FlightGear wiki - User contributions [en]

Suggested software

2008-03-03T14:16:06Z

Chris Metzler: /* Scenery and Airport Editing */ -- fixed links to building/using TerraGear pages.

==== FlightGear GUI ====
* [[FlightGear Launch Control]] ([http://sourceforge.net/projects/fgrun Project Site]) is a graphical frontend to run FlightGear Flight Simulator.

==== Mapping Software ====

*[http://atlas.sourceforge.net Atlas] aims to produce and display high quality charts of the world for users of FlightGear, an open source flight simulator. This is achieved through two main parts: The map creator (simply called Map) and the Atlas viewer.

==== Scenery and Airport Editing ====
* [http://taxidraw.sourceforge.net/ Taxidraw]
* [[FlightGear Scenery Designer]] ([http://fgsd.sourceforge.net/ Project Site]) is an OpenSource interactive program that allow its user to design custom sceneries for the FlightGear flight simulator project.
* [http://www.terragear.org TerraGear] is a collection of open-source tools and rendering libraries which can transform publically available GIS data in 3d representations (i.e. 3d models or 3d maps) of the earth for use in real time rendering projects. TerraGear can import 3d data sets such as DEM terrain grids, 2d polygon data sets such as coastlines, city outlines, lake outlines, and 2d raster data sets such as the 1km NAOO land use/land cover data. It also has tools for generating realistic airports, runways, and lighting based on available FAA data. <br/> See [[Building Terragear]] for a walkthrough on obtaining a working copy of the TerraGear tools, and [[Using Terragear]] for an outline of the scenery building process.

==== Other ====
* fgadmin

Building TerraGear

2008-03-03T14:14:16Z

Chris Metzler: Cleaning up page after splitting off "using Terragear" info into separate page.

Portal:Developer

2008-03-03T14:10:16Z

Chris Metzler: Fixing link re: changing "Building & Using Terragear" to separate building and using pages.

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[[Portal:Developer|Developer]] - [[Portal:User|User]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">The Developer Portal</h2>
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This portal is for developers contributing to FlightGear. If you wanna help with FlightGears development, it's a good idea to subscribe yourself to the [http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel FlightGear devel] mailing list. The [http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=flightgear-devel list archive] is also available and should be searched before posting the same question.
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Latest Organizational Issues</h2>
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* [[ Project Infrastructure Enhancements ]]
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* [[Resources]]
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TODO: use to document and keep track of official branches (i.e. plib/OSG) and local efforts/projects of individual contributors.

* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15494.html XML Particles]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15388.html Random Trees for FlightGear]
*[http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15286.html ATC Enhancements]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15275.html Leak Reduction]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg13123.html TileProxy for FlightGear?]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg13280.html TerraGear fork]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15160.html FlightGear 1.0 Live CD]
* [http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=printer_friendly&forum=198&topic_id=2436&mesg_id=2436 Complete FlightGear Scenery on one DVD]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Compiling</h2>
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* [[ Building Flightgear ]]
* [[ Building Flightgear - Windows]]
* [[ Building Terragear ]]
* [[ OpenSceneGraph ]]
* [[ Building FlightGear Launch Control ]]
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* [[ Submitting Patches ]]
* [[ Code Cleanup ]]
* [[ Development Resources ]]
* [[ Extension Support ]]
* [[ Technical Reports ]]
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* [[ Property Tree ]]
* [[ Subsystems ]]
* [[ UML Diagrams ]]
* [[ Commands ]]
* [[ FDM API ]]
* [[ Nasal scripting language ]]
* [[ File Formats ]]
* [[ Initialization Sequence ]]
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* [[ Long Term Goals ]]
* [[ Bugs ]]
* [[ FGFS Todo ]]
* [[ Feature Requests / Proposals / Ideas ]]
* [[ FlightGear Expo Checklist ]]
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* [[ Changes since 0.9.10 ]]
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* [[ Creating instruments for FG ]]
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* [[ Writing simple scripts in %22nasal%22 ]]
* [[ Nasal scripting language ]]
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* [[http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/XMLAutopilot/]]
* [[ Autopilot Tuning Resources ]]
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* [[ Modeling - Getting Started ]]
* [[ Modelling - FAQ ]]
* [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro Blender3D Modeling]
* [[ Modelling - SketchUp]]
* [[ Model Import and Export ]]
* [[ Modeling Resources ]]
* [[ Aircraft Information Resources ]]
* [[ Normals and Transparency Tutorial ]]
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* [[ Using Terragear ]]
* [[ Blender Ground Signs Tutorial]]
* [[Signs]] (placing and explenation)
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== Developer Documentation ==
=== RFC Topics ===
'''Clarification:'''In its current form, the RFC section is exclusively based on and covered by previous mailing list and forum discussions (as well as various wiki entries), as such it is not supposed to reflect work in progress (RFC="Request For Comments" and not WIP), but is rather to be seen as an attempt to provide comprehensive analyses and summaries of key issues identified in various FlightGear related discussions and feature requests (which are to be linked to in the corresponding resource sections, if that didn't yet take place, it's because of most of these RFCs being indeed WIP).

Thus, RFC entries are not meant to imply anyone "working" on any of these issues, in fact only because an RFC entry is listed here doesn't necessarily mean that work on that particular issue is endorsed by the FlightGear community.

