A preview of features for the ‘Barcelona’ release

Join us for a short overview of what the next Flightgear release within the new automated three-month release cycle will bring!

FG goes to Spain

The most visible change to first-time users will be the change of the default airport. For the future, we plan to name every release after the default airport, and thus while the last release has been ‘San Francisco’ (or 2016.1), the next release (2016.2) will go to the beautiful city of Barcelona. Look forward to some impressive scenery and all-new VRF tutorials and suggested flights in the region!

Improvements to scenery

Improvements to scenery rendering are being added on all fronts. Supported by shader developments within the Atmospheric Light Scattering (ALS) framework, runways and airport keep can now be rendered in multiple ways in high resolution, and this has been implemented for different regions all across the world – including the new default airport of Barcelona ‘El Prat’.

Places across the world continue to be populated with 3d models, for instance check out the progress on London Heathrow!

See the FG world through an infrared camera

ALS now includes a whole suite of filtering techniques, which allow to select brightness and gamma-correction in-sim (i.e. affecting screen pixel color values visible in screenshots, not only the appearance on the monitor). Part of this filter suite is also a night vision mode and, possibly most exciting, and infrared camera mode. The IR vision shows contrasts based on relative temperatures, with the daily temperature cycles of the environment modeled by the weather system.

New and improved aircraft

The Piper J3 Cub, a long-time resident of the aircraft repository, has now been fitted with a brand-new JSBSim FDM as well as support for high-end effects, including interior shadow mapping. Water takeoff and landing by selecting floats rather than wheels is also being developerd.

The Boeing 757 has been updated with new versions and winglets dependent on selected airline livery. The Extra 500 received multiple upgrades and now includes a simulation of icing effects and a sophisticated failure system.

Behind the scenes changes

Multiple less visible changes have also been introduced:

* the handling of shared scenery models has now been much streamlined – shared models now reside in a single location and are most easily obtained and updated via the in-sim terrasync option. Alternatively a (daily updated) collection can be obtained here.

* FG now supports the generation and application of GPU specific rendering setting profiles. The idea is to make the experience for first-time users more pleasant by pre-setting the rendering quality level to something which leads to a good experience for the selected graphics card.

* Currently, support for pre-defining aircraft states (such as ‘cold and dark’ or ‘in air’ or ‘cruise’) is formalized and introduced, with the aim of routinely allowing in-air initialization of complex aircraft with all systems set correctly.

Stay tuned as we fly towards our next release!

11 Replies to “A preview of features for the ‘Barcelona’ release”

  1. Salut chers tous.
    Ce simulateur est de plus en plus impressionnante à chacune de ses sorties. Je vous tire mon chapeau pour ce énorme boulot. Je souhaiterai, pour la prochaine sortie si possible que la piste de l’Aéroport International de Port Gentil (OACI: FOOG) qui est moderne, soit totalement dépourvue des arbres qui l’encombre et que son ILS soit opérationnel dans le simulateur. L’aéroport de Libreville aussi (oaci: FOOL); sa piste n’est pas parfaitement colinéaire au couloir ILS. Merci encore pour ce que vous faites.

  2. Impressive. The Barcelona-release looks good. EBBR (Brussels), I propose that the next airport for a future version of FGFS. Around EBBR all airports have buildings.
    I’ll be very happy to know if other versions of FlightGear display another area. Thanks to all developers of small aircraft (c182s, c150, c172 …). For the beginner, the most important aircraft in FlightGear.

    1. Please join the forum threads for making suggestions for the new release location and for voting for one of the suggestions – they’re done pretty much after every release. The choice is made by the user community and not by the developers.

  3. Can we upgrade or update the sounds of other aircraft, or at least make the default sounds in the game better? Please take the links for example:

    777-200 Pushback/Taxi-Start/Takeoff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO–GOjlV3U

    777-200 Landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH7Qx0WBGgA

    Flightgear 777-200 Landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv6KSoNqjdM

    I’ve already tried to modify the 777 engine sounds by merging some sounds from X-Plane and FSX, but I haven’t been able to get much further than that. Please take this into consideration. Thank you so much for an amazing sim!

  4. A heartly appreciated feature by glider pilots would be if flightgear could proceed the IGC-data files of gliderflights and make it possible to “replay” a distinct glider flight in a realistic scenery.

    There are a plenty of flight files, see
    onlinecontest.org

  5. Looks great! I quit FlightGear a while ago – but now, I’m starting to think again..
    Can’t wait! That scenery is absolutely stunning.

Comments are closed.