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"Advertising FlightGear"  

Postby Lars0817 » Sat May 16, 2020 4:21 am

Fellow Flightgear users. According to my opinion, Flightgear is under advertised. When I say advertised, I mainly mean it's not frequently being shown on social media or the internet.

One way to fix this and therefore increase the number of flightgear pilots, atcers and developers is by choose a date (once a year, four times a year, every month) which is used by everyone with social media or other contacts to promote flightgear, not a mandatory thing. By doing it all at once, on a certain date, users of social media will see this and might think after one or two times, let's check it out.

By recruiting those pilots, atc will also become bigger as well as development resulting in a better flightgear, more realism.

It might be a smart thing to mention that it's free.

By recruiting new pilots, a snowball effect is started. More pilots means more recruiters which means even more pilots.

If you are interested in helping out in whichever way, please reply to this topic. The date will be determined.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Thorsten » Sat May 16, 2020 8:11 am

I mainly mean it's not frequently being shown on social media or the internet.


Not sure what you expect, but it has ~13.000 Facebook followers. Sure, there's pop-stars which have more, but otherwise this seems a pretty decent number.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Hooray » Sat May 16, 2020 9:13 am

Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Lars0817 » Sat May 16, 2020 10:28 am

Thorsten wrote in Sat May 16, 2020 8:11 am:
I mainly mean it's not frequently being shown on social media or the internet.


Not sure what you expect, but it has ~13.000 Facebook followers. Sure, there's pop-stars which have more, but otherwise this seems a pretty decent number.


While 13000 seems a lot, it isn't, especially since it's facebook, not a lot of them will really be active anymore because of the whole facebook/zuckerberg thing and if I were to ask people of my age whether they use facebook, most of them will say no. There's also a difference between followers and active followers. I could give you an example, I have an Instagram page with over 7000 followers, but I am not getting anywhere near 7000 likes om my posts.

If I were to search for flight simulators or top flight simulators, Flightgear isn't a name which pops a lot. Also, besides facebook there's Instagram and YouTube.

Instagram barely has any Flightgear content accounts, while FSX and Xplane have lots of them. For youtube it's pretty much the same, if you are looking for flight sim vids, the chance is pretty big you'll get an FSX, Xplane, P3d or infinite Flight video with just a few Flightgear videos if you were to scroll down.

And the most obvious one is the number of pilots online on the mpmap which usually doesn't leave 0-100 pilots.

You're right 13K isn't nothing
But all these other reasons combined are the reasons I started this topic.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Hooray » Sat May 16, 2020 11:06 am

Speaking in general, it seems that FlightGear doesn't typically appeal to average FSX/X-Plane end users, over the years FlightGear has come to primarily attract potential contributors, i.e. people not interested in payware, but rather interested in having an open/extensible system that they can tinker with, to modify and use it for all sorts of purposes.

The examples you mentioned may thus be a controversial metric to gather popularity, because FlightGear really isn't "competing" with payware at all - primarily, FlightGear is am open platform that seems to attract doers - i.e. many DIY-ers, home cockpit building, coders, artists and so on. As such, multiplayer numbers or even the absence of a multiplayer system are rather poor indicators for the popularity of the platform, given that FlightGear is primarily a volunteer effort that has zero need to attract end users only, i.e. people familiar with a payware product and ecosystem who primarily expect a similar experience when dealing with FlightGear.

This isn't to say that this is perfect or that the community appreciates these circumstances, but that's the way how the project has been operating for two decades now.

We've seen plenty of discussions over the years where this was raised, so you could run a forum search to make up your own mind.

Either way, it's unlikely that FlightGear is going to "compete" with FSX/X-Plane for end users - and the people developing software/artwork for those platforms often do so using some proprietary/closed source form, that isn't easily made compatible with an open source sim like FlightGear.

Of course, any help in promoting a new release, reviewing FlightGear, creating videos etc is going to be appreciated, just don't expect people to compare FG to FSX/X-Plane, that won't work out too well for FG :lol:
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby islandmonkey » Sat May 16, 2020 11:54 am

Hooray wrote in Sat May 16, 2020 11:06 am:Speaking in general, it seems that FlightGear doesn't typically appeal to average FSX/X-Plane end users


Eh, I must be one of these odd FG end users then, primarily because:

  • FG is free gratis and libre,
  • There are some very good examples of aircraft that didn't cost me £60 to buy (and, the amount of times I have heard X-Plane YouTubers like Swiss001 say "there isn't a good A340/A380/whatever in X-Plane" (ah, so we're not alone!!)
  • And, on the whole, FG is just good enough. My main complaints are lack of multithreading out of the box, which I blame for the reason why I got 30fps on my latest six-core Ryzen 5 and an RTX 2060 Super before I turned on AutomaticSelection -- FG chose one thread to max out by default, and better graphics, which we slowly but surely moving towards. Otherwise no complaints about the quality of flight dynamics, or, much else to be honest. Wouldn't pay 50 quid for flightgear but that's always been out of the question.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Ysop » Sat May 16, 2020 12:58 pm

In FSX I am unhappy with everything, which does not work.
In FGFS it is terrific to discover all the things, which do work (and those are a lot!)
Different mindset with more happiness :-)

Need to run an advertisement campain? No.
Making flightsimmers aware, that there is an alternative? Yes.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby CaptB » Sat May 16, 2020 3:02 pm

