On Friday 21 April 2006 06:06, Jonathan Hepburn wrote: > I have an interested query. How well does FG model gliding? I wouldn't > expect (although I am more than prepared to be pleasantly surprised) > that thermals would be well, or at all, modelled,
There is a very crude AI thermal setup where we can place static thermals around the place to use for lift. I personally haven't tested it so I'm not sure how well it works but the non-dynamic nature of them takes most of the fun out of hunting for them. > but how well does the physics of air movement model ridge lift? That is not modeled at all yet. > I ask without having tried, having no ability to do so and having no > experience in what "working" would feel like anyway, beyond the > theoretical knowledge of the deed, but if I was going to invest a lot > of time into learning flying skills in FG, soaring over my local > mountains would be high on the list, particularly with gliders already > present in the CVS hanger. Flying low over an escarpment in the > Colditz glider would be particularly fun :) Where abouts do you want to fly? The way I see it is you have two options : 1. You could add the neccessary code to FlightGear to simulate thermals, ridge lift and non-horizontal air movement but it'll be a lot of work. This would be a nice contribution to FlightGear if you have the neccessary coding skills and lots of patience and stickability. One of the major advantages is that you would have world wide scenery coverage. OR 2. You could use a commercial soaring simulator like SilentWings (http://silentwings.no) which is fairly polished in terms of weather modeling and multiplayer and has all the neccessary features for creating and flying tasks, AI pilots in single player mode or multiplayer pilots, freeflight or competition flying. There is also Condor which is quite popular but it only runs on Windows XP. SilentWings is written on Linux and ported to Windows and soon Mac OS X. Scenery for both these sims is limited but both have scenery tools so that you can create the scenery yourself. (The Condor scenery area is about the size of someone's backyard last time I checked.) If you get SilentWings and there's no scenery coverage for the area you want to fly in let me know and I'll create a small scenery area for you using SRTM3 and Landsat 7 ETM+ data. I do a fair bit of scenery work for the company - 600 000 km2 of Alps scenery. Lyon to Vienna, Frankfurt to Venice, with more scenery on the way (down to Rome for the 2006 Coppa Internazionale del Mediterraneo" held at Rieti in August). Regards Paul ------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
