Is FlightGear being Optimized?

[AVA117]

I use to run FlightGear 2016.2 now I have switched to 2017.1?

And I noticed FlightGear runs better on my laptop and doesn't crash anymore so is FlightGear being optimized?

[Hooray]

There is no orchestrated effort to do this - however, you can review the commit logs, and the devel list, to see that a number of bug fixes/patches were recently committed - but even absent that, a new FlightGear release may contain major improvements without any significant work necessarily done by any FlightGear core developers in that department, which is primarily because FlightGear as a project stands on the shoulders of giants by being built on a handful of architectural pillars, so called "dependencies", which form the backbone of the simulator - for instance, OpenSceneGraph (OSG), which is much more active in terms of manpower and resources going into the project compared to FlightGear - thus, getting a new FlightGear version - or even getting the same version, build against updated dependencies, may bring major improvements with it.

However, more often than not, the FlightGear project may also need to change its way of using said dependencies, which is because the underlying toolkits/libraries require certain "protocols" and "coding patterns" to be used in order to benefit from certain optimizations - OSG as a toolkit is much more powerful and much more comprising than the narrow subset that FlightGear is using, which is primarily because FlightGear used to be built around a totally different toolkit (PLIB SSG), and it literally took over a decade to "port" FlightGear/PLIB to FlightGear/OSG - but even today, there is a plethora of OSG-level optimizations that are not even used by FlightGear - to put things into perspective, the PagedLOD work took also several years to complete, even though OSG provided support for that for many years - equally, there's support for OSG's CompositeViewer that FlightGear is not making use of (yet), even though many/most core developers seem to agree that this would be a good project.

In general however, there is no orchestrated effort in place to regularly review/profile, instrument and optimize the FlightGear codebase - which mainly boils down to manpower issues, as well as a certain barrier to entry to getting patches committed upstream.

However, as can be seen, that doesn't necessarily mean that FlightGear's performance doesn't improve over time - for instance, a number of long-standing performance issues were identified by accident and fixed over time.

http://wiki.flightgear.org/PagedLOD
http://wiki.flightgear.org/CompositeViewer_Support

[AVA117]

I see thank you for replying with clear details!