* [[Next Generation Scenery ]] - revamping the FG scenery engine
* [[Keyboard function priority list]] - reorganizing FlightGear keybindings
* [[FlightGear Sessions]] - discussing possible steps to finally allow aircraft to be reliably switched at runtime
* [[Formalizing Aircraft Status]] - discussing suggestions about how to more properly describe aircraft development status
* [[Simplifying Aircraft Deployment]] - identifying potential steps to simplify deployment of FlightGear aircraft
* [[FDM engine feature standardization]] - discussing possible steps to standardize feature support of mainstream FlightGear FDM engines
* [[FlightGear Glass Cockpits]] - discussing required infrastructure changes to enable non-developers to easily access FlightGear-internals in order to enable them to model complex glass cockpit-type aircraft instrumentation systems
* [[Recommended Property Tree Enhancements]] - discussing possible property tree enhancements to help ensure integrity of crucial runtime state

=== Miscellaneous ===
* [[ Glass Cockpit Projects ]]
* [[ Copyright Inquiry ]]
* [http://www.cafepress.com/fgfs_gear FlightGear - Gear]
* [[ Sign Specification Proposal ]]

== Middleware & Base Package Development ==

* [[:Category:Aircraft TODO]]

=== Misc ===
* [[FGSD- How to make a airport]]

Building & Using Terragear

2008-03-03T14:09:22Z

Chris Metzler: Building & Using Terragear moved to Building Terragear over redirect: Splitting "Building & Using" to separate pages.

#REDIRECT [[Building Terragear]]

Building TerraGear

2008-03-03T14:09:22Z

Chris Metzler: Building & Using Terragear moved to Building Terragear over redirect: Splitting "Building & Using" to separate pages.

== Introduction ==

The terrain used in [http://flightgear.org FlightGear] -- the land over which one flies, its texturing (by land usage type), the rivers and lakes and so forth -- are generated by software from a sister project called [http://terragear.org TerraGear]. TerraGear is used to read in geographical data -- descriptions of ground elevations, land cover (usage) information, airport locations and layouts, and so forth -- and output terrain over which one can fly.

For a variety of reasons, you might want to build terrain yourself, rather than downloading it from the available scenery on FlightGear. For instance, if you use [http://taxidraw.sourceforge.net/ TaxiDraw] to modify/improve information about an airport's taxiway/apron layout, you might wish to see how that modified airport would look in the scenery before deciding you're happy with the results. And normally to see and use the airport in the scenery, it's necessary to [http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp/#Updates submit the changes to Robin Peel], have him sign off on the changes, have the changes appear in the next [http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp/ official apt.dat], and then wait for the next [http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/scenery.html official FlightGear scenery] build; if you can build terrain yourself, you can start using it right away. Maybe the official scenery is too detailed for your slow machine, and you'd like to build terrain using a digital elevation model (DEM) with poorer resolution, to decrease the number of polygons and thus improve your framerates. Or maybe you've got a fantastically fast machine, and you want to build your own terrain using higher-resultion vector data (vmap1, Tiger) to get better roads/streams. For all these reasons, learning how to use TerraGear is a good idea.

There's existing documentation for TerraGear in at least three places: in the source code tree when you fetch it, on the website, and [http://cvs.terragear.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/www/docs/scenery-tutorial/fg-scenery-tutorial.html?rev=1.3&cvsroot=TerraGear-0.0 in the CVS tree for the website]. The latter is the most current, and really needs to replace the version on the website; but all three are out of date in various ways. When I tried to use the most current documentation to use TerraGear, I ran into all sorts of problems: some I figured out on my own, and others various people helped me with (thanks especially Ralf and Frederic). I'm writing this stuff to detail what I had to do to use TerraGear to build scenery. I am not trying to rewrite the documentation; this should be considered an adjunct/supplement to the TerraGear docs, something you read along with the TerraGear docs. The docs can steer you wrong, or miss something; this is my effort to address those issues.

So here I'll describe what you have to do to get TerraGear up and running, and then use it to build the terrain for a particular area. A word of caution, however: I use Linux, so this description will be Linux-centric. I hope instructions for other OSes will be similar, but I really don't know. In particular, I don't have easy access to a Windows machine, so I don't know how what I say will differ for those on Windows. In fact, I don't even know if TerraGear can be built/used on Windows. Hopefully it'll work, under directions not too different from here. If not, hopefully someone else will edit this page to clarify how to do it (if it's possible).

== Building TerraGear ==

Go to the [http://www.terragear.org/ TerraGear website], select "CVS Resources", and check out a copy of the current sourcecode from CVS using the instructions at the top of the page. Once you've done that, you can try to build the source code. First, though, TerraGear depends on some other libraries you'll need. If you look in source/, you'll see a bunch of README files. Read them. In particular, note the ones with names like "README.somesoftwarename"; those describe software you'll need to be able to build and run TerraGear. Cygwin I ignored because that's for Windows and I'm not running Windows. plib and SimGear I already had from their CVS repositories, because I track FlightGear CVS; but it's a good idea to go ahead and update those two to current CVS, just in case the current TerraGear CVS depends on something that's been checked into plib or SimGear since the last time you updated them (yes, that means you'll have to update and rebuild FlightGear as well, sorry). If you don't track CVS for any of these things, you can still try to build TerraGear against whatever copies of SimGear and plib you have installed; but if you run into problems (unresolved symbols or whatever), that'd be the first place I'd look.

Some comments on the other libraries you need:

* GPC. The instructions for what to do are in source/README.gpc. That file says the current version is 3.21; in fact, it's 3.22. Don't forget that editing step described in the README. When you run the makefile, it'll create a library called libgenpolyclip.a; make install will put it in /usr/local/lib/ or wherever else you want it to go.
* GTS. I didn't build this -- I use Debian and got it by installing the Debian packages (libgts-0.7-1 and libgts-dev, both version 0.7.3-2 at this writing). So I can't comment on the instructions in source/README.gts.
* newmat. This is a bunch of matrix manipulation utilities, it looks like. The file source/README.newmat tells you what to do, except for the fact that it sends you to the wrong webpage (an info page) to download the file you need. Once on that info page, to actually find the file you want to download, click on "to home page" near the top, then on the link for downloading files. You'll see links for newmat downloads (I downloaded the current newmat11). Once you've got it, just follow the step by step instructions in the source/README.newmat file.
* nurbs++.

