Yesterday i tried to run the new FlightGear version on Windows 7 64 Bit Prof and it run awful.
There are several fatal major bugs in this release i never had before, though i used WinXP 32 Bit in the time of the older releases before and not Win7 64 Bit, so i am not sure if this is win7 related. I installed FlightGear in another folder than "C:\Programs files" as admin and run FlightGear with normal user privileges. This might be an important information to reproduce some of the bugs. I am here on a linux system now, so i can't test it again, but here is a small listing of some of the bugs and usability issues i can remember from yesterday: 1. FGRun can't find the progamm, scenery and data folders, i have to set them manually at the first start. That shouldn't be the case, FGRun should know where to search for the files after FlightGear has been installed. An inexperienced computer user would give up here and uninstall FlightGear. 2. It is impossible to set the Terrasync folder in FGRun, the button to set the terrasync folder has no function. The terrasync mode can't be used when there is no directory set. BTW, terrasync should use the user directory by default, it's evil to use the progamm folder for that when a user has limited privileges on that directory. Usability hint: When there is a default directory set there is no need to annoy the user with asking the user for a directory location. I suggest to use %APPDATA%/Roaming/flightgear.org/terrasync as default location. If users don't like that, they should be able to change it after installation. But setting a default location is a must in my opinion to improve usability. 3. FGRun doesn't use the user folder to save the settings, instead it asks me where to place it. That's bad usability. 3. Several 3d Models (777-200, F-14b and others) aren't displayed. They're missing in the sim and in FGRun. 4. In flightGear the 3d cockpit controls do not work. For example in the b1900d clicking on them has no effect. In the past on earlier releases that worked. 5. Worst Bug. The sim has strange flickering effects, the result is that the clouds are not displayed. They flicker sometimes up, but only in 1-4 of 60 frames. (My system: Geforce GTX 550 Ti + driver version 280.26) The console shows some error message about OpenGL and a function, but the text is cut, so there's no real info about it. 6. BTW this is only a minor usability issue, but i'll mention it here for for the sake of completeness. FGRun has long loading times to display the 3d aircraft models. In my opinion that is too long for a selection list like that. In my opinion bugs 3, 4 and 5 are the worst in that list and 1 and 2 are serious usability issues all of them harm the reputation of FlightGear more than a new release version with new features do good to it. I can't recommend to offer FlightGear in that condition for download for windows users. Why where there no release candidates or beta releases? Bad release candidates or beta releases do not harm a project so badly like a real release with fatal bugs does. Best Regards, Oliver C. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
