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Feature Poll

Discussion and requests for new features. Please note that FlightGear developers are volunteers and may or may not be able to consider these requests.

What would you want to see most of all in the next flight gear major release? You got 3 votes!

More Aircrafts
6
2%
Improved Aircrafts
54
17%
Better Scenery (better textures)
47
15%
More Accurate Scenery
47
15%
Better Sky
5
2%
Better Sea
7
2%
Improved Physics
26
8%
Better Sound
7
2%
Crash And Other 3D Effects
13
4%
Improved Performance (frame rate)
37
12%
More 3D AI Models (cars on the roads and trains on the railways)
18
6%
Better GUI
11
4%
Improved fgrun Tool (easier to use)
9
3%
More 3D Buildings And Objects
15
5%
Space Flight Support
10
3%
 
Total votes : 312

Re: Feature Poll

Postby Crashpilot » Mon Apr 05, 2010 7:16 pm

Stuart, I thank you for your answer, and I think you are mostly right. Just one thing I ask you to consider: Is there really a sharp distinction between contributing and non-contributing people? Your text sounded a little bit like there is a "we" and "they" to me. But isn't there a group between those entities? I think so, and I believe most non-developers posting here belong to it.

I am subscribed to the mailing list for over 2 (maybe three?) years now, I am monitoring IRC as often as possible, and I am reading a lot in flightgears wiki and forum. I am currently learning C/C++ and I recently wrote just for fun (or for self-education) a standalone autopilot using flightgears socket- and telnet-interface (unfortunately I lagged control engineering skills, but at least the communication uplink/downlink worked). Sometimes my real live (work, family) demand my time, and all those projects hibernate for month. :cry:

To make a long story short, admitted, I have never contributed anything useful to flightgear, nonetheless I just don't feel like the guy who just downloaded flightgear considering it as a "free game", and who starts to rant about it in the forum after he "played" it for a while. And I guess many people here feel like that. Please be aware of that.

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Re: Feature Poll

Postby stuart » Tue Apr 06, 2010 10:02 am

Crashpilot wrote:Stuart, I thank you for your answer, and I think you are mostly right. Just one thing I ask you to consider: Is there really a sharp distinction between contributing and non-contributing people? Your text sounded a little bit like there is a "we" and "they" to me. But isn't there a group between those entities? I think so, and I believe most non-developers posting here belong to it.


You make a good point - there isn't a black-and-white distinction - that's largely just a strawman that I've put up.

However, I've lost count of the number of times people state "I'd love to contribute to FG, but I don't know any C++", which a lot of the time is a bit of a cop out. I think these people _could_ contribute valuably in a variety of ways.

The issues identified in this topic will only get addressed with voluntary effort, and the best way to make that happen is for people to roll up their sleeves and get involved. Most of the current contributors are extremely busy people and don't have the bandwidth to address new issues.

Just to give you an idea, here's what I currently do in FG on top of a full time job, moving house and preparing for a baby in September:
- Moderate the forums
- (Sometimes) edit the newsletter
- Maintain The Manual
- Maintain c172p, pitts1c, vulcanb2, flash2a, c182, c182rg
- 3D clouds & trees (though these are basically complete now)
- Random enhancements (currently looking at improving AI aircraft performance)

Only the last two of these require C++, and only the first of these requires a signficant time commitment, yet together they represent a lot of time.

Crashpilot wrote:I am subscribed to the mailing list for over 2 (maybe three?) years now, I am monitoring IRC as often as possible, and I am reading a lot in flightgears wiki and forum. I am currently learning C/C++ and I recently wrote just for fun (or for self-education) a standalone autopilot using flightgears socket- and telnet-interface (unfortunately I lagged control engineering skills, but at least the communication uplink/downlink worked). Sometimes my real live (work, family) demand my time, and all those projects hibernate for month. :cry:

To make a long story short, admitted, I have never contributed anything useful to flightgear, nonetheless I just don't feel like the guy who just downloaded flightgear considering it as a "free game", and who starts to rant about it in the forum after he "played" it for a while. And I guess many people here feel like that. Please be aware of that.


Understood.

It would be great if you could write a couple of paragraphs on your autopilot investigations for the next edition of the FG Newsletter. That would be very interesting, and would only take 30 minutes or so.

-Stuart
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Re: Feature Poll

Postby Crashpilot » Wed Apr 07, 2010 7:07 pm

stuart wrote:However, I've lost count of the number of times people state "I'd love to contribute to FG, but I don't know any C++", which a lot of the time is a bit of a cop out. I think these people _could_ contribute valuably in a variety of ways.


Sure. The Cpp-Argument is "a Strawman", too. 8)

stuart wrote:It would be great if you could write a couple of paragraphs on your autopilot investigations for the next edition of the FG Newsletter. That would be very interesting, and would only take 30 minutes or so.


My experience regarding autopilots were that I lag a lot of theory in control engineering. I don't want to report on that topic (yet), it might be a little bit embarrassing, and everybody would ask why the heck I just don't use regulators of Flightgears code as a template...

But, for now my focus lies on learning FLTK, with the objective of creating an external program to monitor (and alter) various properties/internals of a Flightgear instance (I am aware of projects like OpenGC or fggc, though I want to do it myself due to educational reasons). If interested in it I can report about this when I have achieved something worth to show.

