Hello,
For some years @Hooray and I have discussed the ongoing work with HLA etc. to modularize FlightGear and make it possible to turn off whole subsections of the program in order to hand over control of those areas to another program.
I have had a side burner project for all this time, using FG in conjunction with a game engine (Torque3D) for rendering, and with recent work I'm doing on my front burner project, the thing would almost be a playable game interface, right now. It's definitely gone past the realm of laboratory testing and into the zone of actual fun. However, in terms of the general public it is IMHO fatally flawed by the fact that I have to start up both FlightGear and Torque separately and get everything all arranged in each program to in order to make it work. If I could just start my game, and at some point along the way have it start up FG, with command line variables setting everything up in fgfs, and be able to tell it to just kill the entire rendering process so as to remain completely in the background... then I might actually have something interesting here.
I'm unfortunately still a complete neophyte in terms of the FG codebase, and as I mentioned this being a kind of side burner project for me, I'd really love it if I didn't have to learn the whole engine and go untangle six months worth of spaghetti before I can possibly get what I want. Though I'd still like to hear the route, if this is the case, since it may yet turn into a front burner job at some point.
However, I'd also be interested in any hacks or gimmicky kluges that might avoid major effort but still fulfill my actual needs: a) not taking up desktop space and mental clutter for the end user by showing FG running, and b) saving performance by avoiding FG draw calls.
Thanks for all the hard work! FG is amazing.
Chris