Once you have all of the above installed, you can proceed with configuring the TerraGear build, and building TerraGear. The TerraGear CVS Resources page that told you how to check out a copy of the source code tells you what to do to build it: run autogen.sh, then run configure, then make, then make install. However, first, autogen.sh comes out of CVS not-executable. So you'll need to make it executable first with chmod +x autogen.sh

Next, when you run configure, it takes arguments telling it where to find the libraries you need. I don't know what those arguments default to, but just for show, if they're all in /usr/local/lib, you could run configure like this: configure w/ args

$ ./configure --with-gts=/usr/local/lib/ --with-gpc=/usr/local/lib/
--with-newmat=/usr/local/lib/ --with-plib=/usr/local/lib/
--with-simgear=/usr/local/lib/

Next comes running make to build all the executables. The instructions in source/README tell you that you want to "compile the /Libs/TriangleJRS code without optimization (-O2)". However, that's not the path to those files. Go to source/src/Lib/TriangleJRS. There, edit Makefile -- remove "-O2" from the two locations it appears (CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS).

At that point, you're ready to run "make", then "make install". Unless you gave an option to configure telling it that TerraGear should be installed somewhere other than /usr/local, you'll probably need to be root to do "make install" successfully.

I ran into no problems with the above -- everything built and installed OK. This was the most pain-free part of the whole experience.

== Using TerraGear ==

Now that you've built TerraGear, it's time to build some scenery. The online documentation is out of date, but you need it anyway. I'll try to comment where it differs from reality. To get the most current docs on how to build scenery, from the TerraGear website's "CVS Resources" page, go to interactive CVS log browser, click on www, then docs, then scenery-tutorial, then fg-scenery-tutorial.html, then the version number of the one at the top. You can also try [http://cvs.terragear.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/www/docs/scenery-tutorial/fg-scenery-tutorial.html?rev=1.3&cvsroot=TerraGear-0.0 this link], but this link points to a specific version; if the docs are updated, you won't be seeing the updated version. The steps in the previous sentence should always get you the most recent version.

Before going any further, one general comment: the different programs that make up the TerraGear suite seem to sometimes have problems with the default optimization in the TerraGear Makefiles. On a couple of occasions, I had to rebuild part of the suite after editing a Makefile and changing an optimization option because of segfaults (e.g. [http://mail.flightgear.org/pipermail/terragear-devel/2006-March/001347.html genapts repeatedly segfaulted on one quite normal airport]; I edited a suspect Makefile and removed optimization, and reran "make"; genapts then ran OK). So if you get weird failures, you might try ditching optimization in this fashion.

The docs tell you that the first thing you'll have to do is get the data files used to make the scenery. The first you'll have to get is the elevation data. The docs suggest three possible datasets you can use: 30-arcsec DEM data, 3-arcsec SRTM data, and 1-arcsec SRTM data. I've only used the 1-arcsec SRTM data, so I can't comment on any issues with using the other two. But as for the 1-arcsec SRTM data, the URL given in the docs for fetching the data is wrong. Instead, you want ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm ; click on "What are these.pdf" to see the difference between Version 1 and Version 2 (you probably want Version 2); below each "version" directory can be found the SRTM3 / SRTM 1 / other datasets. As the docs note, you want .hgt.zip files covering the region of interest.

The next possible pitfall: if you're using SRTM data, the docs tell you to use hgtchop to prepare the data. I had big problems with hgtchop. When I ran it, the status information that it put on the screen looked bizarre, and later phases of the TerraGear process (fgfs-tools-server/client) choked on the stuff hgtchop produced (see [http://mail.flightgear.org/pipermail/terragear-devel/2006-April/001359.html this email to terragear-devel] for a description of what happened when I ran hgtchop, as well as what happened when I later tried to use fgfs-tools-server and fgfs-tools-client to build tiles; note the unprintable characters in the output to the screen). After struggling with this for a while, Ralf Gerlich [http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=15392092 posted a patch for SimGear's newbucket.hxx] to flightgear-devel; this patch was meant to just take care of the bogus characters going to the screen, but oddly solved '''all''' my problems with hgtchop. To the best of my knowledge, this patch has not been committed to SimGear CVS. So if you get oddness out of hgtchop, and are unable to build tiles in the end, you might try applying the patch in the linked message above, then rebuilding SimGear and TerraGear. It worked for me.

Next pitfall: you're now supposed to run terrafit.py, which is a python script, from the top directory you're working in. It will attempt to run ../Terra/terra, which will not exist. The program in question can be found in the TerraGear source tree at source/src/Prep/Terra/terra; if you ran "make install" when you finished building TerraGear, it'll also be in /usr/local/bin or wherever you installed to. You can fix terragear.py to point to one of these locations, or you can do the lazy thing (which I did), and create ../Terra/terra as a symbolic link to /usr/local/bin/terra.

Next comes genapts, the program that puts the airports into the scenery. There are two issues you can run into here. The first is that genapts needs access to the elevation info when it runs; without it, your airports will be on flat ground at sea level (and thus in deep pits in the ground), rather than at local ground level following the surface. So genapts goes looking for the elevation info that came out of your processing of DEM30 or SRTM 3" or SRTM 1" or whatever you used; in other words, if you're using SRTM data, genapts will want to see the files created by hgtchop. genapts has a list of directories it searches for ground elevation information; you can see this list by running "genapts --help". If you do so, you'll see that there are no SRTM 1-arcsecond directories listed. The TerraGear docs have you working through an example case with data from w080n40; it has you put the results into work/SRTM-United_States-1, a directory that genapts doesn't search. I got around this by simply creating SRTM2-North_America-3 as a symbolic link to SRTM-United_States-1. I'm also told that there's an [http://mail.flightgear.org/pipermail/terragear-devel/2006-May/001371.html undocumented command line option] to tell genapts where to look; I haven't tried it so I don't know whether it works.

