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???
My first reaction was to argue against this, since I invented the system, but upon reflection I think you're right -- we should give transparency priority in all parts of FlightGear. Anything that unnecessarily obfuscates either the code or support files, even in the name of efficiency or ease of use, will make FlightGear harder to maintain and thus, eventually, less efficient and harder to use as well.
So, nuke 'em.
As a matter of fact, I'd suggest getting rid of the "yasim", "jsbsim", etc. in aircraft names altogether. We have only a tiny handful of aircraft (172, 310, etc.) supported by more than one FDM; in those cases, let's just call them something like "172-alternate", etc., and mention the FDM in the comments (if at all).
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.
Let's just put a status property in the config properties for each aircraft, and filter on that. For example, if the statuses available were
alpha beta production
options like --list-aircraft could, by default, show only aircraft with a status of "beta" or "production", but with the --show-all option, it could show aircraft with any status.
I think it's worth including the heavies (737, A320, 747) even though their cockpits aren't finished.
See my above comment.
We definitely want the light civilian aircraft just as the Cub (which is one of the few aircraft that are legitimately finished) :-)
I wouldn't go that far. I'd call the Cub "beta", since it's missing some basic panel instruments. I'd probably call the 172p "production", since all the basic stuff is there and it works well.
as well as a C172 (C182?) and maybe include the C310 here, even though ours has navy markings?
The 182 is an excellent idea, since it provides an easy step up from the 172: it adds higher performance and a constant-speed prop, but still has fixed gear and a single engine. Our 3D and flight models for the 182 are both extremely rough, however -- they need a lot of TLC to be in a release.
And definitely the pa28-161.
Thanks. It's another beta, but I think it's usable.
It would be nice to get a 3d mixture control on the default C172 some day.
Can we set up a separate CVS repository for 3D model sources? It would be nice if we could allow everyone working on a 3D model committer access to it (they'd still have to go through a maintainer to get it into the base package).
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.
Me neither.
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.
I'd include at least one of them -- crude or not, they provide something that is otherwise missing.
All the best,
David
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