Scenery infrastructure

The logical and physical infrastructure on which the scenery (terrain, objects) relies on is quite a mistery for a lot of FG users. This article aims to detail how the infrastructure works.

Physical Infrastructure

The current infrastructure relies on one server, called Sphere, hosted freely and gracefully by the people at Telascience. Some users also freely and gracefully set up servers to host Terrasync to speed up and cache the data depending on the location. Squid configuration file for those are stored here : http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/sceneryweb/ci/master/tree/Squid

Logical Infrastructure

As you may already know, scenery is a combination of terrain and objects. However, they all share common resources, mainly a PostGIS database. All those services are, at the moment, hosted on the same server.

The PostGIS database

This geospatial database contains .

• all geographical layers, whether generic (VMAP0, Corine LandCover, OSM...) or specific to FG (custom landcovers) in specific tables ;
• common geographical data (countries definitions...) ;
• all objects and models created by FG users and uploaded to the website scenemodels.flightgear.org (which interfaces with some tables in this PostGIS database, via PHP).

Functions are available on git : http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/sceneryweb/ci/master/tree/SQL/

The webserver

It serves the following scenery websites:

• the Mapserver website, sourcecode is here: http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/sceneryweb/ci/master/tree/WWW/scenemodels/ ;
• the Scenemodels website, which sourceode is available on git http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/sceneryweb/ci/master/tree/WWW/scenemodels/ ;
• the TGWeb tool, used to test new/updated airport layouts, before submitting them : http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/sceneryweb/ci/master/tree/WWW/tgweb/
• the main Terrasync SVN repository : http://scenery.flightgear.org/websvn/listing.php?repname=repos+1
• it also hosts the FG manual in various languages.

The Apache configuration is mostly hosted on Git : http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/sceneryweb/ci/master/tree/Apache

The programming interface

Most tools used on this server use PHP to interface between Apache and the PostGIS database. The sourcecode of the site is here: http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/sceneryweb/ci/master/tree/WWW/

Various tools

Given the hosting performances and the data available on that server, it is also used as FG Terragear server with the full toolchain. This is where the World Scenery sets are created (takes a while and a lot of CPU/RAM/disk resources!). Terrasync is in fact an regular automatic process looking for updates in the PostGis database and creating the corresponding .stg files and pushing the whole (.stg updates, 3D models, png and xml files) onto the Terrasync svn repository, which is grabbed, via the proxies, when a user starts a new FG session.

LaTeX

This server also hosts the LaTeX building infrastructure for the manual. The source code of the manual is here: http://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/getstart/ci/master/tree/ .