The second issue that can come up with genapts: the docs tell you to use command-line arguments like --min-lat, --max-lat, etc., to tell genapts what region to work in. Unfortunately, these command-line arguments are broken: they don't have any effect at all. Thus, genapts will try to work on every single airport in the apt.dat file that you point it to. If you're trying to build scenery for a small area, and you point genapts at the full apt.dat.gz file for FlightGear, you're in for trouble. First of all, genapts will take a very, very long time to go through all the airports in that file (many hours). Worse, it apparently builds a large data structure in memory as it goes, and processing the whole file takes a heck of a lot of memory. Furthermore, genapts appears to go berserk when it reaches NZSP, the "airport" at Amundsen-Scott Station, South Pole. It failed to handle that airport correctly, and memory use exploded until all available RAM and swap were taken and the kernel killed it. Ugh. The solution here is to create a new apt.dat file containing only the airports you need, and point genapts at that. If you're doing a full scenery build and you really do need all the airports, then maybe break the build into parts or something, to avoid having genapts work on the whole airport set, I dunno.

Next comes processing VMAP0 data. For me, this went pretty much as written in the docs, except for one big thing and one small thing. The big thing when you do :

$ cd work
$ tgvpf --chunk=w080n40 --work-dir=LandMass --material=Default /cdrom/vmaplv0 noamer bnd polbnda

You'll get an error:
Processing failed with VPF exception: Failed to open VPF table file
/home/cmetzler/Projects/TGSandbox/data/vmap0/v0noa/vmaplv0/noamer/bnd/f/j/fbr

This is because tgvpf is looking for f/j/fbr when the vmap0 stuff unpacks into f/J/fbr (note difference in case -- the capital J versus the little j). On Linux/Unix-ish machines, this matters, because the OS is case-sensitive. You'll have to go to vmaplv0/noamer/bnd/f and make a symbolic link from j to J (I chose not to rename the subdirectory from J to j because I didn't know if anything else would look for it as J). You're going to have to do this a bunch of times, which is annoying, but that's life.

The small thing: the docs tell you to use a command line argument of "--att=med:1" for freeways and "'--att=!med:1'" for roads. Note that set of single quotes in there -- that's because of the "!", which the shell would otherwise interpret before passing to the command, causing an error. Another option is to leave off the single quotes, but escape the "!" (i.e. "--att=\!med:1"), which I think is what I did.

'''Have Fun, and Good Luck!'''

Portal:Developer

2008-03-03T14:08:20Z

Chris Metzler: Adding link to split-off "Using Terragear" page

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[[Portal:Developer|Developer]] - [[Portal:User|User]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">The Developer Portal</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
This portal is for developers contributing to FlightGear. If you wanna help with FlightGears development, it's a good idea to subscribe yourself to the [http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel FlightGear devel] mailing list. The [http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=flightgear-devel list archive] is also available and should be searched before posting the same question.
|}
|}

{|style="border-spacing:8px; margin:0px -8px;"
|class="MainPageBG" style="width:50%; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; background:#efefef; vertical-align:top; color:#000;"|
{|width="100%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="5" style="vertical-align:top; background:#efefef;"
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Latest Organizational Issues</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Project Infrastructure Enhancements ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Background Info</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[Resources]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Current Efforts/Branches & Work in Progress</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
TODO: use to document and keep track of official branches (i.e. plib/OSG) and local efforts/projects of individual contributors.

* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15494.html XML Particles]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15388.html Random Trees for FlightGear]
*[http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15286.html ATC Enhancements]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15275.html Leak Reduction]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg13123.html TileProxy for FlightGear?]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg13280.html TerraGear fork]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15160.html FlightGear 1.0 Live CD]
* [http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=printer_friendly&forum=198&topic_id=2436&mesg_id=2436 Complete FlightGear Scenery on one DVD]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Compiling</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Building Flightgear ]]
* [[ Building Flightgear - Windows]]
* [[ Building & Using Terragear ]]
* [[ OpenSceneGraph ]]
* [[ Building FlightGear Launch Control ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">HowTos</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Contributing</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Submitting Patches ]]
* [[ Code Cleanup ]]
* [[ Development Resources ]]
* [[ Extension Support ]]
* [[ Technical Reports ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Code Internals</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Property Tree ]]
* [[ Subsystems ]]
* [[ UML Diagrams ]]
* [[ Commands ]]
* [[ FDM API ]]
* [[ Nasal scripting language ]]
* [[ File Formats ]]
* [[ Initialization Sequence ]]
|-
|}

|class="MainPageBG" style="width:50%; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; background:#efefef; vertical-align:top"|
{| width="100%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="5" style="vertical-align:top; background:#efefef;"
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Todo</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Long Term Goals ]]
* [[ Bugs ]]
* [[ FGFS Todo ]]
* [[ Feature Requests / Proposals / Ideas ]]
* [[ FlightGear Expo Checklist ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Done</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Changes since 0.9.10 ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">HowTos</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Instrumentation</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Creating instruments for FG ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Nasal scripting</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Writing simple scripts in %22nasal%22 ]]
* [[ Nasal scripting language ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Autopilot configuration</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/XMLAutopilot/]]
* [[ Autopilot Tuning Resources ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">3D Modelling</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Modeling - Getting Started ]]
* [[ Modelling - FAQ ]]
* [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro Blender3D Modeling]
* [[ Modelling - SketchUp]]
* [[ Model Import and Export ]]
* [[ Modeling Resources ]]
* [[ Aircraft Information Resources ]]
* [[ Normals and Transparency Tutorial ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Scenery</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
* [[ Using Terragear ]]
* [[ Blender Ground Signs Tutorial]]
* [[Signs]] (placing and explenation)
|-
|}
|}

__NOTOC__
__NOEDITSECTION__

== Developer Documentation ==
=== RFC Topics ===
'''Clarification:'''In its current form, the RFC section is exclusively based on and covered by previous mailing list and forum discussions (as well as various wiki entries), as such it is not supposed to reflect work in progress (RFC="Request For Comments" and not WIP), but is rather to be seen as an attempt to provide comprehensive analyses and summaries of key issues identified in various FlightGear related discussions and feature requests (which are to be linked to in the corresponding resource sections, if that didn't yet take place, it's because of most of these RFCs being indeed WIP).

