FlightGear Qt launcher
 The summary page of the Qt launcher for FlightGear 2024.1 as rendered on Windows 10 | |
| Started in | 01/2015 |
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| Description | Integrated launcher for FlightGear |
| Maintainer(s) | James Turner |
| Contributor(s) | James Turner |
| Status | Under active development |
| Folders | [GitLab]/flightgear/flightgear/next/src/GUI |
| Changelog | [GitLab]/flightgear/flightgear/next/src/GUI |
| Package management |
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Background |
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Implementation |
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Front Ends
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Related efforts |
The Qt launcher is an integrated launcher for FlightGear, replacing FGRun in the official distributions as of version 2016.4. Initially designed as a stop-gap solution in FlightGear 3.4 for the problem of support for the old FlightGear Mac launcher ending with OS X Yosemite, it has become FlightGear's main launcher for all platforms, and is shipped with all official FlightGear releases (however, users building from source may need to separately configure/rebuild FlightGear).
Usage
To run the launcher:
- Microsoft Windows: double-click the FlightGear <version> icon on the Desktop or click on Start > All Programs > FlightGear <version> > FlightGear Launcher.
- OS X and Linux: open a terminal and run fgfs with the option
--launcher:$ fgfs --launcher
Note that the launcher is an optional feature for the reasons explained below in the Dependencies section. As a result, if you are on Linux and have installed the version of FlightGear provided by your distribution, it might not be available because the packagers might have not enabled it. In that case, ask your distribution to enable the feature.
Aircraft page
Location page
Environment page
Settings page
Addons page
Enabling console display on Windows systems
To enable console display in Windows along with Launcher startup, right-click on the FlightGear shortcut on the Desktop and click Properties. In the Target box under the Shortcut tab, add --console at the end and click OK.
If you don't need the console when Launcher is running but only when the simulator is running, then in the Launcher go to the Settings page, expand the General section by clicking on the Show more link and check Show debugging console.
Aircraft/TerraSync download directory
As of FlightGear 2016.2, the location used by the launcher to store downloaded aircraft and TerraSync scenery can be specified in the Add-ons tab. Specifying the TerraSync download directory manually has, thus, become unnecessary.[1]
Preferences
In FlightGear 2016.2 and later, the preferences are stored in $FG_HOME/FlightGear/FlightGear.ini on Unix-like systems and for Windows in %UserProfile%/AppData/Roaming/flightgear.org/FlightGear/FlightGear.ini.[1] Older versions make use of the default location used by Qt:
- the Registry on Microsoft Windows;
- ~/Library/Preferences on OS X;
- the default preferences location on Linux (usually ~/.config/FlightGear/FlightGear.conf).
Preferences can be reset to their defaults values by selecting the menu in Launcher with the three dots in the upper left corner and then the Restore defaults settings... item. In older versions, this was done by holding down the Alt key while starting the launcher.[2]
Background
James Turner (primarily) is working on developing a built-in launcher which is intended to completely replace fgrun. This new launcher is pretty mature, runs nicely on every supported OS, and is already available in the current release. Fred B. (who was the primary developer for fgrun hasn't been involved with FlightGear for quite some time, and fgrun is built on a pretty old gui library called "fltk". Any changes that have been made to fgrun in the past couple years have been band-aids by people just trying to keep it limping along with modern os updates, newer compilers, newer osg libraries, etc. There will come a time (probably fairly soon) where we will stop supporting, compiling and distributing fgrun with FlightGear. (Fgrun of course will always exist and anyone can compile it and use it and maintain it if they wish, it just will stop being distributed with the core FlightGear package in favor of the newer launcher.)[3]
The longer term goals include (1) improving the process for aircraft authors' work to be included in the default distribution, and b) make it easier for groups like FGUK to integrate their own hangars into the Qt launcher aircraft management tools. For developers who wish to opt-in, being part of the default distribution would offer far wider exposure of your work. From an end user perspective, this will provide an easy/integrated point and click way to install (and update) the aircraft they are interested in. An aircraft author (or 3rd party hangar maintainer) can publish an 'addon' url that is copy/pasted into the add on page of the Qt launcher and all the new aircraft show up immediately. James has done some really nice work on the Qt side to pull all this together for the end-users. This will be another step forward in the larger process we laid out a while back. [4] The ultimate goal is to make it easy for hangar maintainers to distribute and integrate their work with the 'new' flightgear launcher (which has now been around long enough that it's hard to call new.) James's aircraft catalog system makes aircraft searching, selecting, and updating really easy and seamless for the end users. Aircraft [hangar] maintainers simply publish their catalog.xml (which is generated by the script.) A side effect is this system moves us away from dependency on fgaddon (or other even more massive repositories) and promotes smaller and more focused 3rd party repositories and a higher degree of decentraliation and scalability.[5]
In addition, this was also motivated by the plethora of 3rd party GUI launchers/frontends developed by numerous contributors over the years [6].
As for why the change, because the old one was Windows-only - the Qt5 thing works for Mac and Linux as well and allows to do things OS-independently, which is really conceptually superior as we don't need to deal with dedicated Win, Mac and Linux issues.[7]
History
In October 2014, Apple released OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Unfortunately, one of the frameworks the old FlightGear Mac launcher relied upon, called RubyCocoa 
, was removed, making it incompatible with OS X Yosemite. James Turner started work on a solution for the then-upcoming 3.4 release. He added a simple built-in launcher using Qt, run before the main window would be created. It was released with FlightGear 3.4 as a Mac-only feature.
After FlightGear 3.4, it was decided to that this temporary Mac-only launcher would be developed into a replacement for FGRun and that it would become part of the plan for updating the FlightGear user interface. In FlightGear 3.6, it became available for all platforms, and has continued to be developed, enhanced, and refined.
As of May 2016, the Qt launcher is under active development. This includes the adding of new features, fixing bugs, and refining existing features.
As of mid 2016, the Qt UI is now also available at runtime; however, this needs a lot of testing, but aircraft can be installed / changed and location adjusted from within the sim. After some number of times the sim will crash.[8]
The Options which don't work are things like setting scenery / aircraft paths, and initial position, because those interfere with the values the launcher is passing itself.[9]
As of version 2016.4, FGRun has been removed from the official distributions.
Community video walkthroughs
Aircraft tab: Installing, filtering by ratings
Related content
References
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