Flightgear is constantly under development and as the feature freeze for the next 3.0 release approaches, it is becoming increasingly clear what the next version will have to offer to users:

Scenery 2.0

The next generation scenery has finally arrived!

After long years of waiting, a new version of the world-wide scenery shipped with Flightgear is now being rolled out. This scenery makes use of CORINE data in Europe, utilizes other custom enhancements elsewhere in the world, brings new and improved airport layouts and includes roads and other line data from the Open Street Map project. Especially in the CORINE covered regions, this leads to a much better visual appearance.

Novel water effects

Enjoy watching the shallows around tropical islands in fine weather!

At high quality levels of the water shader, a global water depth map is now used to change the water color in the shallow regions around islands and close to the coast. Especially in the Caribbean, this corresponds to a significant improvement in visual quality. The effect combines with the other variations in water color based on weather and base color due to algae or mud content.

The walker

Now you can get out of your airplane!

The walker project allows to leave an aircraft and explore the scenery on foot. This effectively allows adventure-game like scenarios in Flightgear such as The evil Graveyard where the walker also interacts with the scenery. Combined with the hires procedural terrain texturing options, you can start exploring the scenery from quite a different perspective and walk into your favourite virtual airport bar after a long and exhausting flight.

New airplanes

Enjoy a few new, highly detailed airplanes!

Some recent addition to the list of Flightgear aircraft, the new Boeing 707 (shown above) and the Robin DR400 Dauphin (a single propeller engine plane) impress with impressively detailed modelling of the cockpit, plenty of attention to realistic flight dynamics and especially in the case of the 707 a sometimes frustratingly realistic level of systems modelling.

More complex glass cockpits

Enjoy more realistic instruments!

The canvas 2d rendering technology allows the creation of more realistic glass cockpits with complicated instruments. Shown here is the new PFD and ND of the Boeing-747-400 as an example.

Phototexturing using osgEarth

Explore the scenery textured by aerial imagery!

An experimental implementation of generic phototextured terrain using osgEarth is now on the way and might make it into the 3.0 release. Once enabled, osgEarth renders the terrain scene by building the textured geometry at runtime from raw source imagery and elevation data. The input data can come from a variety of sources including web mapping services or local source data (e.g. geotiff) stored on disk. This feature is runtime-switchable from the default scenery rendering.

Better rendering of fog and haze

We take bad visibility seriously!

For some 3d applications, fog may just be a device to hide the terrain in the distance, but in Flightgear rendering fog and haze is taken quite seriously. The Atmospheric Light Scattering framework now comes with an improved way to render fog patches and variations in fog layer altitude, combined with even more impressive lighting of fog in low sun. You’ll never enjoy bad visibility this much!

And many improvements more…

And that’s not all:

* new regional textures for Scandinavia, Ascension Island and Corsica

* user-controlled moonlight effect for the Atmospheric Light Scattering framework

* added and improved airplanes

* more AI traffic/models

*…

Stay tuned as we fly towards the next release!



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