Vitos, you are obviously an exceptionally talented modeler and it would be a huge loss for FlightGear to lose a contributor as skilled as you. Your idea of simulating space flight is good, many of us quite obviously like the idea of you using your Vostok-1 in FlightGear to simulate space flight.
Well, I have now carefully tried to describe a different perspective to you several times already, yet I can't help but getting the impression that you are wasting our time.
It took me about 1 hour so far to respond to you, that's time I'd rather spend helping people who are willing to accept my help, people who are actively willing to contribute back to FlightGear, under the project's terms and not under some imaginary terms made up by themselves.
Honestly, you are increasingly getting "high profile" feedback here now, such as by people like
HHS, durk, Thorsten, i4dnf and many others.
In other words, every single minute they spend debating with you means that other parts of FlightGear (such as the EC135, the AI traffic system, the local weather system or the IAR80 and lots of if4dnf's recent texture work) may get less attention than they deserve,
because of you!.
I'd go as far as claiming now that you are not only wasting our time, but that you are eating up man power and development resources by, pretty successfully, trying to be a PITA.
Really, you are making this more complicated than it needs to be, just reconsider your attitude - you are not going to accomplish anything as long as you are coming across like a fanatic extremist with social issues.
Personally, I really don't believe this is just a language barrier, you are among those users who regularly engage in rhetoric battles with fellow users, and more often than not you are much more eloquent than most of us (myself included), including native English speakers.
It is easy to find numerous examples where you managed to communicate in a completely different manner, successfully I may add.
The thing is, I guess you won't find a single FlightGear user who hasn't once been frustrated with the way FlightGear development "just happens", in fact I guess the same holds true for many FlightGear contributors and even core developers.
I know I belong to this group myself, I have frequently expressed my criticism here, too. And I know for a fact that Thorsten also started out here by critizising the FlightGear development process.
Indeed, most of the more seasoned contributors seem to have started off like this. You only need to do a little forum search (or see the mailing list archives) to see this is right.
Although I think this is actually natural, because critizising something means that you obviously care about it to some degree, and that you'd like to see it improve.
For instance, HHS and some others started improving and modeling helicopters for FlightGear long before there was a real FDM available to actually simulate helicopter flight realistically.
Flug experimented with controlling the AI traffic system from scripting space, even though this was never documented anywhere.
Thorsten started experimenting with implementing weather modeling in scripting space.
I am sure every single one of them could come up with dozens of feature requests for FlightGear to improve a certain part of it, no matter if it's helicopter support, scriptable AI traffic or modeling weather in FG.
Yet, it is important to realize that, more often than not, there is a limited man power available, i.e. you simply have to make workarounds to make any progress at all.
vitos, I argue if you had been the one with the vision for helicopter support in FlightGear, a dog fighting system in FlightGear or a complex weather system, we would have none of this today -simply because you would have always expected core developers to implement your "prophetic vision".
This really isn't how FlightGear development works, which is a good thing in my opinion - because there are only so many core developers.
More and more often, "development" these days is happening INSIDE the base package, where users no longer need to be "core developers" in order to make significant contributions to FlightGear.
Core developers like durk have made FlightGear so powerful that new things -like the bombable addon- can now be developed without even touching the C++ source code, and even without having to talk to core developers at all. That means that it's no longer people with C++ knowledge who shape where the project's going.
Rather, FlightGear
users like YOU can make a difference now.
vitos, somehow you apparently managed to have been part of this community for about 3 years, without even sligtly understanding how open source generally works, and how FlightGear in particular works.
There are enough people here who told you how you could go about proceeding without being restricted by FlightGear itself. There are people here who have done similar things in the past, and who illustrated how you simply lack a proper understanding of the issue at hand.
It is stubborn, childish and very uninformed to disregard this type of quality feedback now.
Especially, since you yourself have clearly stated repeatedly that you lack the corresponding knowledge, disregarding now feedback offered by people who quite obviously have the corresponding skills, is not particularly wise, to say the least.
This isn't "just talking" anymore. You have rejected numerous offers providing all forms of support.
I have said this before, for a very long time (i.e. in the plib days), FlightGear used to support the "draw-otw" property that made it possible to disable OTW rendering. If that property is no longer supported, then it's a regression. One that's presumably easy to fix and one which should be reported using the bug tracker so that it can be fixed.
Conceptually, the code implementing the "draw-otw" listener would also more generally allow you to disable rendering of other scene graphs nodes, such as terrain or ocean tiles. That means, should not be too complicated to disable the scenery engine.
Finally, I am not sure if you can afford the luxury of being selective who's supporting you and who isn't. You have repeatedly said that you need core changes to proceed, I provided a number of ideas on how to go on, including a very simple patch to disable terrain rendering for starters. Yes, it's very simple - but it's a first step.
And like I said, you can surely get higher quality feedback by talking to core developers asking them how they'd go about completely disabling the scenery engine so that alternatives can be explored.
Obviously, that would require that you can control your attitude, though!
Making existing code optional and more configurable is mostly about introducing a bunch of new properties, this is well understood by all FlightGear developers, the APIs are easy enough. In fact, I am quite certain that the whole tile manager could be disabled like this, too.
Really, your whole issue is apparently related to a feeling of being ignored by "core developers", but the truth is: a FlightGear core developer is just like you and me, the only exception being access to the main repository.
In other words, if someone were to give you now commit privileges to the core repository, you would all of a sudden be
vitos the FlightGear core developer, apart from commit access there is really nothing different at all.
Consequently, that also means that people frustrated with FlightGear would go and yell at
vitos the core developer, just because he's got commit privileges.
Yet, from your point of view, not much (if anything) would have changed, right?
You'd still consider yourself just a FlightGear contributor.
Do you think, that'd be fair?
vitos, if you don't want to listen to us, just listen to yourself:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12005&start=15#p124427vitos wrote:You simply want to bite some too big piece at once. It's useless to make big list of tasks until we can not solve one vital task what blocks solving of any next problem in that list entirely. And it seems You do not understand structure of most Open Source projects at all.