Thus, RFC entries are not meant to imply anyone "working" on any of these issues, in fact only because an RFC entry is listed here doesn't necessarily mean that work on that particular issue is endorsed by the FlightGear community.

* [[Next Generation Scenery ]] - revamping the FG scenery engine
* [[Keyboard function priority list]] - reorganizing FlightGear keybindings
* [[FlightGear Sessions]] - discussing possible steps to finally allow aircraft to be reliably switched at runtime
* [[Formalizing Aircraft Status]] - discussing suggestions about how to more properly describe aircraft development status
* [[Simplifying Aircraft Deployment]] - identifying potential steps to simplify deployment of FlightGear aircraft
* [[FDM engine feature standardization]] - discussing possible steps to standardize feature support of mainstream FlightGear FDM engines
* [[FlightGear Glass Cockpits]] - discussing required infrastructure changes to enable non-developers to easily access FlightGear-internals in order to enable them to model complex glass cockpit-type aircraft instrumentation systems
* [[Recommended Property Tree Enhancements]] - discussing possible property tree enhancements to help ensure integrity of crucial runtime state

=== Miscellaneous ===
* [[ Glass Cockpit Projects ]]
* [[ Copyright Inquiry ]]
* [http://www.cafepress.com/fgfs_gear FlightGear - Gear]
* [[ Sign Specification Proposal ]]

== Middleware & Base Package Development ==

* [[:Category:Aircraft TODO]]

=== Misc ===
* [[FGSD- How to make a airport]]

Using Terragear

2008-03-03T14:06:24Z

Chris Metzler: Splitting "Building & Using TerraGear" into separate building and using pages.

== Introduction ==

The terrain used in [http://flightgear.org FlightGear] -- the land over which one flies, its texturing (by land usage type), the rivers and lakes and so forth -- are generated by software from a sister project called [http://terragear.org TerraGear]. TerraGear is used to read in geographical data -- descriptions of ground elevations, land cover (usage) information, airport locations and layouts, and so forth -- and output terrain over which one can fly.

For a variety of reasons, you might want to build terrain yourself, rather than downloading it from the available scenery on FlightGear. For instance, if you use [http://taxidraw.sourceforge.net/ TaxiDraw] to modify/improve information about an airport's taxiway/apron layout, you might wish to see how that modified airport would look in the scenery before deciding you're happy with the results. And normally to see and use the airport in the scenery, it's necessary to [http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp/#Updates submit the changes to Robin Peel], have him sign off on the changes, have the changes appear in the next [http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp/ official apt.dat], and then wait for the next [http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/scenery.html official FlightGear scenery] build; if you can build terrain yourself, you can start using it right away. Maybe the official scenery is too detailed for your slow machine, and you'd like to build terrain using a digital elevation model (DEM) with poorer resolution, to decrease the number of polygons and thus improve your framerates. Or maybe you've got a fantastically fast machine, and you want to build your own terrain using higher-resultion vector data (vmap1, Tiger) to get better roads/streams. For all these reasons, learning how to use TerraGear is a good idea.

There's existing documentation for TerraGear in at least three places: in the source code tree when you fetch it, on the website, and [http://cvs.terragear.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/www/docs/scenery-tutorial/fg-scenery-tutorial.html?rev=1.3&cvsroot=TerraGear-0.0 in the CVS tree for the website]. The latter is the most current, and really needs to replace the version on the website; but all three are out of date in various ways. When I tried to use the most current documentation to use TerraGear, I ran into all sorts of problems: some I figured out on my own, and others various people helped me with (thanks especially Ralf and Frederic). I'm writing this stuff to detail what I had to do to use TerraGear to build scenery. I am not trying to rewrite the documentation; this should be considered an adjunct/supplement to the TerraGear docs, something you read along with the TerraGear docs. The docs can steer you wrong, or miss something; this is my effort to address those issues.

So here I'll describe what you have to do to use TerraGear to build the terrain for a particular area. In writing this, I'm presuming that you've already downloaded and built the TerraGear source, and thus have a working copy of the TerraGear tools. Since that step was also challenging, similar adjunct documentation for [[ Building Terragear ]] exists.

A word of caution: I use Linux, so this description will be Linux-centric. I hope instructions for other OSes will be similar, but I really don't know. In particular, I don't have easy access to a Windows machine, so I don't know how what I say will differ for those on Windows. In fact, I don't even know if TerraGear can be used on Windows. Hopefully it'll work, under directions not too different from here. If not, hopefully someone else will edit this page to clarify how to do it (if it's possible).

== Using TerraGear ==

Now that you've built TerraGear, it's time to build some scenery. The online documentation is out of date, but you need it anyway. I'll try to comment where it differs from reality. To get the most current docs on how to build scenery, from the TerraGear website's "CVS Resources" page, go to interactive CVS log browser, click on www, then docs, then scenery-tutorial, then fg-scenery-tutorial.html, then the version number of the one at the top. You can also try [http://cvs.terragear.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/www/docs/scenery-tutorial/fg-scenery-tutorial.html?rev=1.3&cvsroot=TerraGear-0.0 this link], but this link points to a specific version; if the docs are updated, you won't be seeing the updated version. The steps in the previous sentence should always get you the most recent version.

