Hi everybody !
Sorry to bring this up again - Just catching up on the hundreds of postings on both lists ... and I wanted to add the following:
Jon Berndt wrote:
Yes, I've made an attempt in the JSBSim config file format to include a "done-ness" specifier for the FDM:
Beta, Alpha, Release, UNRELEASEABLE, etc. IMHO, probably ONLY Release models should be in the base package.
I agree with much of what has been said so far - concerning the reputation of FlightGear suffering from various incomplete aircraft ... at times it's really hard to tell what's the cause of a problem, whether it's your hardware, the simulator or a particular aircraft ...
So, I like the above idea, even though I don't think that it's necessary to remove "immature" aircarft, rather one could try a compromise -
provide additional "maturity flags" within each aircraft's XML
definition file, for example:
experimental
pre-alpha
alpha
pre-beta
beta
"okay/working"That way we would have one additional tag within the XML file, like:
<maturity>alpha</maturity>
And would thereby enable the *user* to choose what kind of aircraft he/she wants to use.
So, while the usual parameter
--show-aircraft
would currently display ALL available aircraft, we could have an additional parameter like:
--min-maturity-level=beta
to return only those aircraft in the base package that match the corresponding criteria.
This would of course only be optional - but I think it could really reduce some of the frustration new users encounter when first trying out FG.
So, one would end up having a definable maturity level for aircraft, in order to address the issues concerning "too much realism" it might be a good idea to also enable users to adjust the realism level on demand - this is something that other simulators offer, too - and it has been discussed on the devel list before ...
One could still ship ALL aircraft, but prevent new users from trying unfinished aircraft and drawing false conclusions.
Probably, it would not even be a bad idea to make --show-aircraft return by default only "relatively mature" aircraft instead of all the experimental stuff that's in the base package ?
If that idea is accepted I would not mind taking care of the corresponding changes that make FlightGear return only aircraft meeting particular "maturity" requirements, frankly spoken simply because I was going to change one or two similar things, anyway - e.g. I wanted to be able to tell whether a particular aircraft is part of the base package or not, that's why I suggested some time ago to provide an additional tag for that purpose, too.
---------- Boris
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