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Terrible Experience with Flightgear

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Terrible Experience with Flightgear

Postby AndrewCz » Fri Dec 23, 2016 2:34 pm

Hello all, hope you are well.

I recently decided to try out a flight sim and was really stoked that Flightgear was a thing. However, at the end of about three or four hours of trying to enjoy this program, I noticed that I was more frustrated than anything.

For background, I am running Arch on a Lenovo T430 (beefed up by some hardware mods) and the graphics, startup time, etc went as smoothly as could be expected. The in-game experience is what had me tearing my hair out.

First of all, since it didn't install to the desktop, I had to figure out how to run it - with what command. That was surprising since I know of no other program named "flightgear" and would never have thought to type "fgfs". But that was an easy complication.

When I did start the program up, I started in a large, open area that was very bluish in hue, in a plane that was turned off, and realized I had no clue how to do anything. Luckily you guys have some very thorough tutorials. However, I haven't been able to ascend into the air even once, having been frustrated in my attempts to do so.

For instance, when I selected the very first tutorial (RE: Preflight Checklist) I found that I could not advance past the step of removing the wind speed cap (${terminology}) that is required directly after stepping outside of the plane at that point. No matter how many times I clicked it would not move. I must have restarted the program about five times taking different approaches (CTRL-C for wireframes, etc) but not being able to manipulate it at all. Fortunately, I found that I could bring up the checklist and press the button indicated with a greater than symbol to accomplish the task. Ok, it's a work-around anyways.

So I am now able to continue with the tutorial, and come around to the other side of the plane. At that point I needed to check the cleanliness of the fuel to see if it was light blue or clear. Now, doing this on the right side of the plane went perfectly fine, however, I must have accomplished the task faster than the program anticipated, because it kept prompting me to repeat the action, as if it had not registered the action. I attempted to, however, since it was an automatic pop-up, nothing that I could click would let me do it again. Now, that last sentence may not be true, but I wouldn't know. I certainly know that there was no button on the checklist ('>') to autocomplete the action. But even more frustrating was that for every button with a question mark on it there was the same non-action across the board. Not one of the - what I can only assume would be - help buttons did a single, solitary thing. So here I am, restarting the entire program because I got stuck in a simulation.

After I eventually completed that one, the next tutorial - not automatically loaded or anything - was starting up. This was pretty basic, straight forward, and only took me two attempts. Initially, I messed up the magnetos switch. This is the one that that both turns the engine on as well as selects between the right and the left "magnetos" I guess. Anyways, when required to turn it to the left, it got turned all the way off. I mean, that one's on me - sure. But now that meant that I had to do everything prior to starting the plane again. This, while the tutorial was still waiting for it to be turned to the left. Having only gone through the startup procedure for a Cessna 172p for the first time in my life about two and a half minutes ago, I decided to restart the tutorial rather than attempt to recall all of that information offhand. Luckily enough, the tutorials are modular and can be individually restarted over and over again, but more on that later.

Like I said, compared to the rest of them, that tutorial was a breeze. The next (and last) one awaiting me was the Taxiing Tutorial. Keep in mind that I'm still in a big body of water, not knowing that this wasn't how the program was meant to be experienced. See, I mention that because I got a whole face full of water at that point. When the tutorial started I heard the customary plane crash and - you know what? I hadn't mentioned that before. Each time I started, restarted, or finished either a tutorial of the program itself, there was a crash noise that went off. Two crash noises if it was a tutorial, and just one if it was restarting the program entirely. That was jarring the first several times when I wasn't expecting them, but I got used to the aural assault eventually.

Anyways, where was I. Oh yes, I got a face full of water. And sky. Maybe that's because I was situated facing the propeller on top of the hood of the Cessna. That was quite the surprise. Also, not being able to manipulate any of the controls (or even see them for that matter, what with being on the hood of the plane and all) really threw me for a loop. Luckily I still had the instructor letting me know which buttons to press to open the throttle and steer. So, naturally, I did.

The message that I received from the instructor was to open up the throttle, scale it back once the plane started moving, and wait for the ground to change color. Only two things wrong with that. How was I supposed to know if I was moving if all I saw were two shades of blue split at the horizon and how was I supposed to move. Needless to say, I spent too long (by any reckoning) with the throttle just wide open and chillin'. Finally I decided to restart the game after cycling through all of the views of this beautiful plane stuck in a body of water only to return back to the hood instead of the cockpit every time.

