FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.
The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.
There are a wide range of people interested and participating in this project. This is truly a global effort with contributors from just about every continent. Interests range from building a realistic home simulator out old airplane parts, to university research and instructional use, to simply having a viable alternative to commercial PC simulators.
Flight Gear and its source code have intentionally been kept open, available, and free. In doing so, we are able to take advantage of the efforts of tremendously talented people from around the world. Contrast this with the traditional approach of commercial software vendors, who are limited by the collective ability of the people they can hire and pay. Our approach brings its own unique challenges and difficulties, but we are confident (and other similarly structured projects have demonstrated) that in the long run we can outclass the commercial "competition."
Among the features:
- Over 20,000 real world airports included in the full scenery set.
- Correct runway markings and placement, correct runway and approach lighting.
- Taxiways available for many larger airports (even including the green center line lights when appropriate.)
- Sloping runways (runways change elevation like they usually do in real life.)
- Directional airport lighting that smoothly changes intensity as your relative view direction changes.
- World scenery fits on 3 DVD's. (I'm not sure that's a feature or a problem!) But it means we have pretty detailed coverage of the entire world.
- Accurate terrain worldwide, based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data.) 3 arc second resolution (about 90m post spacing) for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
- Scenery includes all vmap0 lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, etc.
- Nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and headlights visible on major highways. This allows for realistic night VFR flying with the ability to spot towns and cities and follow roads.
- Scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread to minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas.
