-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I've tried introducing a few friends to Flightgear. They are mostly Windows users, technically competent but not adept, who have had experience of video games and possibly other flight simulators. I thought I'd muse a bit on the following points, because, given the user base, it might be instructive.
1) Fgrun/fgfs. For the average windows user, this is *highly* counterintuitive. In so far as Windows has an overarching user interface and tool design philosophy, it's integration. The concept of a GUI that launches the program doesn't make sense to them; they expect to be able to run flightgear, and for it to present a menu that reads something like "New flight"/"Saved Flight"/"Options"/"Exit". I'm not saying this is the way we should go, but I'd like to note that many users, when presented with the current method, get *very* confused, especially by the absence of a flight planner. Many also find restarting FlightGear in order to change aircraft counterintuitive 2) Performance If Windows users come to FlightGear from most video games, the performance they get is not what they expect. I think that when you've been using FlightGear for some time, you can become desensitised to the lower frame rates; newer users aren't expecting this, and responses I've got range from "even so, it's flyable", through "this frame rate is ****", to complaints that it hurts their eyes. 3) ATC/AI This may just be my group of friends :P, but many of them find it much more fun and interesting if there are other aircraft in the world, and if they can communicate with ATC. Durk's work in this area is making this easier, but ATC itself can still feel quite primitive. Coupled with this, people expect to start on the apron if it's there, and then to taxi out to the runway of their choice. Finally, some other shorter things that people seem to want: * Ability to save flights * Explanation about p-factor and torque. Once I tell them that it's semi-realistic modelling, they are fine with it, but until then, it can be confusing * [Bug] FGFS seems to revert to KSFO if it can't find the selected runway at the selected airport. When you've expected to load EGLL, finding yourself in California is unexpected, to say the least (this seems to happen more often to fgrun users Giles Robertson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (MingW32) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iEYEARECAAYFAkHv7ycACgkQrI0r/XDZkDC2SgCdGDIJHZ/zNy3OOcGLl+JggqL0 QZAAmgMT/MXe4sqrz/4sbMcmpSthdzPf =CpX9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