Before going any further, one general comment: the different programs that make up the TerraGear suite seem to sometimes have problems with the default optimization in the TerraGear Makefiles. On a couple of occasions, I had to rebuild part of the suite after editing a Makefile and changing an optimization option because of segfaults (e.g. [http://mail.flightgear.org/pipermail/terragear-devel/2006-March/001347.html genapts repeatedly segfaulted on one quite normal airport]; I edited a suspect Makefile and removed optimization, and reran "make"; genapts then ran OK). So if you get weird failures, you might try ditching optimization in this fashion.

The docs tell you that the first thing you'll have to do is get the data files used to make the scenery. The first you'll have to get is the elevation data. The docs suggest three possible datasets you can use: 30-arcsec DEM data, 3-arcsec SRTM data, and 1-arcsec SRTM data. I've only used the 1-arcsec SRTM data, so I can't comment on any issues with using the other two. But as for the 1-arcsec SRTM data, the URL given in the docs for fetching the data is wrong. Instead, you want ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm ; click on "What are these.pdf" to see the difference between Version 1 and Version 2 (you probably want Version 2); below each "version" directory can be found the SRTM3 / SRTM 1 / other datasets. As the docs note, you want .hgt.zip files covering the region of interest.

The next possible pitfall: if you're using SRTM data, the docs tell you to use hgtchop to prepare the data. I had big problems with hgtchop. When I ran it, the status information that it put on the screen looked bizarre, and later phases of the TerraGear process (fgfs-tools-server/client) choked on the stuff hgtchop produced (see [http://mail.flightgear.org/pipermail/terragear-devel/2006-April/001359.html this email to terragear-devel] for a description of what happened when I ran hgtchop, as well as what happened when I later tried to use fgfs-tools-server and fgfs-tools-client to build tiles; note the unprintable characters in the output to the screen). After struggling with this for a while, Ralf Gerlich [http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=15392092 posted a patch for SimGear's newbucket.hxx] to flightgear-devel; this patch was meant to just take care of the bogus characters going to the screen, but oddly solved '''all''' my problems with hgtchop. To the best of my knowledge, this patch has not been committed to SimGear CVS. So if you get oddness out of hgtchop, and are unable to build tiles in the end, you might try applying the patch in the linked message above, then rebuilding SimGear and TerraGear. It worked for me.

Next pitfall: you're now supposed to run terrafit.py, which is a python script, from the top directory you're working in. It will attempt to run ../Terra/terra, which will not exist. The program in question can be found in the TerraGear source tree at source/src/Prep/Terra/terra; if you ran "make install" when you finished building TerraGear, it'll also be in /usr/local/bin or wherever you installed to. You can fix terragear.py to point to one of these locations, or you can do the lazy thing (which I did), and create ../Terra/terra as a symbolic link to /usr/local/bin/terra.

Next comes genapts, the program that puts the airports into the scenery. There are two issues you can run into here. The first is that genapts needs access to the elevation info when it runs; without it, your airports will be on flat ground at sea level (and thus in deep pits in the ground), rather than at local ground level following the surface. So genapts goes looking for the elevation info that came out of your processing of DEM30 or SRTM 3" or SRTM 1" or whatever you used; in other words, if you're using SRTM data, genapts will want to see the files created by hgtchop. genapts has a list of directories it searches for ground elevation information; you can see this list by running "genapts --help". If you do so, you'll see that there are no SRTM 1-arcsecond directories listed. The TerraGear docs have you working through an example case with data from w080n40; it has you put the results into work/SRTM-United_States-1, a directory that genapts doesn't search. I got around this by simply creating SRTM2-North_America-3 as a symbolic link to SRTM-United_States-1. I'm also told that there's an [http://mail.flightgear.org/pipermail/terragear-devel/2006-May/001371.html undocumented command line option] to tell genapts where to look; I haven't tried it so I don't know whether it works.

The second issue that can come up with genapts: the docs tell you to use command-line arguments like --min-lat, --max-lat, etc., to tell genapts what region to work in. Unfortunately, these command-line arguments are broken: they don't have any effect at all. Thus, genapts will try to work on every single airport in the apt.dat file that you point it to. If you're trying to build scenery for a small area, and you point genapts at the full apt.dat.gz file for FlightGear, you're in for trouble. First of all, genapts will take a very, very long time to go through all the airports in that file (many hours). Worse, it apparently builds a large data structure in memory as it goes, and processing the whole file takes a heck of a lot of memory. Furthermore, genapts appears to go berserk when it reaches NZSP, the "airport" at Amundsen-Scott Station, South Pole. It failed to handle that airport correctly, and memory use exploded until all available RAM and swap were taken and the kernel killed it. Ugh. The solution here is to create a new apt.dat file containing only the airports you need, and point genapts at that. If you're doing a full scenery build and you really do need all the airports, then maybe break the build into parts or something, to avoid having genapts work on the whole airport set, I dunno.

Next comes processing VMAP0 data. For me, this went pretty much as written in the docs, except for one big thing and one small thing. The big thing when you do :

$ cd work
$ tgvpf --chunk=w080n40 --work-dir=LandMass --material=Default /cdrom/vmaplv0 noamer bnd polbnda

You'll get an error:
Processing failed with VPF exception: Failed to open VPF table file
/home/cmetzler/Projects/TGSandbox/data/vmap0/v0noa/vmaplv0/noamer/bnd/f/j/fbr

This is because tgvpf is looking for f/j/fbr when the vmap0 stuff unpacks into f/J/fbr (note difference in case -- the capital J versus the little j). On Linux/Unix-ish machines, this matters, because the OS is case-sensitive. You'll have to go to vmaplv0/noamer/bnd/f and make a symbolic link from j to J (I chose not to rename the subdirectory from J to j because I didn't know if anything else would look for it as J). You're going to have to do this a bunch of times, which is annoying, but that's life.

