You're welcome.
johnm0awi wrote in Wed Jan 11, 2012 4:48 pm:I have been trying to track on the forum just where to start in understanding FlightGear code, scenery and aircraft programming without much success. I am sure it is all there somewhere it's just knowing where to start, so many abbreviations and so many variations.
Unfortunately FlightGear have a very varying quality of the documentation, some things are really well documented, other are really bad documented, with most things somewhere in between.
One of the better places are actually in the installation itself, in
..FlightGear/data/Docs in several
<THING>.readme text files.
Otherwise the Wiki can at times be a good source of information, but it is a bit disorganised (compared to Wikipedia), and with a bit of variation in quality of the articles.
johnm0awi wrote in Wed Jan 11, 2012 4:48 pm:For example, I have not yet found two aircraft with similar file structure. A block diagram might help an absolute beginner like me.
FlightGear aircraft, for better or worse, doesn't have a standardised file structure. It's up to the aircraft developers.
The characteristics of an aircraft are defined with the
property tree which is set up using xml tags, who are spread across several xml files throughout the aircraft directory starting at the
..FlightGear/data/Aircraft/<aircraft>/<aircraft>-set.xml for each aircraft.
(You can look into the property tree using the property tree browser found through
Menu > Debug > Browse internal properties, or pressing "/". )
The thing with FlightGear is that there isn't a centralised project management. It's a bit of an engineering and social experiment, where everybody bring their own contributions the best way they can. I'd say i's going rather well, though one might at times think that it could progress a bit faster.