Just a suggestion

[aTazul]

Why not have animated vehicles (cars, boats, trains) as default with powerful graphics? Wouldn't it be a lot nicer like that? More realistic?

[Clive2670]

Only issue I can see is that it needs to be made clear at the start (Qtlauncher) that there is this feature on the program, BUT it cannot be set to start as default, because otherwise it will bring the program to a crawl for those people that don't have a "shed load" of spare cash to throw at a top end gaming rig, thus limiting the sim' to only those that know how to remove the "Start as default" setting. You have to think of the majority of people that use the sim like myself that only have a 2Gb grahics card, 6Gb of RAM, and a i5 processor, which is the "average" set up for most. Flightgear wants to attract ALL people not just the chosen few who can afford to spend 1000+ (£/$) on a computer!!! Sorry to be a bit of a party pooper! Maybe as it's a open source simulator you can put your programming skills to use and set it up on your rig and post the results?

[aTazul]

Only issue I can see is that it needs to be made clear at the start (Qtlauncher) that there is this feature on the program, BUT it cannot be set to start as default, because otherwise it will bring the program to a crawl for those people that don't have a "shed load" of spare cash to throw at a top end gaming rig, thus limiting the sim' to only those that know how to remove the "Start as default" setting. You have to think of the majority of people that use the sim like myself that only have a 2Gb grahics card, 6Gb of RAM, and a i5 processor, which is the "average" set up for most. Flightgear wants to attract ALL people not just the chosen few who can afford to spend 1000+ (£/$) on a computer!!! Sorry to be a bit of a party pooper! Maybe as it's a open source simulator you can put your programming skills to use and set it up on your rig and post the results?

I don't have the knowledge to edit the coding of the game. However, the animated vehicles could still be done, if that memory was distributed between the CPU, GPU and RAM. My GPU processor also has 2gb, though I thought that it could handle it...

(Edit was for a typo)

[legoboyvdlp]

There's also the small minority like myself that have a B950 processor, a 512K GPU VRAM, and 5GB of RAM xD
If it is done, great, but it must be toggleable, and I don't think it should be enabled by default.

[Isaak]

Everything is possible, but it 's up to a developer to do the efforts. This poll won' t change a thing unless you or an other volunteer starts actually working on it. Please be advised that FlightGear is a project of volunteers. Want to change something? Be the change and start (learning how to) code(ing).

[aTazul]

Everything is possible, but it 's up to a developer to do the efforts. This poll won' t change a thing unless you or an other volunteer starts actually working on it. Please be advised that FlightGear is a project of volunteers. Want to change something? Be the change and start (learning how to) code(ing).

I realised that...

I'm learning c, c++, java, html5, java, python and nas. It is a whole lot of work for me, especially with my studies and all, but I will try to get it done (somebody else might do it before me but what the hell).

[Thorsten]

Why not have animated vehicles (cars, boats, trains) as default with powerful graphics? Wouldn't it be a lot nicer like that? More realistic?

We actually do have boats, and you can have ten thousands of (rather flat...) cars with the OSM roads and traffic shaders. Not sure about trains.

Otherwise - visuals are one part of a realistic flightsim - however a photo-realistic near still image at one frame per minute also has problems of its own. There's potentially lots of vehicles, and if you go about this the wrong way, you'll notice quickly.

[Hooray]

If you have a little programming experience, Nasal as a scripting language is close enough to JavaScript that many of its learning resources online will come in handy (Nasal being based on ECMAScript concepts) - also, we do have quite a bit of existing functionality in that department. For instance, one straightforward way would be looking at ThomasS recent Ground Services effort:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Ground_Services


In its current form this is obviously airport specific and not at all integrated with the shader based system that Thorsten mentioned, but it's definitely a good start, and once you understand how that works, you will also understand how to extend it to support other features, but also where/when not to use it because a shader based approach may be superior (i.e. at high altitudes, viewing tons of scenery - as per Thorsten's comments) - speaking in general, learning shaders/effects (GLSL) is a completely different matter, and would be a little far-fetched if you don't have a strong background in C and preferably graphics - but actually, what we have right now should suffice for a rather compelling proof-of-concept, the main thing missing is some mutual integration, i.e. collaboration between the people involved in these approaches - ideally in conjunction with the osm2city folks (Python).

Apart from that, while having at least some programming experience is obviously an asset, being young, or possibly even being retired, i.e. with a lot of time on your hands can make up for any lack of experience and skill, as long as you are willing to read, tinker and learn - so, I would not understimate what you can bring to the table if you are serious about an idea. For instance, we also have enormously experienced contributors who can hardly complete their projects due to a lack of time, whereas we've literally seen teenagers provide scripting space solution (fgdata) that ended up being superior to what some of the most seasoned core developers have come up in C++ space.

Besides, the whole "distributed between X, Y and Z" is simply a red herring - even just working through a few 5-minute coding tutorials to make FlightGear do something like printing your name, or showing a tooltip with your name will go a long way to teaching you stuff - much more so than throwing out buzzwords that you don't really understand, because "distributing memory between ..." is not helpful at all.

Thus, my suggestion would open the DEBUG menu and navigate to the entry called "Nasal Console", which is a fancy word for a simple editor where you can put commands to tell flightgear what to do:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_Console


Once you have opened the console, it will basically look like this:



and then experiment with some of the really simple stuff - for example, starting here:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_Hello_World
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Using_Nasal_ ... e_examples

[aTazul]

I'll try it...

[Hooray]

Someone with access to a computer that is capable of running FlightGear and the built-in Nasal console, should be able to find tons of useful learning resources in the FlightGear wiki.

For example, here is a rather simple example to get you going playing with the console (lines starting with a # sign are comments, so are ignored by flightgear):

Code: Select all

# this creates a variable named name, assigning a text string as its value (the part in quotes)
var name = "aTazul";
# this creates another text variable (the part in quotes), to which we are appending the value stored in the name variable
var message = "Your name is: "~ name;
# this invokes a command to show the message on screen as a tooltip
gui.popupTip( message );


You could play with this changing/replacing the text strings or showing other messages.

There's also some documentation showing what you can change when showing such a tooltip, see: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Tooltips

Admittedly, it's rather basic and very simple, but it goes to show that it's not that difficult to add new features to FlightGear, i.e. stuff that does not need to be added by core developers.

If you are interested, we can provide other pointers/tutorials - and there is also a dedicated Nasal scripting sub-forum, too.

Personally, my suggestion would be to tinker with the snippet shown above and then leave Nasal scripting alone for a while to read up on how the property tree in flightgear works:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Property_tree

There is a bit of reading to do here, especially if you want to understand how this relates to XML files.

The most important asset here is the so called property browser: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Property_browser


And with that background in mind, I would suggest that you try to modify the code snippet I posted to show a name that is stored in a property.
The next thing would be changing the code snippet to always show the tooltip with your name when the property is updated.

[aTazul]

I pressed '/' on my keyboard and it brought up that prompt. I didn't know what it was for, now I do.

[Hooray]

Good job there, that's what's commonly called "learning"

In general, it helps to imagine the "property tree" like a file system on your computer - it has folders and files, i.e. a hierarchy.
"Files" would be "properties" - and they have types - text, numbers, boolean values (1/0)

You can make up almost arbitrary names (using a few naming conventions) to create new properties, and assign values to them at runtime.

[aTazul]

Cool. I can't use my laptop right now, though I will do so tomorrow, before I act as atc.

[Hooray]

Once you do a little research, you will find that we really have more than just a handful of existing attempts at implementing this kind of functionality, for example see:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Scripted_AI_Objects

[aTazul]

exactly what I need