On Tuesday, 12 April 2005 23:39, AJ MacLeod (email lists) wrote: > I've been getting withdrawal symptoms since my demo license for "Silent > Wings" expired - it's really very good, and available on Linux, too. > Unfortunately it is neither free nor open source and both, particularly the > former is an issue for me - I just don't have �50 to spend on that sort of > triviality! I also don't use any closed-source software other than the > Nvidia drivers, and don't particularly want to go back down that path.
My license expires this weekend but I'm going to scrape my pennies together and buy it because it's a great product and I would like to see it succeed. The multiplayer patch is going to make it really fun. > Getting back to FlightGear (which is also a fantastic achievement), are the > thermals fixed in the CVS version? Are any of the FG developers > particularly interested in gliding; i.e. are we likely to see more features > to facilitate that soon? I would dearly like to assist, but my coding > skills leave much to be desired - testing is more my thing! > > I imagine that more accurate modelling of things like thermals/clouds and > "ridge lift" are very low priority in FG and possibly not worth the > detrimental effect on performance for the majority of users? There is/was interest in the area of adding soaring to FG but it's a huge amount of work. - Proper volumetric clouds with a thermal model attached to them - Aerotow and winch launching - Proper modeling of vertical air movement, ridge lift, windshear, thermals that lean with the wind, sinking air over water and cooler areas, etc. - Modeling of complex intruments (Cambridge L-NAV, GPS units, etc) - Decent terrain engine that can handle large areas of satellite or aerial images (the one in SilentWings is simple incredible!) A soaring simulator is just too "specific" and FG tends to be a general purpose, powered flight simulator. I'm sure if there was enough motivation it could be done but I doubt anyone would be willing to do all the hard work. It took a couple of people several years to write SilentWings and they were supported financially to do it. Just the terrain engine of SilentWings would take ages to write let alone all the other soaring specific stuff like aerotows, ridge and wave lift, etc. There will always be a place for commercial apps that excel in specific areas. Paul _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
