FlightGear

[Tami]

The [url=\"http://www.flightgear.org/index.shtml\"]FlightGear[/url] flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

There are many exciting possibilities for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas.

FlightGear is an open-source project. This means as long as you abide by the terms of the GPL license you may freely download and copy FlightGear. Anyway can have easy and open access to the latest development source code. Being an open-source project, we have made our file formats open and easily accessible. We support standard 3d model formats and much of the simulator configuration is controlled through xml based ascii files. Writing 3rd party extensions for FlightGear (or even directly modifying the FlightGear source code) is straightforward and doesn't require a large amount of reverse engineering. This makes FlightGear an attractive option for use in private, commercial, research, or hobby projects.

FlightGear is known to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS-X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX platforms allowing the user run on their platform of preference.

* 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.