stuart wrote:(This is going slightly off topic, but in response to Crashpilot I thought it worth responding to point out the ways in which people can contribute.)
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Submitting bug reports accurately is a good example. You can do so by using the FG Bug Tracker (
http://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/). This is new, but if used sensibly, a very good tool to help us Devs.
Crashpilot wrote:Why should I have to contribute C++ code to state that I think Flightgear wastes major potential by minor mistakes?
You can contribute in many ways without writing code. For example, placing objects in the scenery with the UFO and submitting them to the Scenery Objects DB is pretty straightforward and takes very little time. Even an hour spent doing this would make a difference.
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Crashpilot wrote:For example, having ~300 Aircrafts to download might look impressive in the first place, but causes more harm than benefits if the vast majority of them are unfinished and/or orphaned. The thing is, the jewels hide in the crowd. People will download some fancy looking Crafts with very high expectations, and will become disappointed by it: "Not yet done". After some tries they will think "what a crappy sim" and leave. Small issue, big impact. There are other examples, like Scenery.
... and yet everyone seems intent on creating new aircraft rather than improving existing ones?
One way you could easily contribute would be to submit patches to CVS setting the "status" flag on each aircraft accurately. Yes, it'll require learning a bit about CVS, and XML, but that would be a fine contribution. You'd have to decide on appropriate criteria for the status flags, but that isn't impossible.
Crashpilot wrote:Flightgear do lack of marketing, release management and distribution. Not important you say? Well, I think this is where some greedy people kick in and take advantage of this by offering an actual distribution - for sale!
Release management actually works pretty well. Certainly the timescales for a release have improved significantly over the last couple of years. You are absolutely correct that marketing is a significant issue, and has caused some real headaches. Unfortunately most of the current contributors are too busy making improvements to the simulator to spend the time on marketing. This is an area where new people could contribute successfully.
Another simple way to contribute would be to write an appropriate review for one of the major Flight Sim websites. Even writing some articles for the FG Newsletter would help.
In fact a quick search of the wiki came up with this page:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php/Volunteer, which lists lots of ways to contribute to the simulator.
-Stuart