1. I'm growing less enthused with our aircraft alias naming system. I don't mind that we have the capability, but it becomes annoying to have 8 names for the same aircraft, even 2 names for the same aircraft. What would people say to nuking all the alias entries for the upcoming release? Now that we have the "fgrun" launcher, name length or complexity is not really an issue. Even for us hard core unix folks who refuse to give up the command line, we can learn to copy/paste to avoid unnecessary typing. I think getting rid of the aliases would make aircraft browsing and selection a lot less mystifying to new comers. We've got 20 (!) varients of the C172. Maybe for this release it would be nice to just have one or two???
2. We have a *lot* of aircraft in the base package. Some of these are really nice, some of these are not even close to basic functionality. Most are probalby best considered "works in progress." (Now this is perfectly fine, and is what CVS is for.) However, for the next release I would like to just include a subset of the available aircraft, picking and choosing the best or most interesting ones.
I think it's worth including the heavies (737, A320, 747) even though their cockpits aren't finished.
We definitely want the light civilian aircraft just as the Cub (which is one of the few aircraft that are legitimately finished) :-) as well as a C172 (C182?) and maybe include the C310 here, even though ours has navy markings? And definitely the pa28-161. It would be nice to get a 3d mixture control on the default C172 some day.
There are some vintage aircraft we should include such as the Wright Flyer and ComperSwift and maybe the dc3 although I have no idea what's going on with the cockpit there.
The P51 and the Hunter should definitely be included, those are ones that also could be considered "finished".
Lee has built a nice fleet of various aircraft which are worth including such as the AN-225 (huge russian transport), a b-52, a seahawk, a tsr2 and a yf23. All of these fly well, have beautiful external 3d models, are very well animated including the gear and suspention, but all lack 3d cockpits and instead have a functional, but non-realistic 2d cockpit.
The a4 is nice, although I don't know how complete the cockpit is??? The J22 and F16 both show promise. We should also include the X15, but that takes some startup parameters to get flying.
And the Ornithopter should definitely be included. And we should toss the ufo in as well. I'll list the remaining aircraft below. These I've had less experience with or non-optimal results when I have tried them.
What is the status of the helicopters? They've seemed very crude when I've looked at them. I don't mean to be anti-helicopter, but if we are trying to cull some of the less nice stuff out of the official release, I'm not sure in their current form they would make the cut.
OV10-jsbsim North American OV-10A Bronco
T37-jsbsim Cessna T-37
T38-jsbsim Northrop T-38
airwaveXtreme150-v1-nl-uiuc Airwave Xtreme 150 hang glider (UIUC)
as350-yasim Ecureuil AS 350 Helicopter
asw20-v1-nl-uiuc ASW-20 sailplane (UIUC)
beech99-v1-uiuc Beech 99 (UIUC)
bell206-yasim Bell 206 JetRanger Helicopter
bo105-yasim Eurocopter Bo105
ch47-yasim CH-47 Chinook Helicopter
f104-jsbsim Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
f15-jsbsim McDonell Douglas F-15 Eagle
fkdr1-v1-nl-uiuc fokker100-jsbsim Fokker 100
fokker50-jsbsim Fokker 50
harrier-yasim British Aerospace Harrier (YASim)
marchetti-v1-uiuc Siai Marchetti S.211 (UIUC)
paraglider-jsbsim paraglider
sgs233-jsbsim Schweizer 2-33
shuttle-jsbsim Space Shuttle
sopwithCamel-v1-nl-uiuc t6texan2-jsbsim T-6A Texan II
x24b-jsbsim USAF/NACA X-24B reentry testbed
Am I being too generous here? Should we draw the line a little tighter? Am I being too strict? Am I way off on my evaluation of what should go in or out?
As time permits I plan to start doing some preliminary release work, going through my check lists, making sure version numbers and refererences are up to date, gleaning through the commit logs to come up with a list of changes, etc. etc.
Regards,
Curt. -- Curtis Olson Intelligent Vehicles Lab FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org
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