Personally i think it is too early for a 1.0 release. Here are some points why:
1. The gear problem, Jon Berndt allready mentioned it. On the ground the planes just don't feel good. 2. An in game GUI for every user (not only Windows users) is missing. This is IMHO a big must for a 1.0 production release. fgrun.exe is okay for the beginning or development versions but not for a production release. A production release should really have a menu that is running inside of flightgear as a part of flightgear and not as an outside application. Especially when we aim at end users. Sure, some will say that this is not necessary for a simulator, but end users will base their review and valuate it on that. 3. Another requirement for a 1.0 production release is a way to change the aircraft when flightgear is allready started. 4. If you want to reach the end user, you need a "learn to fly" interactive in game tutorial (how far is fligttutor progressed?). In other words, documentation is not enough for the marked today. Releasing flightgear 1.0 without a "learn to fly" interactive flying tutorial leads to a situation that users download flightgear, start it, don't know what to do. take a tour around San Francisco to see what flightgear has visually to offer and then delete it because they don't know what to do next. We should show to the users that there is a lot more possible than just only seeing flightgear as an eye candy city tour software. 5. A way to switch the airport from an in game menu when flightgear is allready started. It should also be possible to select an airport by country or city name. In my opinion we should delay the official FlightGear 1.0 release until the above is fixed. This would mean at least 4-10 more releases, so an estimated release date for a 1.0 release could be somewhere in 4th quarter 2006. Don't understand me wrong, but i don't want to see people complaining about the above missing features and saying that flightgear is crap because those things are missing. We should take in mind, that people, especially magazines tend to review and compare Open Source applications with the competition (X-Plane, MS Flight Simulator etc.) when the application reaches version 1.0, And a 1.0 version is the first and most important version number for a production release because people judge later versions on experiences they made with version 1.0. Any bad reviews because the above is missing are not good reviews. FlightGear has gone a long way, but imo it is still far too early for a 1.0 production release. Best Regards, Oliver C. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
