mods (modifications)

[pilot]

how about mods for flight gear so you could get a water realism mod (drive on top if fast enough but sink if too slow), or um I can't think of any more.

[5H1N0B1]

Some aircrafts already do something close to that...
It's true that flightgear have so many aircraft it's difficult to test (taste ) them all...
But you will find something close to what you told...(except none of them are sinking...)

[pilot]

well mods could actually help in FAA approved flight simulators to make FG more realistic to give pilots better training (any pilots who train with Flightgear take note) maybe a mod tat allows ejection, plane damage, plane blowing up and more.

[Hooray]

Due to FlightGear's open nature, it is fairly straightforward to "mod" it, because you don't need to use any heavily-restricted 3rd party SDKs - and you could argue that we've been seeing lots of "mods" over the years actually - such as flug's bombable addon, Thorsten's local weather system (now "advanced weather") or the "ATC aircraft". Similarly, there are a few core projects that started out as a "mod" and that got absorbed somewhere down the road.

FlightGear being based on XML, scripting and open file formats, you can easily modify it - usually even without having to touch the source code. Some of the more recent additions like the Canvas system for example, make it increasingly easy to customize FlightGear in totally novel ways, and even use it for completely new projects and unprecedented ideas.

Thus, nobody here is opposed to "mods" or "modding" - as can be seen, we are seeing dozens of such "mods" that have become a part of FlightGear - and you could even argue that any new aircraft/vehicle is a form of "modding" FlightGear.

As has been mentioned previously, modding is already possible - it just works in a slightly different way, because it doesn't necessarily involve SDKs or building FG from source - Thorsten and others have demonstrated that the simulator can be extensively customized/modded without having to touch any C++ code - the most advanced weather system we have is not written in C++ code, it's been developed in scripting space and augmented through custom shaders.

Bottom line being, "modding" is already going on - it's a part of FlightGear development - it's just that some of these mods stand a better chance of being integrated/absorbed at some point (think weather, rembrandt, canvas), while others may have a hard time (think bombable).

[pilot]

um ... I'm thinking of and option to have to choose and not have it permanent