On 12/06/2007 04:22 AM, AJ MacLeod wrote: > One point which keeps cropping up is "size".
We may be able to have this cake and eat it to; see below. > While I fully agree that it's > important to keep the base package to a reasonable size so that people aren't > put off downloading FG, I also think that there's perhaps even a "danger" in > not showing off FG quite enough. Without wanting to get into tiresome "my > sim's better than yours" comparisons, and definitely not wishing to follow > suit like sheep, it's certainly valid to consider the download size of the > FS-X and X-Plane demos... > > Perhaps we just need lots of very nice screenshots in our release publicity > to > encourage people to explore the aircraft for download instead though ;-) It might help to have some sort of download-on-demand feature. In particular, fgfs --show-aircraft would show *all* known aircraft, with perhaps some indication of whether they had already been downloaded or not. The first use of a not-yet-downloaded aircraft would cause it to be automagically downloaded, assuming a network connection is available. Then the "base package" can be quite small, containing just the name, thumbnail, and short description for each aircraft, plus the full model for a verrry small number of aircraft. If you want to go the whole nine yards, you could a tool analogous to Debian "deselect" which shows the menu of what is available and what is selected, and allows downloading of new things and/or purging of old things. This is a pretty serious user-interface issue, because it is completely unreasonable to expect users to download new aircraft when they don't know what's available. Showing them a menu of what's available makes a huge difference. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
