Hi All, Disclaimer: This is being written after a glass of wine, so take with a pinch of salt. For those of your thinking disapproving thoughts - at least I'm not coding :)
I spent a little time over the last couple of weeks looking at the other flight sim websites and thinking about how FG fits into the wider flightsim community. Of course, at one level, we don't care. We're not a commercial competitor to FS-X, X-Plane or the recently canned Microsoft Flight. We do what we want for our own enjoyment. Nevertheless, we'd all like to see FG being used as widely as possible, and take pride in producing the best quality flight simulator we can. Side note: Time and time again, I have come across limitations in other simulators that we simply done have due to our open architecture. Frankly FG features and capabilities are in another league compared to FS-X, and our graphics are catching up fast. We should be immensely proud of what we have achieved, and what we can do in the future. One of the comments on flightsim.com rather struck home. To paraphrase "FlightGear is great if you're main interest is in developing a flight simulator, rather than flight simulation itself". A fair point. So, for the last couple of weeks I've been spending a bit of time thinking about and implementing improvements to try to make FG easier to use for newcomers. I've been looking at 3 areas in particular: 1) The new Weather dialog is the first step: unifying the UIs for Basic and Local Weather - details that the new user simply shouldn't care about. 2) Joystick configuration. All of the people reading this list are more than competent to write their own joystick XML config file, but it's something that I see huge numbers of posts about on the forum, from people who do not have enough knowledge to edit an XML file. I'm now looking into whether we could configure joysticks within FG itself. My aim is a UI to allow users to change bindings on-the-fly and save the results. 3) Scenery. Terrasync is now built into FG, and we have nice UI to configure it in-sim. However, it still requires users to set up a separate directory and configure FG_SCENERY before it can be used. It would be great if the standard installers created an $FG_ROOT/WorldScenery directory with the appropriate permissions, and added it to $FG_SCENERY by default. This would allow new users to download scenery from TerraSync without having to make any changes to their installation. I don't have any knowledge of our installers, but I would hope that this is a trivial change to make. So what is the point of this rambling post: a) Please test the Weather GUI and raise issues using the bug tracker. I've tried hard to make it as usable as possible, while retaining the flexibility we expect. b) Could the maintainers of the installer code for the various platforms make the changes described above? I think it would improve usability significantly (and allow me to simplify the text in the Manual massively!) c) If you spot useabilty issues with the GUI, please raise an issue using the bug tracker, and CC me. I'm on a bit of a mission here, and feedback is welcome. d) Expect further usability and UI changes. -Stuart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
