Enhancement requests
These are some enhancement requests.
Describe the feature you would like to see implemented. Be as precise as possible and include additional information (for example links to certain websites). Please limit the request to reasonably small and simple features.
Many of these requests can can be found on the FlightGear issue tracker. Preferably respond to those on the issue tracker, as only some of the developers follow what happens on the wiki.
Fundamental changes should be discussed on the mailing list.
Audio
fgcom and radio through different sound device
It would be nice, if fgcom and all radio sounds could be routed through a different sound device. In noisy aircraft it is hard to hear anything. USB headsets are separate sound devices.
Is that possible (on Linux)?
Source: Ticket #1641
Networking
Making screenshots every 1..100 milliseconds and sending it by UDP or another protocol
There is no ability in FlightGear to take frames from screen and send it permanently to another programm \(to computer vision system, for example\).
It may be a good feature, that can do it.
Source: Ticket #1647
View System
Manual view ordering
Currently if you want to have overhead panel, for example, to have one click away from the cockpit view, you have to a) contact the developer and hope that they find that order useful too or b) change it yourself. Choise 'b' isn't a big issue with production planes but it can become a hassle with those in active development. Also it can be very comforting for players who just want to fly.
Is it possible to change the menu so one could manually create a custom view order, for example moving the items up and down the list?
Source: Ticket #1664
Save FOV settings
Currently FlightGear does not store FOV values associated with zoom levels used in each view. That would be nice to have especially on multiple or extra wide screen setups where you always have to adjust the FOV value for each view. Same when using the mouse to pan around (after putting the mouse in pan mode with the tab key), if you click to set back the view to default angle, the zoom level/FOV is reset to its default 0 value and should rather stay at the value that has been set using the x/⇧ Shift+X key.
Source: Ticket #1970
Multiplayer
Callsigns should be secured
The system that handles callsigns in multiplayer should be secured so that callsigns cannot be spoofed. A few days ago, I was involved in an incident in the KSFO area, connected with mpserver16, where an unknown individual began spoofing callsigns and used the callsigns of random pilots to make numerous racist jokes and comments.
Source: Ticket #1679
Suggestion: private chat messages for private ATC coordination
FGMS allows for no private chat messages. This is actually realistic when speaking of pilots, but not of ATCs who cannot coordinate without using third-party software. Mumble often being used for controlling, it is hard to be in two channels at once. IRC #atc could be an option, but it seems a good idea to me to also allow for private chat between players.
I see a "chat" FGMS msg type is deprecated. Could we revive that to use it as a private channel?
I can suggest this elsewhere instead (like to Wolfram for his hondover server), but if integrated to fgms, ATCs could use it to address pilots as well. Most other MP environments offer such feature to allow offline chats about connection, spawn position, and all of that stuff currently filling most of the controlled FG sessions.
Source: Ticket #1881
Canvas
| Note This probably won't be needed if we restore support for Effects at the sc::Element level, since all sorts of fancy GLSL effects would then become possible automatically. |
Inverse clipping
Related:| Title: | Inverse clipping |
| Issue: | Ticket #1686 |
| Category: | Canvas |
| Priority: | (priority missing) |
| Difficulty: | (difficulty missing) |
| Skills: | * c++
|
| People (mentors): | (mentors missing) |
| Use Cases/Purpose: | Especially in HUD development it would be very useful to have opposite clipping in canvas. |
| Description: | Right now we can do this:
Would be nice if we could do the opposite, set a rectangle where there should not be drawn:
|
| Status: | Proposal |
| Progress: | 
|
Website
Aircraft Ratings Submission System in "Download Aircraft" webpage
we got to focus on creating a better "Aircraft Download" webpage with more functionality. Here are some ideas for consideration:
- Allow registered users thump up/down aircrafts and allow "sort by rating".
- Keep download stats to allow "short by downloads"
- Allow registered users to easily submit a different rating than the one the author set for Cockpit, FDM, Model and Systems. We may then show an average of these ratings as an alternative, or automatically perform re-evaluation of the shown data if a certain number of user ratings deviate greatly from what the author set. This will help us: a.) quickly rate all the unrated aircrafts, b.) raise the ratings of the underated models (strict/perfectionist authors) and c.) lower the rating of planes that have been over-rated.
Source: Ticket #1699
Scenery
flightgear does not read groundnets from apt.dat.gz
there are far more parking positions in apt.dat than in the xml files but flightgear does not use them so far.
Source: Ticket #1753
Known workarounds
There are some scripts which generate ICAO.groundnet.xml files from apt.dat entries. see:
- Re: parking positions for 7125 airports post on the forum
- Bash script used to convert parking positions for 7125 airports from apt.dat to groundnet.xml (with only parking positions). - Re: LIRP improvement - Aircraft not aligned with runway post on the forum - Python script used for converting parking positions created in WED to groundnet.xml (again with only parking positions).
Many ground nets with parking positions have been converted from apt.dat and uploaded to the TerraSync servers.
Suggested fix
A function like parseParkPos(simgear::strutils::split(line)); in Airports/apt_loader.cxx.
Decision: Implement during World Scenery 3.0
non-solid taxi lines and other markings
Is it possible to make the taxilines non solid (and other)? At some airports the yellow taxilines are few centimeter higher than the ground, he plane jump up and down.
Maybe it is possible to interpolate new nodes for the line and to recalculate new elevations.
Source: Ticket #1767
Decision: Implement during World Scenery 3.0
Misc
Tutorials should instruct how to turn cockpit lights on
All tutorials don't seem to reflect that if the scenario starts in the dark/night the first step is to get some light in order to be able to see something, i.e. turn the cockpit lights on or light a candle or else.
Source: Ticket #1838
All FG instances run on CPU0
all FG instances run on CPU0 so their framerate drop. I have to manually move processes onto different cores with "taskset -cp CORE PID"
Source: Ticket #1943
Recompress Textures with e.g. optipng
Several textures are not "optimized", i.e. the PNG data can be recompressed in a more optimal way, losslessly.
For e.g. the Textures/Sky/ directory, using optipng -o3 -dir opt reduces the size from 3396 kByte to 3164 kByte, a reduction of 7%. Globe/world.topo.bathy.200407.3x4096x2048.png can be reduced to 8.6 MByte (from 11.3 MByte, i.e -24%).
Source: Ticket #2038
Feature Request: **Provide functionality to maintain customisations during future upgrades**
I'd like to upgrade from version X to version Y but, I don't want to lose all of the customisations made to my /Data directory. These include new and custom AI scripts, Bombable entries, Nasal scripts etc and, of course, scenery files.
Source: Ticket #2082