I've been waiting to post this until after the release went out, hoping there'd be more discussion when things were a tiny bit calmer . . .
Over time, various people have done a lot of work on ground structures,
etc., to add to the scenery for FlightGear. Frederic's did a lot of work
on the bridges + downtown for SF; that's now distributed with the default
area scenery. Franz Melchior did Vienna's Donaturm tower, complete with
animations, and made the model available for download. Mat Churchill
has recently shown off some great stuff with the airport in Nice. Josh
Babcock and I are slowly doing stuff around the Washington, D.C. area.
I'm sure lots of other people are doing things as well.
The question is, what should happen to this stuff when people create it
and choose to make it available? Mat Churchill and I recently had a
discussion about what we thought of this, and the following points got
mentioned (which are of course just opinions, and which you may or may
not agree with):
1. It's probably *not* the best idea for it to all just get added into
the FlightGear scenery archives, to be there automatically when the
terrain for an area gets downloaded from scenery.flightgear.org or its
mirrors. There are already people having a hard time with framerates
just with the structure in the default area. I imagine a scenario
where a user fetches updated scenery files for an area they've been
flying around for a while, and discovers suddenly that it's unusable
now for them because of a recent addition of a bunch of framerate-
crushing eye candy. A better idea is to leave this stuff out of the
official scenery, but to make it available for those who are interested
to install as they wish . . .
2. . . .which is basically how things are right now. The problem is
that there's no easy way for anyone to know what others have done and
what's available to them. Right now, what's typically done is that
the creator puts stuff up on their personal ftp/website, and makes a
post to flightgear-users or -devel announcing what's available. Over
time, this gets forgotten. In the MSFS world, that role is played by
sites like avsim.com and flightsim.com and so on; they provide searchable
file repositories, with pictures, etc., to which people can upload, and
from which people can download. Stuff gets a lot more exposure this
way.
3. Some users like eye candy. The more of it there is (and the easier
it is to obtain), the more fun some people will have, and probably the more users
there'll be. And consequently, the more project/scenery/etc.
contributors there'll be. And so forth. In particular, making
attractive ground structures available will inspire other people to
join in and create some themselves, and so on.
4. Some models, textures, etc. that are already out there cannot be
distributed with FlightGear because of licensing incompatible with the
GPL (e.g. "Freeware" licenses). But that doesn't prevent them from
being *used* with FlightGear; it simply prevents them from being bundled
with and distributed with FlightGear. As an example of what I mean, not
all the theme/icon/background/etc. stuff available for KDE or GNOME
online is GPL'd. Stuff with licensing incompatible with the GPL can't
be merged into KDE and distributed as part of KDE; but that doesn't
mean it can't be made available on kde-look.org, for people to fetch
and use as they desire.
So what we discussed was a webpage/site which would (eventually) do for
FlightGear what avsim.com/flightsim.com's file libraries do for MSFS.
At least at first, it'd provide upload/browse/download capability.
Eventually, it could also be a place to fetch useful scripts, programs,
scenery-making tutorials, etc. It wouldn't necessarily require a chunk
of Curt's time or hardware; it need not even be in the flightgear.org
domain, although I think it'd be a good thing if it was (unfortunately,
scenery.flightgear.org is occupied, hehe). Mat Churchill and I are
both enthusiastic about such a scenery website.
What do people think?
-c
--
Chris Metzler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(remove "snip-me." to email)
"As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I
have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
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