Yasumune wrote:Well, then I stand corrected on the "closed door" issue. I am curious if anyone can expand on this concept that MD-Terp has put forth. Can the new liveries and "developments" that are being made outside of the developers (official developers) be incorporated into the CVS and such so that when we install official Flight Gear stuff, all the new/approved stuff gets loaded up as well?
The only real developments that I see being made outside of the mailing lists and IRC channel (neither of which are closed doors - why not join us?) are scenery objects (for which there is a well established route into CVS) and countless repaints of airliners.
Now, the problem with the latter, as HHS has tried to say here already, is that people are generally doing a half-job on the liveries. We are not going to allow a thousand 747s to show up when using --list-aircraft, when the only difference between them is the paint job! People need to muck in and apply the already-developed generic livery system to aircraft they want to repaint. It only needs to be done once for each aircraft, no big deal. It will require learning a little bit about how a FG model is put together, but it's hardly brain surgery, just copy and paste mostly (mind you, maybe brain surgery is like that too for all I know about it
).
Until that is done, all these hundreds of repaints are effectively worthless. It's no conspiracy by "the developers" to keep the riff-raff out... this is open source, YOU are "the developers", there are no interviews or application forms, no secret initiation rituals
Fix something, tell people via the official channels, and if it's half sane, it'll go into CVS!
It seems as if there are two (or a million) avenues of development and none of them are coodinated or incorporated together. It makes it time consuming and frusterating to get the Sim on track and keep track of which stuff needs to go where.
Well, yes, it's mostly true that there are hundreds of avenues of development. It's a good thing! There is no FGFS "head office", setting us targets and objectives to meet. People work on what they're interested in, when they get the time. The thing is they then package it up and ask for it to be committed to CVS, and we all benefit. And the process has worked very well indeed; we have had many very important features long before other off-the-shelf flight sims, and still today there is no other flight sim (at all) that provides the kind of flexibility that FG does.
I once again highly recommend joining the mailing lists (fg-devel and the cvs commits list in particular) and dropping in to the IRC channel if you are seriously interested in helping with FG. You will see the process at work, and get help on any FG-related problem or question.