> Am I right in thinking that thermals are broken in the latest FG release? > I can't seem to find any lift over the tower as promised and seem to > remember this being mentioned on one of the lists.
Yes, they were broken sometime before the 0.9.8 release and they are still broken as of today's CVS. They worked in 0.9.6, so you might want to revert to that release. > 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'm interested, but don't have much time left for coding these days. Paul's interested, and I was recently contacted by someone in Europe who was interested. > 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? The current cylindrical thermals exist mainly because they were an easy extension of the AI objects code. The math overhead is small and there is no interaction with the terrain or weather. Also, since the thermals are defined at startup in an AI scenario file they only exist for people who want them and who have also enabled the AI subsystem. Getting the thermals to lean downwind shouldn't be too hard, and capping each one with a cloud won't be hard (but making it look right amongst the other clouds might be tough). The ridge lift issue looks pretty hard, especially if you want FlightGear to look for the ridges and put lift over them. Creating a tow plane would be fun, but still a challenge. It would be an AI aircraft that has some interaction with the user airplane, similar to the current AI tanker that passes gas when you get close behind it. This one is doable, but I doubt I could get to it. Dave _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
