FGRS wrote: I'm trying for years to persuade people here that the A 320 Family is a great family of aircraft but and that is worth fixing and further developing ,but nobody gives a damn about it...
If that's the case, i.e. you having spent years "trying to persuade people", you should have better used that time to ask questions on how to make some simple changes. None of this is difficult or even involves programming - most of it is just editing text files and images. There's a ton of stuff that can be accomplished like that. We've all been there and started out exactly like that: being frustrated with the way FG worked, and nobody else taking any interest in listening to our feedback - then again, how are people supposed to listen to someone who prefers criticizing stuff instead of rolling up his own sleeves and playing around a bit to make some simple experiments first ?
I certainly would not listen to such a person, and neither did anybody listen to me when I pointed out the issues I saw.
You will see a ton of other examples for this - people like Thorsten started out here being really frustrated with the way the project works, and with the way things were "just happening" instead of being planned. Fast forward ~5 years later, some of us have become contributors. While we've certainly spent a fair amount of time in the meantime, we also started out with little to zero background knowledge, many of us without any programming background whatsoever, and some still having never written a single line of code, despite having become key contributors in the meantime.
There's nothing "worn out" here at all - you will find a huge number of contributors who are neither programmers, nor fgdata committers - yet, they're contributors.
Honestly, you need to decide if you want to get involved or if you just want to provide feedback and let others act on it (or not....)
This is not intended to sound negative - I can perfectly relate to people not interested in contributing, I am myself also not interested in contributing to certain areas, and cannot imagine having the motivation to learn certain stuff (such as 3D modeling or doing FDMs for example) - then again, there are others doing these things, and I can help them by doing stuff that I am interested in.
You really don't need to touch anything in fgdata or FlightGear to become a contributor here - even if you were to just help with the forum or the wiki, your feedback would have much more weight than just being a random user who decides to point out things missing in his opinion.
There's nobody disagreeing with what you say concerning the A320 - but then again the people who worked on it, are likely to be much more familiar with existing issues than you are.
Basically you are looking for volunteers to solve a bunch of problems that you consider really important, but you do not show any incentive to roll up your own sleeves to fix certain things yourself, or even just contribute to different FG areas.
Frankly, I don't care if you don't like aircraft modeling, 3D modeling, texturing or programming - but there's certainly /some/ niche in FG where you could contribute. Even if it just involves contributing to the newsletter. That alone would allow others to see that you are a valuable member of this community, and they might actually consider helping you.
Nobody here is asking you to become a programmer or aircraft developer.
To be honest, I fully agree that FG's support for older hardware has not really improved very much during the last 2-3 release cycles, and I find it a pity too.
But to me, this is not about some outdated aircraft - it's a core problem, that should and could be tackled, and people like you could actually help with it, e.g. by contributing to the issue tracker whenever something doesn't work as expected.
IF we had more people like you contributing to the project
actively, certain things would not go unnoticed.
For example, I actually contributed a tiny little patch 2-3 years ago which was intended to provide better diagnostics for OpenGL/shader issues.
It was trivial, but it actually broke FG for people who didn't have hardware supporting shaders, i.e. people with old hardware - like you.
I never noticed anything, and neither did any core developers - because we all had sufficiently modern hardware.
Then again, we cannot all have dozens of computers to test FG on, that's where folks like you come in.
I would LOVE to have 20+ people here with really outdated hardware who regularly test-run FG on such hardware and provide feedback via the issue tracker.
And I would volunteer my time to help ensure that things are kept working on such platforms.
But so far, we have very few folks actually interested in contributing in this way to the project.
If you are specifically interested in older aircraft, I'd suggest to get in touch with openflight, he's the main guy here who actually goes out of his way to improve support for older FG versions and older hardware configuration, see:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=14971viewtopic.php?f=42&t=17521viewtopic.php?f=42&t=19213viewtopic.php?f=72&t=21385viewtopic.php?f=42&t=21468viewtopic.php?f=42&t=21612Now, I don't entirely agree with him on technical grounds, but that guy sure is one thing:
consistent, he's been following his mission for several years now, and is obviously looking into more and more ways to make it happen.
And as you can see, he's already found 2-3 other guys interested in this - ideally, all of you would really team up and document things using the wiki.
You could come up with a roadmap and milestones, you could document what's working/broken, and what's missing.
You would end up being a handful of folks, and if you can pull this off - you'd definitely have my attention, and probably the attention from others as well.
But what's typically happening instead ? People start their own threads, or even contribute to unrelated ones - so that things go unnoticed for months or even years.
Seriously, spend 20 minutes going through openflight's postings here, start a wiki article and document things - get in touch with him and others, let us know what's broken - and learn how to use the issue tracker, and I promise you the situation will be better in 12-18 months.
And PLEASE, do yourself a favor and read this:
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=15267If you should still find yourself being frustrated with the way the project works and the lack of action by core developers, just imagine for a second someone were to give you commit access to FG - all of a sudden, you'd be considered a "(core) developer" by others - but nothing would've changed for you - still, people would be asking to act on their feedback