vnts wrote in Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:05 am:Grumpysanta wrote in Sun Aug 23, 2020 2:55 pm: FlightGear takes information from openstreetmaps, which is fine, however does omit some of the finer details. What it does is take an area of housing and paints a generic overlay which fails to represent the actual area. Notably FlightGear also omits a lot of roads which can be seen from the screenshots that I have taken.
Did you, by any chance, happen to read this (link) recent linux-magazine.com article? Just curious . Was it how you came across FG, or were prompted to take a look after some years Edit: fix url
How I came across FG. A good friend of mine had been secretly (well he didn't tell me until after he'd been doing it) taking helicopter lessons. He'd been learning in a Robinson R44, should have been a Robinson R22 but he's a big heavy chap and the combined weight of the the instructor and him was too much for an R22 so he was learning in an R44 instead. The flying school decided to not keep the R44's any more and his instructor introduced him to FG as a means of continuing his flight training. From that my friend decided to test me as well on FG using the R44, because as a young lad I had flown Chipmonks in the Air Cadets, we both got hooked. Since that point we have tried many other helicopters for fun and we have stayed pretty much on the Eurocopter EC135 P2, mainly because it's used by so many different organisations.
I've even written a program to generate flights with different loads/cargo to alter the flight characteristics. So generally we fly the EC135, if we find a situation that is complicated, landing on lighthouses was one of our fun tests for a while, we might revert the the R44 as it's smaller and easier to handle, having completed the test we go back to the EC135 and then just for shear stupidity we'll do it again with an Osrey or Sikorsky Super Stallion.
I think the first version of FG we were using was 2018.3.2, might have been even earlier. I've looked at other flight simulators and to be honest none of them can do all of what FG can do and some of them (FSX) were so bad they were unusable. So we stay with FG because it just works so well.
I had not seen the link to the article in linux-magazine.com, although for a few years I was also using linux (I would not insult my computer with Windows VISTA).
And thank you for the link for screen shots of OSM2City in use, they are stunning. As I said in an earlier post, it's not about photo realistic images, just more recognisable areas.