Regards, Crashpilot
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Re: Feature Poll

Postby El Flauta » Fri Apr 09, 2010 4:31 am

MD-Terp wrote:
simbabeat wrote:I say 24 because 24 is the industry medium (correct me if I'm wrong here) for video.

I believe motion picture (film) is 24, and television (and videotape) is 36...??

24 frames per second is just a motion picture standard.

For TV and video, are 29.7 or 30 FPS. Computer video used to have 30 FPS ;)
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Re: Feature Poll

Postby AndersG » Fri Apr 09, 2010 4:50 pm

El Flauta wrote:24 frames per second is just a motion picture standard.

For TV and video, are 29.7 or 30 FPS. Computer video used to have 30 FPS ;)


That's NTSC TV and video. PAL TV are 50 interlaced frames per second giving 25 full frames per second.

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Re: Feature Poll

Postby Sebulba » Mon Apr 12, 2010 11:08 am

Hi everyone! I'll try to inform people again on what is going on with the development of flight gear on the things that we voted on this poll. Actually there is only one thing i noticed that is relevant to our "requests" here and that is the " User selectable quality level for effects" that allows users to improve their frame rate. That is very good... see it here: http://frbouvi.free.fr/flightsim/fgfs_quality_level.gif
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Re: Feature Poll

Postby jack » Wed Apr 21, 2010 6:36 am

I think that arming more military aircraft should be a priority. I HATE to see such beautiful missiles on the F-14B when I can't even use them!!!!! :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:
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Re: Feature Poll

Postby grtux » Wed Apr 21, 2010 10:49 am

jackmermod wrote:I think that arming more military aircraft should be a priority. I HATE to see such beautiful missiles on the F-14B when I can't even use them!!!!! :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:



I see, your policy is WAR and FIGHT but nothing. :D
What about to fly ( not to play ) in peace ?

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Re: Feature Poll

Postby Sebulba » Wed Apr 21, 2010 11:08 am

jackmermod wrote:I think that arming more military aircraft should be a priority. I HATE to see such beautiful missiles on the F-14B when I can't even use them!!!!! :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:


ha! that is a valid point. i also think about that when i fly military airplanes...some of them fire their guns...for the missiles to be entertaining they should exlode on the ground. i mean treat them like an object and when it touches the ground trigger an animation. i wish i could do that. i have no idea how! haha! maybe someday someone will...
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Re: Feature Poll

Postby stuart » Wed Apr 21, 2010 11:26 am

Have a look at the Vulcan for an example of how to do this.

-Stuart
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feature scaling

Postby Hooray » Thu Apr 22, 2010 12:51 pm

flameout wrote:1. Graphics throttling, I envisioned something where it would automatically change the detail level to keep the framerate constant.
Graphics throttling would be awesome! When I can get 20 fps just by checking a couple boxes, I'll be VERY happy with FG.


Yes, this is often called "feature scaling".

If anybody is really interested in this, I think this could be rather easily done by using a Nasal script that dynamically enables, disables and tweaks various settings at runtime, I am willing to provide help if you have trouble getting started doing this in Nasal.

Some settings that come to mind include:

  • fog type
  • scenery visibility
  • fdm update rate (model-hz)
  • clouds (2D, 3D, visibility and density)
  • vegetation (random trees)
  • random objects
  • shaders (landmass, clouds, water)
  • shadows
  • particles
  • precipitation
    (and probably many others!)

Many of these things can already be dynamically configured because they are driven using properties, most of these are made available in the "rendering options" dialog, so it would be straightforward to use a Nasal dialog to tweak FlightGear at runtime.

So it would be mostly a matter of using a Nasal script to optionally tune these settings automatically, maybe with some simple GUI dialog for configuration purposes.
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Re: feature scaling

Postby Gijs » Thu Apr 22, 2010 3:20 pm

Hooray wrote:Yes, this is often called "feature scaling".

I did give this a try a while ago and ran into a problem.

Let's say, I set my minimum-fps setting to 20. The script will disable features. One at a time, until the fps are 20. However, you do want to have those features enabled again when your fps allows it. Problem is then that you end up in a circle. Once the fps is 30, 3D clouds are enabled, making the fps to drop below 20. Therefore, 3D clouds are disabled again, pushing the fps to 30 again. Which is enough to enabled 3D clouds, etc. etc.

So the implentation isn't just a matter of auto enabling/disabling features based on framerates. Some other people might have better ideas/ways than I had though :)

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Re: Feature Poll

Postby stuart » Thu Apr 22, 2010 3:37 pm

Yes - feature scaling isn't likely to work when the granularity of the feature's effect on FPS is so high, e.g. 3D clouds.

One thing you can do to help, if you haven't already, is to use a low pass filter on the FPS input. That will help smooth out any intermittant drops in FPS without disabling loads of features.

On CVS, I'd suggest simply tying it to the shader rendering quality slide (I can't remember the property value).

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Re: Feature Poll

Postby snowmanf » Sun Apr 25, 2010 10:01 pm

A Pirep system integrated into the main program.

A financial module that could be used for people wanting to see if they could run services as a business and for VA's.

A missions module that could not be cheated in a trivial manner.
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Re: Feature Poll

Postby Toanphuc » Sun Jun 20, 2010 6:42 pm

When the next version come i really want to see the improvements in aircraft models and maybe some better atmosphere such as a raytrace atmosphere in Orbiter OGLA engine and dynamic light.Have anyone think about using some technology in Orbiter engine?
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