The best way to promote flightgear, is to use it, and show that you do, and talk about why you do. Don't get discouraged by those who try to compete on eyecandy alone. I always underline it's open nature and the freedom it provides is more important to me.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Hooray » Sun May 17, 2020 5:38 pm

Also, it does help to create "promo" videos while reviewing FlightGear - ideally, focusing on new/improved features, i.e. those mentioned in the changelog: http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php?ti ... edirect=no
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Parnikkapore » Mon May 18, 2020 7:51 am

Speaking of promo videos, I'm making one for 2020.1 on DorDek Kiddy right now ;)
There are free alternatives to (almost) every program you encounter. You just have to find them.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby J Maverick 16 » Mon May 18, 2020 9:58 am

Hooray wrote in Sat May 16, 2020 11:06 am: FlightGear really isn't "competing" with payware at all

Well I guess it's time to start considering this no?
Not much we have to loose, probably more that we can gain. Payware sims need cash and usually a more performance-driven computer than the one you would need to run FG on medium settings.
Many don't said rigs and just look up to invest their money into a more powerful PC and actually buying payware. I guess advertising FG to that type of community would be a pretty good bet to gain more users.

Personally I'm running the somewhat only good FlightGear Instagram account alongside Legoboy, but both of us have limited time because both RL and FG developing/flying takes a lot of the time. Recently I've posted the invite link to the FG Discord community saying that it's a better place to ask for support and hang out with people because I get daily PMs in there with people asking for help in how to find planes, where are the ATCs, setting shaders correctly etc. which I simply cannot answer all just because I simply don't know everything of the sim it being so wide as an example. Well, after posting the invite link we got a bump of about 50+ users on Discord who came from Instagram to ask said questions and just hang out with the rest of us. And the number is still climbing.

That said, if anyone with some good knowledge about Instagram and FlightGear would like to help me with it, I'm more than welcome to have collaborators on the page, given that they follow some simple guidelines regarding posting high quality pics etc.
Linking the Instagram account to the FG Facebook page would also be a great deal since it would allow it be a sort of approved business page and be more exposed as well. Might be worth considering.
Let me know.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby FirstOfficerDelta » Tue Aug 25, 2020 1:24 pm

Okay, so apparently this is still being discussed in Discord especially after Swiss001 made a video on FG (that was not as bad as the 2018 one). I decided to take notes about this and here is how I summed it up:

“The problem at hand is that it is hard to get new people into FlightGear because of the perceived steep learning curve that comes with joining the community.

There is also a problem identified that there is an unlimited number of ideas but a limited number of developers to implement them (just saying it like that so that it sounds like the concept of scarcity in economics).“

Now, do not take everything against me, nor to the people who discussed this, this is a discussion and must always be taken with a grain of salt.
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Hooray » Tue Aug 25, 2020 3:46 pm

I'd say it depends on which part of the community you're interested in "joining". While core development has a long-standing reputation of being an "inner circle" and having a steep learning curve, many other areas are wide open in comparison - i.e. anything involving middleware development, helping with the forum/wiki etc.

Also, to be fair, you don't need to be an fgdata or fgaddon committer to develop an aircraft, or parts of it (XML, Nasal, textures, 3D models etc)
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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby stuart » Tue Aug 25, 2020 7:54 pm

Hooray is absolutely right here.

Also, while some areas of core development do require quite a lot of knowledge of how flightgear internals work, there are other areas which are more approachable or where a new contributor could make changes or fix bugs without needing to know everything before they start.

Just find something you are interested in and get your hands dirty. You'll learn lots!

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Re: "Advertising FlightGear"

Postby Hooray » Tue Aug 25, 2020 8:09 pm

However, I'd be very careful when suggesting to start with core development ...

at least not without having an active core committer willing to "mentor" (review/discuss and integrate) related patches - the point being, the project has meanwhile a rather long history of C++ patches that were never reviewed/integrated - which is why it's obviously important to point out that non-trivial C++ patches may cause quite a bit of friction unfortunately.

Back in the early 2000s core developers like Curt, Erik, Melchior or David M. went out of their way to integrate useful stuff, often without much effort required on the part of the original developers - however, these days, that's no longer the case - the last two committers who would integrate/commit patches "proactively" were actually ThorstenB and FredB. So there's that, too.

Curt has repeatedly mentioned that there's a significant attrition rate among core developers, and other senior contributors have pointed out that getting people to "report bugs" is not as complicated as getting bugs properly triaged and fixed.

Basically, there still is a shortage of active core developers. And that's becoming even more problematic once newcomers provide patches that are non-trivial (i.e. think stuff like touching multiple subsystems or unmaintained code areas). This was repeatedly highlighted by James in response to YASim patches.

Historically, the project has also been rather hesitant to provide newcomers with commit access - even if those newcomers made sizable contributions (think sports-model/John Denker, osgEarth/Jeff Biggs, radio propagation/Adrian, to name just a few examples).

More recently, James highlighted how the project is lacking actively involved core developers familiar with OSG/OpenGL and FlightGear's rendering pipeline specifically. Thus, certain patches touching certain areas will undoubtedly provide for an uphill battle ...

So if someone is hoping to get C++ patches committed, it's best to reach out to the devel list first and ask for "bite-sized projects", and then also have the discussion who's around and who's willing to actually help review/integrate and commit those. Otherwise, there's a pretty good chance that people will end up having to maintain their own private forks "by accident", because of the project's development/manpower constraints, and overall because of the project's inertia (which ironically also is causing some stablity, i.e. it shielding the project from certain external influences).
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
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