On August 17, developers officially unveiled FlightGear
v2.8. For the uninitiated, “FlightGear is an open source flight simulator with
more than 400 aircraft, a seamless worldwide scenery database, a multi-player
environment, a flexible open aircraft modeling system, multiple display
support, and an open architecture. Best
of all, being open source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone
is encouraged to contribute.” The community has been around for over 15 years
now, so the simulator has a ton of people contributing to the project. It’s easily one of the best flight simulation
programs in the world. As always, FlightGear is available for download
completely free of charge through their website.
FlightGear 2.8 sports a number of new features. My favorite
is a new automated system that allows users to make changes to the scenery. Users can now also select between summer and winter textures
in-sim, and an improved atmospheric scattering and terrain haze model means the
lighting of the terrain is more realistic. The world scenery now includes over 20,000
airports. It has gotten so large and detailed that it now takes 3 DVD’s to hold
the entire scenery database.
Want to know if your computer can support
FlightGear? You’ll probably need a computer with a dedicated GPU. I imagine
that the any computer with the new integrated Intel HD 4000 would be able to
run FlightGear at a playable level. According
to the developers, “FlightGear
requires a reasonable hardware accelerated 3D card with OpenGL drivers to achieve smooth frame rates. Software-only
rendering typically yields frame rates in the neighborhood of several seconds
per frame. But, with a 3D accelerated card you can expect much higher. On a
2-3Ghz class CPU with a GeForce card, frame rates in excess of 60 fps are
reasonable to expect in most situations. The actual frame rate varies of course
with scene complexity (which changes from area to area and changes as your view
direction changes) and the specific details of your hardware.”
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