First impressions of FlightGear 2.10

[Dr Vesuvius 22]

Last year I gave the previous version of FlightGear a try and rated it "promising, but not ready for primetime"  This morning I've been giving 2.10 a trial run and wanted to share my experience and thoughts.

 

The straight-out-of-the-box experience is getting better.  I have a fairly standard CH Products yoke, throttle and pedals setup and FG recognised and configured them automatically.  There were problems with it assigning conflicting controls to multiple devices which took a little bit of manual config, and I've still got problems with the rudder pedals giving being misread at extreme left/right positions, but at least the days of having to manually edit XML files to get your controls working seem to be mostly over.

 

Next up a plea to the FG aircraft developers.  For heaven's sake put some time in on the humble Cessna 172 and get it up to full Production status, preferably with a little more texturing in the virtual cockpit.   It's the de-facto standard training aircraft and always the first plane I fire up when I want to quickly test something (whether a new piece of scenery, or a whole new flight simulator) The FG C172 interior looks plasticky and horrible and very FS95, which doesn't give newcomers a terribly good impression.  I get the feeling that the team have focussed on the Triple-Seven as the showcase bird for this release, and indeed it looks pretty darn good.  But a newbie isn't going to want to start out with a complex airliner like that.  One thing I did like is that the aircraft download page at the main FlightGear repository now lets you filter the aircraft list by how complete it is.  It saves messing about with unfinished projects before they're ready.

 

Graphically, I think that the default FG is marginally improved over the previous version, but the big game changer in this release is the inclusion of Project Rembrandt rendering in the main release.  This makes a big difference in the visual appearance of the sim.  But I was rather disappointed to see a lot of heavy pizellation in the shadows in the cockpit.  I was a little surprised to see absolutely no buildings at my local airport.  If it had been a podunk GA field I could have understood that, but Manchester (EGCC) is one of the biggest (if not *the* biggest) UK airports outside London.  I would have thought at least some basic blocky buildings to show where the gates are would have been in order. But the urban area was heavily populated with autogen and looked suitably metropolitan, if not strictly realistic as such.

 

I'm not really qualified to talk about the accuracy of flight modelling, but I did get the impression that FG was significantly more twitchy than FSX, though that might have been down to the wind and weather conditions today.  Oh yes, that was another thing, FG automatically downloaded and interpreted the correct real-world METAR weather, something that FSX has recently forgotten how to do.  I managed to get both the C172 and the B777 into the air and buzzing around.  Frame rates were mostly comparable with what I get from FSX, and looking pretty smooth.  But for some reason in the B77 as I flew over a forested area the frame rate dropped to an unusable 3fps slideshow with Rembrandt.  Without Rembrandt I got a similar drop to about 8fps.  Not great, but it's possible that this sort of thing might be fixable with suitable time spent tweaking the detail settings.

 

So overall I'd have to say my opinion is unchanged.  I'm impressed with the improvements and see a lot of potential here, but FlightGear is still in need of a lot of work as an entertainment flight simulator.  I can see it making an excellent engine if you were building a full-cockpit sim for procedural training, where videogame quality eye candy isn't required.  But if I want an immersive sim that lets me feel like I'm flying in a virtual world, FG just doesn't cut it for me.  Yet.  I stand by my original prediction - in five to ten years time FlightGear might well be a pretty good replacement for FSX. 

 

So in summary I'd advise anyone to give FlightGear a try, but with tempered expectations.

 

Dr V

[emarkay 0]

I have couple of recent posts on their official forums on a few minor issues with the new release. Some may be bugs, some may be my own bumblefingering.
I don't understand why there is no concern on their part regarding these issues...

[stuart_d_buchanan 4]

Hi emarkay,

 

I haven't looked at your issues specifically as I've been on a break from FG development for the last month but have you raised the bugs through the official bug tracker (https://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/)?

 

-Stuart