For our February “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected FlightGear, a free and open-source multi-platform flight simulator.
FlightGear was founded in 1997 and developed by a worldwide group of volunteers brought together by a shared ambition: to create the most realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and distribute. This sophisticated and open source flight simulator framework is being used in a wide range of applications, from academic research, pilot training, and as an industry engineering tool, through to just being a fun, realistic and challenging desktop flight simulator. FlightGear is also an excellent alternative to commercial PC simulators.
With over 400 aircraft, a worldwide scenery database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking options and more, FlightGear offers many options and exciting possibilities.
FlightGear was previously voted Project of the Month in September 2017 and before that, in November 2015 where the FlightGear team spoke about the project’s developments and direction. It’s a well-loved project that has consistently garnered positive reviews and will no doubt continue to be an outstanding open source project.
I downloaded some months ago and could never get it to work under Win10. A simple executable would be best for me,
not source. Ironically, I was a space shuttle simulator engineer for NASA in clearlake city, Tx. for 2 years and then 2 more
doing fixed and rotor sims for a company in tampa.
Having flown real Cessna 172’s in the past, I have great fun in adapting Flightgear’s controls to match the real thing as closely as possible.
Not having expert programming skills in C++, I find that I can achieve this by changing the various .xml files in Flightgear data.
I am looking forward to further information on adapting the source code to multi-core processors.