Thorsten wrote in Sat May 14, 2011 8:17 am:It's my impression that there are so many terrestrial issues to be fixed/addressed that you probably won't get too much attention devoted to orbital flights in Flightgear.
It depends only of personal interest. You personally not interested in it because You are find task for You already. Someone else may have interest in other things.
Thorsten wrote in Sat May 14, 2011 8:17 am:While it's likely that nobody would reject an addition if you'd bring a chunk of code for high-altitude/orbital rendering, it's unlikely that you get anyone to do it for you, since it's a massive workload and everyone has his private project already. AI traffic seems to be a major open issue, weather needs to much more to be done, autopilots need tuning,...
Again, You are talks about things what interesting for You personally. Simply try to look on it from point of view of other person. For example, You do not need AI traffic at all if You are interested in military stuff. You do not need much weather if You want "simply flight". You do not need autopilot if planes what You are use not using it really.
So there is no common matters. There is never real common matters, only matters common for some people. You are talking of what interesting for You now. I write it for other person, who may be interesting in spaceflight.
Thorsten wrote in Sat May 14, 2011 8:17 am:Orbital flights opens a whole new can of worms besides the need for different rendering - completely different physics, completely different numerical stability issues,... basically you want to write a new orbital simulator, because the amount of stuff you can really use from a flight simulator is pretty small.
There is no real difference, nor in physics, nor in stability. Only different accounting of gravity. There is no real difference. JSBSim, what Flight Gear is using already, accounts all needed things at least for low Earth orbit flight. You seems to not had read what I did wrote too. If I write "spaceflight is possible already...I did it number of times" it means what I did it from takeoff to land exactly as it was in reality.
I do not want to write other simulator because there is not so many people who interested in spaceflight much enough. Everything what used rarely is first candidate to be broken or forgotten. Let's count it simply... It's easy because we already have
http://avsim.net/ with topics of most flight simulators, including open source flight simulator Flight Gear, Windows oriented space flight simulator Orbiter, and Windows oriented flight simulator MSFSX.
Number of topics in Flight Gear forum: ~30pages with 20 topics on page.
Number of topics in Orbiter forum: ~6pages
Number of topics in MSFSX forum: ~3500pages
So, some open source space flight simulator what I would made could have ~(fg/msfx)*orbiter=0.05pages. With 20 topics on page it means... 1 topic. What that topic could be? "New free spaceflight simulator is created", heh.
What would it mean to be exact? No evolving and fast oblivion, because to time when someone else would get interest there will be other, more proper, solutions. Is it reasonable to put years of hard work in it? Not, exactly. Not. Otherwise someone else already would start it.
Of course I would want to make freeware open source space flight simulator for everybody. But I am smart enough to avoid suicidal attempts. To continuously improve already existed open source simulator is more vital and realistic way.
Waste of time: too unprofitable for work, too exhausting for hobby.