I've been into Flight Sim for years and just came across the FlightGear project. It seems to be a wonderful goal, an open source, cross platform flight simulator. I'm curious about the plans as to Flight Gear's maturity...I see that the current version is at 0.9.4... I haven't really been able to find much on the official website (or else I'm daft and haven't come across it yet), but what will the version 1.0 entail? Will it have a simplified, clean, user-friendly user interface for selecting aircraft, location, etc? What about taking the sheer amount of scenery and dropping it into a format that can be spread across just a few CD's? I know Microsoft's stuff looks more or less accurate and fits on four. What about textures? Is it at all feasible that worldwide photorealistic or pseudo-photorealistic scenery could be created?Just curious. I have an interest in using Linux these days, but one of the main holdouts is that there is nothing to quell the Flight Sim addiction I have. I hear that X-Plane will have a version for Linux soon, but... I'm bad... I like the eye candy.Ken

>I see that the current version is at 0.9.4... I haven't really>been able to find much on the official website (or else I'm>daft and haven't come across it yet), but what will the>version 1.0 entail? Don't know. The developers will decide when it is ready for a 1.0 release.> Will it have a simplified, clean,>user-friendly user interface for selecting aircraft, location,>etc? I think yes, because that is something that can be expected from a version that is called 1.0.>What about taking the sheer amount of scenery and>dropping it into a format that can be spread across just a few>CD's? I know Microsoft's stuff looks more or less accurate>and fits on four. You can't reduce the size of the scenery without loosing accuracy.And because the accuracy of the scenery will increase the sizeof the complete world scenery will increase too.Microsoft's scenery is imho worse than that from flightgear.The textured are good in FS2004 but the elevation data is horrible andinaccurate. > What about textures? Is it at all feasible>that worldwide photorealistic or pseudo-photorealistic scenery>could be created?That could be possible but is very unrealisitic today.Here are the reasons:1. You need to have such photo realisitic data from somewhereand it must be legal to include it into the flightgear scenery.2. Such data would be so large, that you will need hard drives thatallow to store more than 10 Terrabytes of data.That is unrealistic on todays home computers.Another problem is the memory.Though it could be possible to have some small areas (some large cities etc.) with photo realisitic textures in flightgear