The small thing: the docs tell you to use a command line argument of "--att=med:1" for freeways and "'--att=!med:1'" for roads. Note that set of single quotes in there -- that's because of the "!", which the shell would otherwise interpret before passing to the command, causing an error. Another option is to leave off the single quotes, but escape the "!" (i.e. "--att=\!med:1"), which I think is what I did.

'''Have Fun, and Good Luck!'''

Boeing KC-135E

2008-03-03T13:49:54Z

Chris Metzler:

{{infobox Aircraft
|image = KC-135E.jpg
|name = Boeing KC-135E
|type = Military aircraft
|fdm = JSBSim
|status =Alpha
|authors =Innis Cunningham, Vivian Meazza, David Culp and Julien Pierru
|fgname = <tt>KC135</tt>
}}
The '''Boeing KC-135E''' is the only [[aircraft]] in FlightGear which can refuel other planes in air.

==Manual==
The boom will extend automatically when in air.

==Related content==
* [[Air-Air Refueling Howto]]
=== Related lists ===
* [[Aircraft]]
* [[Aircraft Todo]]

[[Category:Aircraft]]
[[Category:Military aircraft]]
[[Category:Aircraft TODO]]

Help:Formatting

2008-03-03T13:48:08Z

Chris Metzler: /* Formatting conventions */

'''Wiki is a ''collaboratively edited'' encyclopedia to which ''you'' can contribute. This tutorial will help you to write good wiki articles.

The following pages will discuss features of Wiki, giving style and content guidance, information about the Wiki community, and important Wiki policies and conventions.

This is a basic ''tutorial'', not an extensive manual.

==Formatting==
'''Formatting Wiki articles''' is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor. Instead of a strict ("what you see is what you get") approach, Wiki uses text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g. headings). This "language" is known as '''Wikitext''' (or '''Wiki-markup''') and is designed for ease of editing.

=== Bold and italics ===
The most commonly used wiki tags are '''bold''' and ''italics''. '''Bolding''' and ''italicizing'' are done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes (<tt>'</tt>):

{| style="border:none; text-align:left;"
|-
| style="background:#E6F2FF; padding:0.3em; text-align:center;"|'''You type'''
| style="background:#E6F2FF; padding:0.3em; text-align:center;"|'''You get'''
|-
|<tt><nowiki>''italic''</nowiki></tt>
|''italic''
|-
|
<tt><nowiki>'''bold'''</nowiki></tt>
|
'''bold'''
|-
|
<tt><nowiki>'''''bold italic'''''</nowiki></tt>
|
'''''bold italic'''''
|}

===Headings and subheadings===
Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up the article by inserting a heading for each '''section'''.

Headings can be created like this:

* <tt><nowiki>== Heading ==</nowiki></tt>
* <tt><nowiki>=== Subheading ===</nowiki></tt>

If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents will automatically be generated.

=== HTML ===
HTML code can be used in pages to produce more advanced formatting such as colors, tables, and edit page layout. However, you do not need to know HTML to use Wiki and follow formatting conventions.

=== Formatting conventions ===
It is a Wiki convention to mark in '''bold''' the names of an article's subject when they are first mentioned in the article. For example, the article [[Boeing KC-135E]] begins:

:The '''Boeing KC-135E''' is the only aircraft in FlightGear which can refuel other planes in air.

==Wiki links==
'''Linking''' Wiki articles together is very important. These easily created links allow users to access information related to the article they are reading and greatly add to Wiki's utility.

===When to link===
The easiest way to learn when to link is to look at Wiki articles for examples. If you are trying to decide whether to make a link or not, ask yourself "If I were reading this article, would the link be useful to me?" Usually link the first, and only the first, occurrence of a word/term in the article, that does not have an implicitly understood definition.

===How to link===
When you want to make a link to another Wiki page (called a <em>wiki link</em>) you have to put it in double square brackets, like this:
:<tt><nowiki>[[Aircraft]]</nowiki></tt> = [[Aircraft]]

If you want the display text of the link to have a different title, you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards) followed by the alternative name. For example:
:<tt><nowiki>[[Target page|display text]]</nowiki></tt> = [[Target page|display text]]

You can make a link to a specific section of a page like so:
:<tt><nowiki>[[Target page#Target section|display text]]</nowiki></tt> = [[Target page#Target section|display text]]

If you want the display text of the link to appear in italics or bold, nest the double square brackets for the link within the multiple apostrophes that delimit the italicized or bold text, like this:
:<tt><nowiki>''[[Main Page]]''</nowiki></tt> = ''[[Main Page]]''

Please check your links to ensure they point to the correct article.

===Categories===
You can also put the article in a category with others in a related topic. Just type <nowiki>[[Category:]]</nowiki>, and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets.

To make a link to a Category page (for example, as a reference for further research), simply put a colon (''':''') at the beginning of the "Category" tag, like this:

:<tt><nowiki>[[:Category:Aircraft]]</nowiki></tt>

The above code would produce the following:

:[[:Category:Aircraft]]

'''It is very important to put in the correct categories so that other people can easily find your work.''' The best way to find which categories to put in is to look at pages on similar subjects, and check which categories they use. For example if you write an article about a type of tree, you may look at an article on another type of tree to see which categories could be appropriate.

Portal:Developer

2008-03-02T17:44:37Z

Chris Metzler: Changing link name to reflect change in page name.

<div align="center">
[[Portal:Developer|Developer]] - [[Portal:User|User]]
</div>

{|style="border-spacing:8px; margin:0px -8px;"
|class="MainPageBG" style="width:100%; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; background:#efefef; vertical-align:top; color:#000;"|
{|width="100%" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="5" style="vertical-align:top; background:#efefef;"
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">The Developer Portal</h2>
|-
|style="color:#000;"|
This portal is for developers contributing to FlightGear. If you wanna help with FlightGears development, it's a good idea to subscribe yourself to the [http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel FlightGear devel] mailing list. The [http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=flightgear-devel list archive] is also available and should be searched before posting the same question.
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{|width="100%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="5" style="vertical-align:top; background:#efefef;"
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Latest Organizational Issues</h2>
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* [[ Project Infrastructure Enhancements ]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Background Info</h2>
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* [[Resources]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Current Efforts/Branches & Work in Progress</h2>
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TODO: use to document and keep track of official branches (i.e. plib/OSG) and local efforts/projects of individual contributors.

* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15494.html XML Particles]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15388.html Random Trees for FlightGear]
*[http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15286.html ATC Enhancements]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15275.html Leak Reduction]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg13123.html TileProxy for FlightGear?]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg13280.html TerraGear fork]
* [http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg15160.html FlightGear 1.0 Live CD]
* [http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=printer_friendly&forum=198&topic_id=2436&mesg_id=2436 Complete FlightGear Scenery on one DVD]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Compiling</h2>
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* [[ Building Flightgear ]]
* [[ Building Flightgear - Windows]]
* [[ Building & Using Terragear ]]
* [[ OpenSceneGraph ]]
* [[ Building FlightGear Launch Control ]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">HowTos</h2>
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* [[FlightGear-Points of Interest]]
* [[Adding features]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Contributing</h2>
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* [[ Submitting Patches ]]
* [[ Code Cleanup ]]
* [[ Development Resources ]]
* [[ Extension Support ]]
* [[ Technical Reports ]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Code Internals</h2>
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* [[ Property Tree ]]
* [[ Subsystems ]]
* [[ UML Diagrams ]]
* [[ Commands ]]
* [[ FDM API ]]
* [[ Nasal scripting language ]]
* [[ File Formats ]]
* [[ Initialization Sequence ]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Todo</h2>
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* [[ Long Term Goals ]]
* [[ Bugs ]]
* [[ FGFS Todo ]]
* [[ Feature Requests / Proposals / Ideas ]]
* [[ FlightGear Expo Checklist ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Done</h2>
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* [[ Changes since 0.9.10 ]]
|-
! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">HowTos</h2>
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* [[FlightGear-Points of Interest]]
* [[Adding features]]
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* [[ Creating instruments for FG ]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">Nasal scripting</h2>
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* [[ Writing simple scripts in %22nasal%22 ]]
* [[ Nasal scripting language ]]
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* [[http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/XMLAutopilot/]]
* [[ Autopilot Tuning Resources ]]
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! <h2 style="margin:0; background:#0f7a71; font-size:120%; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #d9e2e2; text-align:left; color:white; padding:0.2em 0.4em;">3D Modelling</h2>
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* [[ Modeling - Getting Started ]]
* [[ Modelling - FAQ ]]
* [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro Blender3D Modeling]
* [[ Modelling - SketchUp]]
* [[ Model Import and Export ]]
* [[ Modeling Resources ]]
* [[ Aircraft Information Resources ]]
* [[ Normals and Transparency Tutorial ]]
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* [[ Blender Ground Signs Tutorial]]
* [[Signs]] (placing and explenation)
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__NOTOC__
__NOEDITSECTION__

== Developer Documentation ==
=== RFC Topics ===
'''Clarification:'''In its current form, the RFC section is exclusively based on and covered by previous mailing list and forum discussions (as well as various wiki entries), as such it is not supposed to reflect work in progress (RFC="Request For Comments" and not WIP), but is rather to be seen as an attempt to provide comprehensive analyses and summaries of key issues identified in various FlightGear related discussions and feature requests (which are to be linked to in the corresponding resource sections, if that didn't yet take place, it's because of most of these RFCs being indeed WIP).

Thus, RFC entries are not meant to imply anyone "working" on any of these issues, in fact only because an RFC entry is listed here doesn't necessarily mean that work on that particular issue is endorsed by the FlightGear community.

* [[Next Generation Scenery ]] - revamping the FG scenery engine
* [[Keyboard function priority list]] - reorganizing FlightGear keybindings
* [[FlightGear Sessions]] - discussing possible steps to finally allow aircraft to be reliably switched at runtime
* [[Formalizing Aircraft Status]] - discussing suggestions about how to more properly describe aircraft development status
* [[Simplifying Aircraft Deployment]] - identifying potential steps to simplify deployment of FlightGear aircraft
* [[FDM engine feature standardization]] - discussing possible steps to standardize feature support of mainstream FlightGear FDM engines
* [[FlightGear Glass Cockpits]] - discussing required infrastructure changes to enable non-developers to easily access FlightGear-internals in order to enable them to model complex glass cockpit-type aircraft instrumentation systems
* [[Recommended Property Tree Enhancements]] - discussing possible property tree enhancements to help ensure integrity of crucial runtime state

=== Miscellaneous ===
* [[ Glass Cockpit Projects ]]
* [[ Copyright Inquiry ]]
* [http://www.cafepress.com/fgfs_gear FlightGear - Gear]
* [[ Sign Specification Proposal ]]

== Middleware & Base Package Development ==

* [[:Category:Aircraft TODO]]

=== Misc ===
* [[FGSD- How to make a airport]]

Building TerraGear

2008-03-02T17:43:41Z

Chris Metzler: Building Terragear moved to Building & Using Terragear: The content of the page covers both, and I originally titled it this on the original FG wiki (on seedwiki).