Web site: www.flightgear.org
Category: Games
Sub-Category: Simulation
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows, BSD
License: GNU GPL
Interface: GUI
Wikipedia: FlightGear
First release: July 17, 1997
FlightGear Flight Simulator – a sophisticated free, completely open-source flight simulator framework, created by volunteers.
The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated and open flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, pilot training, as an industry engineering tool, for DIY-ers to pursue their favorite interesting flight simulation idea, and last but certainly not least as a fun, realistic, and challenging desktop flight simulator. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.
There are many exciting possibilities for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas.
Extensive and Accurate World Scenery Data Base:
– Over 20,000 real world airports included in the full scenery set.
– Correct runway markings and placement, correct runway and approach lighting.
– Taxiways available for many larger airports (even including the green center line lights when appropriate.)
– Sloping runways (runways change elevation like they usually do in real life.)
– Directional airport lighting that smoothly changes intensity as your relative view direction changes.
– World scenery fits on 3 DVD’s. (I’m not sure that’s a feature or a problem!) But it means we have pretty detailed coverage of the entire world.
– Accurate terrain worldwide, based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data.) 3 arc second resolution (about 90m post spacing) for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
– Scenery includes all vmap0 lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, etc.
– Nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and headlights visible on major highways. This allows for realistic night VFR flying with the ability to spot towns and cities and follow roads.
– Scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread to minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas.