Forum communication: Difference between revisions

FlightGear is developed by volunteers across the globe, who typically will have a single computer with a certain hardware configuration (sounds/graphics card, fixed amount of RAM). The FlightGear developer community is fairly small however - so that our new features do not get as much testing as needed. Sometimes new features are only really getting tested widely once they're part of a new release, or once they're enabled by default.

So it isn't uncommon that certain features may work well for most people, but some others may no be able to use them. In an open-source project like FlightGear without any funding, we depend on end-users to provide good feedback so that we can identify, troubleshoot and fix such issues. And we're grateful for everybody providing this very feedback.

Remotely troubleshooting problems is an extremely tedious process, that gets more tricky because of people's tendency to act in a frustrated and sometimes even disrespectful way. But please keep in mind that just because FlighGear may not work for you properly, that this doesn't necessarily apply to the majority of people. Very often, such issues are highly setup specific, i.e. depend on the type of hardware, operating system, drivers, application settings - and sometimes even other software.

All this is further complicated that unlike MS FSX, FlightGear is cross-platform software, which means that it needs to run across all supported hardware platforms and operating systems (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux). Unlike a commercial software project, we're not making any significant profits to actually fund development or do Q&A testing. Commercial software companies will typically have dedicated teams testing new features across a huge variety of hardware/OS configuration. FlightGear however, depends on end-users providing good feedback to ensure that FlightGear keeps working for most people.

This is particularly important because the FlightGear developer community has historically shown a tendency to be comprised of "geeks", i.e. people using certain -very powerful- gaming hardware, and Unix-based operating systems like Linux. Thus, support for other operating systems (especially outdated versions) may sometimes suffer a bit in comparison, because new features are seeing more testing on Unix-based operating systems than on Windows unfortunately.

While we have been providing a way for end-users to get involved in regularly testing FlightGear pre-releases provided via the [[FlihgtGear Build Server]], very few users seem interested in getting involved in this, and even fewer people are actually providing bug reports via the issue tracker unfortunately.