Flight Gear is a free and highly sophisticated flight
simulator.
The project is primarily aimed at civilian flight
simulation. It should be appropriate for simulating general aviation as
well as civilian aircraft.
In FlightGear, scenery is divided into two kinds of data:
Objects and Terrain. Objects are the buildings, bridges and radio
towers, etc. that
represent three-dimensional structures. Terrain represents the
contours, elevations and type of ground you fly over.
Flight Gear
License
GNU GPL Developer Curt Olson and many others
Wide range of aircraft models from gliders to helicopters,
and from airliners to fighter jets
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
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
Implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with
correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time
and date
3 Flight Dynamics Models:
JSBSim - a generic, 6DoF flight dynamics model for
simulating the motion of flight vehicles
YAsim - an integrated part of FlightGear and uses a
different approach than JSBSim by simulating the effect of the airflow
on the different parts of an aircraft
UIUC - based on LaRCsim originally written by
the NASA
Advanced Features
Aircraft Carrier - supports carrier
operations on the Nimitz, (located near San Fransisco) and
Eisenhower
Atlas - supports carrier operations on the Nimitz,
(located
near San Fransisco) and
Eisenhower
Multiplayer - supports a multiplayer
environment, allowing you to share the air with other
flight-simmers
Multiple Displays - allows you to connect
multiple instances of the program together to display
different views of the simulation though a highly flexible I/O subsystem
Recording and Playback - ability to record your
flight for later analysis or playback
Text to Speech with Festival - supports Text To
Speech (TTS) for ATC and tutorial messages through the
festival TTS engine