After restarting it, I got back to that same simulation, and the engine didn't autostart for me. I honestly don't have any kind of snarky remark for that because it did that twice and then never again. Huh. However. The plane would not move. Come hell or high water, that plane would not move. Brakes, tie-downs, you name it, I checked it. That plane (still in the middle of the god forsaken ocean by the way) would just not move. As in, the airspeed indicated never even twitched - not even once. And every time I restarted that tutorial, I heard the sound of plane crash twice in a row, and then was faced by a non-moving plane. I tried putting it in another location - which was supposed to be the included KSFO airport. I tried setting all of the necessary environment variables. I tore through the logfiles, all of which amounted to squat. There was no way in hell that the plane I was sitting in would move no matter the cajoling or pleading that I did with it.

It was at that point that I gave up. I figured, why torture myself over this. If this program doesn't want to be used, why should I continue to attempt to use it? The killer was...the absolute bitch of it was that according to the manual ch. 8.3: "Once FlightGear is started you will see the following window and hear the sound of an engine". Mine started in a big body of water with the sound of a plane crash. Ominous, no?
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Re: Terrible Experience with Flightgear

Postby sanhozay » Fri Dec 23, 2016 3:22 pm

Which version of Flightgear did you install, where did you get it from and how did you install it?

Did you start the simulator using "fgfs" as a command, i.e. no other command line options? (That would be OK).

Could you post the contents of ~/.fgfs/fgfs.log?

Clearly you aren't getting any scenery, but there could be various reasons for that, depending how you installed it and how you ran it.
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Re: Terrible Experience with Flightgear

Postby rominet » Fri Dec 23, 2016 4:16 pm

Hello AndrewCz,

Sorry for your experience, I hope you're not too badly traumatized. It seems to me your biggest problem is that you started in a place with no scenery at all (which puts you in the ocean). The two simplest ways to avoid this are IMHO:
  • start at the default airport for your FG version (which one is it?), which is normally included in the base package;
  • alternatively, if you have a decent Internet connection, use TerraSync which will download the scenery prior to FG showing the landscape (and also as you fly). If you started FG from the command line, this can be done by passing --enable-terrasync to the fgfs program. You may also pass --download-dir=/what/you/want to control where this scenery will be downloaded to, as well as other data (for now, aircraft downloaded using the builtin launcher). If you use a launcher instead of the fgfs command line, please say which one it is.

    Note: to try the builtin launcher, use 'fgfs --launcher', the download dir can be then be configured from its GUI. But this launcher is not available in old versions, or versions of FG compiled without Qt support.
One thing that contributed to your bad experience is that you seem to have been reading an outdated FG manual (“The FlightGear Manual — March 8, 2015 — For FlightGear version 3.4.0“ from your link), whereas the current FG version is 2016.4.3 and was released a few weeks ago.

As you can see, there is a new version numbering scheme (year.minor.micro) with four minor releases per year (1, 2, 3 and 4) and since this was started with 2016.1.1, the default airport changes with each release (giving each release a “cool marketing name”—ahem :roll:). But for decades before, the default airport used to be San Francisco (KSFO), which your old manual assumed to be the case.

So, if you know which version you are using ('fgfs --version' should tell you), it should be relatively easy to find your default airport. Another way is to start the simulator at the default airport (i.e., without giving any --airport option on the fgfs command line), type / to open the Property Browser and look at the /sim/airport/closest-airport-id property, which will give you the airport identifier (often an ICAO code).

Yet another way, using the command line and assuming your FG version is 2016.4.1 or later, could be:
Code: Select all
% fgfs --json-report 2>/dev/null
{
        "meta": {
                "type": "FlightGear JSON report",
                "format major version": 1,
                "format minor version": 0
        },
        "general":      {
                "name": "FlightGear",
                "version":      "2017.1.0",
                "build ID":     "none"
        },
        "config":       {
                "FG_ROOT":      "/home/flo/flightgear/src/fgdata",
                "FG_HOME":      "/home/flo/.fgfs",
                "scenery paths":        ["/home/flo/.fgfs/TerraSync"],
                "aircraft paths":       [],
                "TerraSync directory":  "/home/flo/.fgfs/TerraSync",
                "download directory":   "/home/flo/.fgfs",
                "autosave file":        "/home/flo/.fgfs/autosave_2017_1.xml"
        },
        "navigation data":      {
                "apt.dat files":        ["/home/flo/flightgear/src/fgdata/Airports/apt.dat.gz"]
        }
}

Depending on how your FG was installed, you could have $FG_ROOT/Scenery in the list of scenery paths given by this command, and inspecting it would probably tell you all airports installed by default in your case (by far not the easiest way, I admit, but this command may help you understand your installation a bit better, which is why I am giving it. 'fgfs --version' also gives parts of this info, and is supported in older FG versions).

