FlightGear hangars

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Revision as of 11:58, 24 July 2018 by DJGummikuh (talk | contribs) (→‎Third party sites: Adding Aircraft catalogues section to page to distinct betwen web-links for manual download and those for automatic download by FlightGear itself.)
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For other content than aircraft and liveries, see Links

FlightGear has aircraft and other content available from 3rd-party hangars, some which are GPL compatible and also included in official distributions while others are independent. Aircraft versions range from requiring a developmental build, to being compatible with the latest primary release, to requiring an older version.

Be careful with external links!

Background

It is completely up to the original content author to decide how they wish to license their original work. GPL is just one option. Many people seem to prefer one of the variants of the creative commons license these days. If you are modifying someone else's original work, or incorporating portions of their work into your own work, then you must be respectful of the original author's license terms. If you wish to protect your work from being copied or modified (yet somehow still distribute it to users), FlightGear does not have the infrastructure built up to assist with that. Fgaddon is simply a resource offered to aircraft designers. It is a common area to share and collaborate for aircraft development. Historically it has also been the source of FlightGear aircraft that are included in the official distribution. Because fgaddon is closely tied to the main project, we do our best to ensure everything there is licensed with a gpl compatible license so we can safely distribute all those aircraft. We also do our best to ensure that fgaddon aircraft track upstream code changes in the flightgear program so that incompatibilities are not introduced. As others have said, the intention of FlightGear and our evolving infrastructure is to support and encourage 3rd party hangars, and we have no problem if developers want to use other resources to manage and distribute their original aircraft. It is especially important to maintain separation of content with gpl-incompatible licensing.[1]

We have support for catalogs and external hangars for precisely this reason. We obviously want to encourage GPL aircraft, but not every aircraft developer wishes, or is able to, release their work under the GPL. FlightGear both respects and supports that option. [2]

please do ask about setting up your own hangar with whatever license you like. One of the major goals is to give a better end-user experience for different sources of aircraft.[3]

Creating a hangar

it would be great to start seeing some of the other aircraft hangar developers distributing their work this way. From an end user perspective, you just add a single url to a single catalog file, and then you have instant access to download and update all the aircraft in that catalog. James has done some really cool gui work to help make aircraft easy to find and install for end users.[4]


the update catalog script is in flightgear-fgmeta/catalog/ and called update-catalog.py[5]


Next to the update-catalog.py script is a directory called fgaddon-catalog/ To run the script, just execute: "./update-catalog.py fgaddon-catalog" The idea is to create a subdirectory tree for each catalog you wish to maintain. This subdirectory can be called anything you like and it contains the config and administrative files for maintaining the catalog. I recommend you take a quick look through the script to make sure there aren't any hard coded paths that I missed. And of course the config file inside the catalog directory will need to be adjusted for each new hangar. The script doesn't automatically upload the aircraft like your original did, instead it just builds the content locally and I sync with a separate (rsync-based) script. I maintain a local copy of the flightgear ftp tree and have a script that rsyncs the whole tree at once.[6]

Screenshots

Note in this system it would be important the screenshots are *just* screenshots - no border, badges or other info as some splash screens currently do. The idea being to add this using OSG dynamically from the metadata and then it can be restyled as needed.[7]

Official hangars

Aircraft

FGAddon logo.png

Stable releases

The official aircraft hangar is known as FGAddon. For each FlightGear release, these aircraft are tagged and official downloads provided:

Aircraft development

The FGAddon version controlled repository contains in-development aircraft as well as aircraft tagged for FlightGear 3.4 and higher stable releases.

Liveries

Third party sites

Aircraft catalogues

These Are links that you can directly add to your FlightGear QtLauncher as additional Hangar locations. Then you can directly download (and update) all planes that are hosted by these catalogues.

Aircraft hangars

These are links where you can download individual planes manually.

Old Hangars

Livery/Scenery hangars

Other FlightGear repositories/mirrors

Related content

References

References