to use mxe for building a patched version of sg/fg including osgEarth support.

People familiar with cmake/autotools or gcc internals are obviously also invited to get involved :D

For details and updates, please refer to: Building_FlightGear_-_Cross_Compiling


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In the Hangar

Amphibious variant of the C172p

The c172p-detailed aircraft has been given a variant with pontoons (optionally with wheels) so that it can land on water. The aircraft will replace the old c172p in FlightGear 3.6.

An amphibious variant of the C172p.

Scenery Corner

Scenery Project Elba

The Scenery Project Elba has been started, aiming to improve the scenery of Elba, an island west of Italy. More information can be found on the wiki page: Scenery Project Elba. Contributions welcome! Development thread: http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26138

Elba.jpg

Maiquetia SVMI (Project Venezuela) Release 1.0

Aeropuerto Internacional Simon Bolivar (SVMI) has been undergoing development since January by legoboyvdlp, and now, finally release 1.0 has arrived! This release features:

  • An 850 layout
  • Regenerated terrain-- the hill north of 10-28 is now correct!
  • Static Planes
  • WORKING Jetways (viveFG)
  • Beautiful models (viveFG)

This project is released under the GNU GPL, and therefore will be hopefully included in World Scenery 3.0 via TerraSync! This airport may be downloaded from GitHub along with TNCM which has been fixed by legoboyvdlp with a "quick and dirty" hack to stop flooding. Legoboyvdlp (talk) 15:41, 31 May 2015 (EDT)

Community News

The Festival of FlightGear 2015 (1/2) - 2 & 3 May

Time: All weekend Sat 00:00-Sun 23:59 Location: Argentina/Brazil (SBRJ/SBGL and south)

Contributing

Translators required

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FlightGear logos

If you want some graphic elements for your FlightGear-related site (such as a hangar or YouTube channel), please feel free to visit FlightGear logos for a repository of logos. And if you have some art skills, please don't hesitate to contribute with your own design creations.

Screenshots

The FlightGear project always needs screenshots, which show features that were added since the last release. These should be of good quality, especially in content and technical image properties. It is therefore recommended to use the best viable filter settings (anti-aliasing, texture sharpening, etc.). More info at Howto:Make nice screenshots.