Interview: Christian Schmitt

Q: What is your forum/IRC nickname?

Surprise: it’s papillon81. Yes, I’m that guy 🙂

Q: How long have you been involved in FlightGear?

Acording to my mail correspondence it must have been in 2007/2008 when I became an active part. I was unsatisfied with the state of EDDF in the FG scenery (no buildings, lightpoles everywhere), so I teamed up with a guy who had already started some work there. I ended up creating all of the terminal buildings and improving the airport layout. In those days, not many pilots were flying there. This changed in the months afterwards, which was a big boost of motivation, too.

Q: What are your major interests in FlightGear?

My main interest is clearly the scenery and technology connected with it, like GIS. I started to create some custom scenery, like Helgoland, and after I was granted direct access to the mapserver database, I was able to proxy-commit other peoples work, that started to come in. IMHO, the best FDM or aircraft models are useless if you don’t have a nice place to fly, takeoff and land 🙂 So this area is what motivates me the most.

I do also maintain the Gentoo packages (ebuilds) for the GIT versions of FG, SG and TerraGear. All these can be found in the Gentoo Gamerlay repo.

Q: What project are you working on right now?

Some months ago I was fed up of FG being unable to read apt.dat 850 data. So I started digging into the terragear code. Having no experience with C++, it was a steep learning curve, but to my own surprise I was able to convert the original TG parser to read the runway data and other features from the new format files. I started to implement as many features I was able to. Luckily, Pete was already working on the taxiways and surface features. So we teamed up and eventually merged our work together. Since then it has become a really great project to learn and improve FG along the way for me. I hope it will be put into use for the next scenery version. Before that can happen, we need more testers and bug reports (hint! hint! hint!) 🙂

Q: What do you plan on doing in the future?

I will continue to work on Terragear, commit some improvements to the Concorde (my favorite plane in FG) and take care of merge requests. I’d also like to dive more into the FG/SG code and do some adjustments here and there. We’ll see what else the future might bring 🙂

Q: Are you happy with the way the FlightGear project is going?

I’m actually very happy with it. The improvements from 2 years ago up to now are breathtaking. Sometimes it is just amazing what features people start to work on, like Project Rembrandt right now. Also, the work that went into the weather and shader system recently is amazing.

Q: What do you enjoy most about developing for FlightGear?

The fact that we support each other and have a strong community with many very capable people from completely different backgrounds. Knowing that you can build on the work of others and that there is a helping hand in case of problems. Personally I like the FG IRC channel a lot.

Q: What advice can you give to new developers who want to get started on their first aircraft/new feature/Nasal script?

They should first of all have some experience with FG in general, meaning, they should have used the program for some time. We often have people asking questions that they could answer for themselves just by USING FG a bit with different aircraft for a bit longer than just a day or so. If they identify an area where they want to start developing, they should get in contact with the maintainer(s) and seek advice before investing many hours of work.