posted 03-04- 08:54 AM            

With that in mind, consider the impact that an open source flight sim could have.
Publishers are shying away from spending money to develop realistic flight sims. Publishers also aren't interested in giving users control over the sim beyond painting planes or other trivial control.
Fighter Squadron goes part of the way to this goal by having an open plane description format. Imagine if the source code to FS was available. By now we would likely have realistic padlocks, moving ground objects, more reliable multiplayer games, etc. An open source flight sim would also attract all the people who don't like SDOE because of one or another of its deficencies. The EAW people could fix the things about SDOE that they don't like. Maybe they would work on making it more dynamic, or expanding the terrain, or optimizing some of the code so more planes can be onscreen.

An open flight sim is going to make a closed one (EAW, Janes) seem like a real dead end.

posted 03-04- 01:46 PM               

I have been totally amazed by the planes developed by the OOP community. This is an exiting time to by flying FS. However, sometimes I think that FS is like a beautifull shiny car that needs a new engine!! There are some inherent shortcoming in the engine that limits how far and how successfull Openplane can be: the controls are still too touchy, the air is too thin and some improvements are needed with the maps , etc...

With all the newer WWII simulation on the horizon, Openplane may be a dead end if a new engine does not arrive soon, either an update to the existing FSSDOE, or a completely new engine based on the Openplane format.

Keep in mind that Openplane is a data format for airplane information. Maybe some group of users could start writing an open source engine (a lot of work, tough). Or, is there an engine in the works (MH, please reply!!)