I'm an Astronomy student, but I'm spending the summer teaching at a computer camp for 11-17 year olds. One of the classes we teach is video game modding, and one of the games the kids mod is Microsoft Flight Simulator. I would assume, though, that the open source nature of FlightGear makes it much more suitable for this sort of thing (i.e it's cross platform, the code is freely available, the app itself is free). However, I've only just discovered FlightGear and was wondering if anyone could give me more concrete examples of points I could use to convince my management that switching would be a good idea. Specifically I'm wondering about what sort of tools are required to mod FlightGear and if you the community feel that young beginners would be up to the task. Thanks ahead of time for your help.

>I'm an Astronomy student, but I'm spending the summer>teaching at a computer camp for 11-17 year olds. One of the>classes we teach is video game modding, and one of the games>the kids mod is Microsoft Flight Simulator. I would assume,>though, that the open source nature of FlightGear makes it>much more suitable for this sort of thing (i.e it's cross>platform, the code is freely available, the app itself is>free). However, I've only just discovered FlightGear and was>wondering if anyone could give me more concrete examples of>points I could use to convince my management that switching>would be a good idea. Specifically I'm wondering about what>sort of tools are required to mod FlightGear and if you the>community feel that young beginners would be up to the task. >Thanks ahead of time for your help.HiWhile I would agree that FlightGear is definitely much more suited for that purpose with regards to its architecture and design, I'm afraid that you may currently find it less feasible to actually use FlightGear rather than Microsoft's Flight Simulator for your project, however this depends really on the scope of your project as well as the background or experience of your students or at least their willingness to actually "learn" something.This mainly for some simple reasons: unlike Microsoft's Flight Simulator, FlightGear doesn't yet really feature any GUI frontends to the various paths of modifying/extending or even just customizing it - that is, while there are hundreds of add ons and tools available for Microsoft's Flight Simulator, only a very small number of such tools is available for FlightGear. Likewise, this applies to the available documentation: Microsoft's Flight Simulator, while theoretically not as extendable as FlightGear, features impressive and usually current documentation, whereas FlightGear documentation is somewhat terse in many areas, maintained by volunteers and usually not really in sync with the development process.So, usually -as a FG user- you'll simply use standard tools such as a plaintext editor, a graphical editor (i.e. GIMP) and maybe an XML editor to modify FlightGear (the base package, that is).Unlike the MS FS world, where there is meanwhile a whole number of specific tools for each and every small feature/setting that try to make up for a number of deficiencies of MS FS.Also, unlike MS FS, there isn't any "WYSIWYG" support within FlightGear, which can be pretty motivating and helpful to new users. In addition, many ways how to extend FlightGear aren't yet thoroughly documented, so if you are not familiar with the source code, or aren't subscribed to the FlightGear mailing lists, you may not be aware of FlightGear's full potential because of its lacking documentation.Hence, the average (Windows) user is definitely (and unfortunately) more likely to find it easier to use said MS FS tools rather than doing everything manually with FlightGear, because the latter also requires some more knowledge about the internals of FlightGear, as well as your specific operating system (i.e. shell usage etc.).Likewise, FlightGear -unlike some other flight simulators- doesn't (yet ?) have any inbuilt support to enable users to create aircraft directly within FG, so you'll again end up using 3rd party tools for this purpose. For example, 3D editors such as blender (free/opensource).This approach in itself does have its pros and cons, it just depends on the perspective - if you are already familiar with such 3rd party tools, you'll usually find it much more convenient and benefecial to use such tools and afterwards chain their output together in order to modify FlightGear (indeed, that's a major point of the whole UNIX philosophy - to have a number of tools, each one for a very specific purpose, rather than having one giant application that tries to do everything and all).So, there wouldn't be any need to get familiar with any special tools within FG. Any professional developer will consider this the preferable approach.However, on the other hand: if you aren't yet familiar with these tools, then of course your learning curve will be much steeper, because you don't need to only get familiar with one specific application and its features, but rather with a whole chain of tools before you can actually use them effectively in order to modify FlightGear.So, depending on what exactly it is that you ultimately hope to achieve with your project, your students may have only to familiarize themselves with a shell environment and a plaintext editor, or indeed with a fully featured 3D modeller application (i.e. in order to modify/create aircraft/scenery) or maybe a sound editor and other tools or even whole development environment.Additionally, FlightGear's scripting support is still relatively basic, at least compared to MS FS, so if you hope for example to extend FlightGear with some scripts, you may have to to be familiar with a development environment (i.e. IDE & compiler, as well as familiarity with C/C++) in order to add new hooks or commands to FG, whereas MS FS may, in some areas, allow you more complex customization using their scripting support.Also, most more complex changes that you make to FlightGear's base package will usually require a restart of FlightGear currently, given FlightGear's startup time, this may be another inconvenient issue, depending on the hardware that you have available. So my point is, even though FlightGear is theoretically much more modifiable than say MS FS, it currently simply lacks the corresponding interfaces and features to allow *USERS* (that is, NOT developers) to do any such things easily, conveniently and in a straight forward fashion.On the other hand, if you and your students do have some computing background or if you are at least interested in computing in general, you may find it a very enjoyable experience to fiddle around with FlightGear and its features. However, likewise it can become a pretty frustrating experience if you are mainly used to the Windows world of things and don't want to have to deal with things such as a shell environment.In contrast, as a MS FS user you will be able to achieve appealing things without really having to know much about computers at all, the "point and click" philosophy will definitely help you there.Otherwise, there's a whole number of things that you can already do easily with FlightGear, like for example:- create/modify aircraft- create/modify cockpit panels- create/modify instruments- create/modify HUDs (Head Up Displays)- create/modify FDMs (Flight Dynamic Models)- create/modify GUIs (menu, dialogs etc.)(and several other things)All of these can be easily accomplished modifying XML based configuration files, their format is pretty straight forward, so it would usually not take much longer than a couple of minutes to come up with some nice basic results.I'd recommend you to have a look at the available documentation and possibly subscribe to the FlightGear mailing lists. Also, it would be helpful if you could provide some more details about what exactly you want to do illustrate with MS FS/FlightGear, that way we'll be able to make a much better recommendation.