As you can see on this and that links (same thread, but the SourceForge archive doesn't make it obvious), the problem of the outdated manual linked from http://www.flightgear.org/ is being worked on. Just bad timing for you!

Finally, the various aircraft tutorials may not be perfect, but this is free software (waiting for your reports and/or contributions), and may vary from aircraft to aircraft. To avoid this frustration, you may want to skip them entirely for now, or try different aircraft with an autostart function that “just works” (777-200ER, 707 or 707-TT, f-14b, dhc6, PC-9M, Citation-II and many, many others). The c172p is a great aircraft, but sometimes its great sophistication/realism makes it more difficult to start than other simpler or not-in-such-an-active-development aircraft. Generally, the autostart function is either available in the last menu (aircraft-specific, press F10 if you don't see the menu bar) or on the 's' key, or not available at all (in which case there may be help bound to the '?' key, or on the FG wiki).

After the autostart has finished (listen to the engines; sometimes, a message is printed at the top of the screen), if pressing Page Up doesn't cause the aircraft to move, press Shift-B once to release the parking brakes in case they were on.

Hope this helps.
Last edited by rominet on Fri Dec 23, 2016 7:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Terrible Experience with Flightgear

Postby ludomotico » Fri Dec 23, 2016 4:26 pm

Since you are not getting any scenery, it is going to be difficult to move the plane on water :)

Unfortunately, the tutorial system is a bit unstable at the moment. For your first flight I guess you'll prefer to "autostart" the aircraft (an option in the c172p menu) and just fly a bit. Also, each time you press Ctrl+U, your altitude increases 500ft. You can at least fly a bit at 6000ft even with the engine off.

While fixing your scenery problem (and this should be your priority), you can check the options of the C172P, install the optional floaters, "auto repare" the aircraft and then "autostart". This way, you will be able to move on water.

"fgfgs --launcher" will launch the application with a convenient graphical launcher to set some options. Check if "terrasync" is on. Terrasync is used to download scenery automatically.
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Re: Terrible Experience with Flightgear

Postby wlbragg » Fri Dec 23, 2016 5:15 pm

@AndrewCz, especially after having experienced such frustration, thank you for taking the time to post such a detailed chronology of your new user, first time, experience. I can only wonder how many other first time users had something like this happen to them and didn't even bother to report back to us their horrible experience. It is really valuable to developers of FlightGear to get input from a new user with no knowledge of the internal workings of this program. I can see how even some of the replies could seem like Greek to someone with no base knowledge of how this simulator works.

I would suggest you post to the forum sooner rather than later if you need more help.

If you still want to try and get this program working, it's worth it in the end if you like this kind of simulator, I would suggest you get the scenery working first. For us to help you we need to know where you got your program and how it was installed. After that we more than likely will have more questions in order to help you sort it out.

Finally, your detailed report isn't going on def ears. It should be an eye opener to everyone that has anything to do with the development of FlightGear. There are things we as a community can do to minimize this type of new user experience.

It truly is ashame your first impression of this incredible simulator is so bad.
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Re: Terrible Experience with Flightgear

Postby AndrewCz » Fri Dec 23, 2016 10:10 pm

Hey guys, thanks for the kind words. I think my post was mainly meant like @wlbragg mentioned: to report on the experience of a first time user.

I definitely want to figure this out and find out what all went wrong, and even hopefully provide some actionable feedback instead of just complaints. However, I don't think I'll be able to make the time to get back to this anytime soon. However, I will definitely be using this thread as a jumping off point when I do. And just for my reference for when I come back around to working on this:

  • --launcher
  • terrasync
  • autostart
  • are the tutorials stable yet?

Once again, thanks for the response, I know this is free software (I use FOSS almost exclusively) and I am very glad to see the quality of the community around this piece of software. I'll see what I can do as far as bug reporting goes soon. Catch you on the flip side.

P.S. Installed via Arch repos - flightgear version 2016.3.1 (must've been a couple of weeks ago)
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Re: Terrible Experience with Flightgear

Postby rominet » Fri Dec 23, 2016 11:08 pm

The default airport in FG 2016.3.1 should be SBRJ (Rio de Janeiro , cf. the wiki). To see its scenery, you should have somewhere in your FG installation a file called Airports/S/B/R/SBRJ.groundnet.xml (among others), precisely at /usr/share/flightgear/data/Scenery/Airports/S/B/R/SBRJ.groundnet.xml if your installation corresponds to https://www.archlinux.org/packages/comm ... gear-data/

In this case, if the package was properly prepared, running:
Code: Select all
fgfs --airport=SBRJ

should put you on hard ground. If this doesn't work, try being explicit about FG_ROOT:
Code: Select all
fgfs --fg-root=/usr/share/flightgear/data --airport=SBRJ

If this still doesn't work, you can also be explicit about the scenery path(s) by appending this to either of the previous commands:
Code: Select all
--fg-scenery=/usr/share/flightgear/data/Scenery

If you want to use TerraSync with its default directory ($HOME/.fgfs/TerraSync on Linux), you may specify several scenery paths like this:
Code: Select all
fgfs ... --enable-terrasync --fg-scenery="$HOME/.fgfs/TerraSync:/usr/share/flightgear/data/Scenery"

Paths coming earlier in --fg-scenery take precedence over those coming later, so in such a case, TerraSync scenery will be preferred if available. Normally, if you just use --enable-terrasync and have an existing /usr/share/flightgear/data/Scenery directory, not specifying --fg-scenery at all should do the same as what I just wrote.

Or you can use 'fgfs --launcher' (probably easier for the first time experience).
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Re: Terrible Experience with Flightgear

Postby Thorsten » Sat Dec 24, 2016 7:57 am

Just a few observations:

* After we separated the default scenery from FGData, I'm actually not clear on how we ship it under Linux at all. For Windows and Mac, the user gets a self-contained startup package containing FGData and the default airport scenery, but looking at our download page, for Linux we rely on the various distros to package (or the user has to download/compile and then care for scenery on his own it seems).

If (and I don't know that) a Linux distribution doesn't follow our packaging scheme with moving default airport, you might well end up without initial scenery. Same if you compile yourself and don't realize you need to acquire the scenery package yourself.

At least partially that's out of our hands (and should be reported to the distro packager)

* Of course FG starting up without scenery is a bummer, and I'm surprised the rest works as good as it did with the aircraft submerged in water... so this was dead on arrival, the tutorials and checklists simply aren't made to deal with how you get the aircraft out of the water, onto floats and then start from there...

* Years back when I last installed FG via a distro, I actually got an automatic menu link. So it's possible to do that, and I guess also possible to automagically use the launcher rather than to assume commandline - but again, that's in the hands of the packager and out of ours. Also, for self-compiled FG, that might simply be without Qt and launcher capability at all, so there's nothing automatic here.

For Windows, the installation is again much more streamlined.

* Checklists and terminology... The C-172p has made a lot of progress towards realism in recent times. Which is a good thing in my view. The issue that follows is of course that just as you can't sit in a real plane and expect to take off but you have to spend a few hours to learn the basics before you get into the air, now you have a fairly steep learning curve ahead if you don't come with a flight background.

I guess part of the solution is (particularly in the C-172p as default aircraft) to draw attention more on features like auto-completion of tutorials or auto-start to bridge the gap. Also the ability to resume to a 'clean' state if you messed up some tutorial might not be a bad thing.

The alternative is to use a different default aircraft that's still easier to start up and get into the air.

Though I believe the state support will solve this nicely.

* There's plenty of knowledge about FG that's terribly handy if you start the first time - existence and usage of the launcher, how to acquire scenery and aircraft,... I'm not sure on how up to date the manual is at this point, but I think figuring it all out without reading any documentation is a tough nut. So the question is - is the existing documentation not accessible enough?

A realistic flightsim will never be simple in the sense that you can expect to load any aircraft and be in the air three minutes later - something like the Concorde or the Space Shuttle will have to be learned for days and weeks before you can really operate them properly.

So in my view our task is less to provide something self-explanatory, but to make the existence of the documentation known to a first-timer.
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