FGFS Related Links

In addition to www.flightgear.org, there are a large number of websites either directly related to FlightGear, or which contain information of use to the FlightGear pilot. This page provides a non-exhaustive list of them. Any additions or corrections should be sent to the maintainer at the bottom of the page.

Major Projects

FlightGear relies directly on a number of other projects, including:

• JSBSim Flight Dynamics Modeling. JSBSim is an object-oriented, multi-platform, flight dynamics model written in C++. It is one of the several ways to drive aircraft flight "math/physics" for FlightGear, but JSBSim also can be run in a standalone mode and is also being used for other projects. The JSBSim web site also strives to serve as a resource to flight simulation engineers, hosting and providing links to relevant technical papers and references to other sites.
• TerraGear. TerraGear, using geographical elevation- and landuse-data as input, provides the physical geography of the FlightGear world, from the sea to the mountains.
• FlightGear Scenery Object Database. All the buildings, structures, and other objects in the FlightGear world are stored in this database. Contributing new objects to this database is an easy way to help the project and improve your local virtual flights.
• FlightGear World Custom Scenery Project. A major project to improve the quality of the world scenery by using GRASS and other well-known OGC-compilant tools.
• FGMS. A standalone network server for FlightGear, With fgms you can fly with other pilots scattered around the world. You can assemble experiences in formation flight, build virtual airlines, track yourself on google maps, etc.

FlightGear Tools

There are a number of add-ons to FlightGear available.

• TaxiDraw is a taxiway editor for FlightGear and X-Plane, written by David Luff.
• Scenery Designer. is an interactive program that allow its user to design custom sceneries, written by Fred Bouvier.
• Atlas - Cartography for virtual worlds. A FlightGear compatible moving map display and atlas.
• The FlightGear AI Aircraft Download Page hosted by Durk Talsma.
• Kelpie Flight Planner for FlightGear - A Java/SWT based Gui flight planner which uses the airport and navaid databases of Flightgear, allowing the user to search for airports and navigation aids and plan flights between them.
• Signs: Displays city/airport/object names as floating text within the FlightGear visuals. Requires no changes to the FG code, but requires write access to the FlightGear data tree.

FlightGear Web Pages

Other websites dedicated to FlightGear.

• A Russian language site about FlightGear.
• A Japanese language translation of the FlightGear website.
• Erik Hofman's prebuilt sgi binaries.
• Fred's "current" builds of FlightGear from cvs as well as the FlightGear Scenery Designer, Taxidraw, Atlas, and a few other miscellaneous things.
• FlightGear Developer Locations - View a map of the world with the locations of the flightgear developers who have volunteered an approximate lon/lat.
• Flight Gear Aviation Training Device project (FAA Certification sought)
• Aircraft Dynamics Models for Use with FlightGear - Maintained by Dr. Michael Selig, UIUC.
• OpenGC - Open source glass cockpit display project.

Flight Dynamics Modeling and Aircraft Modelling

Resources for people interested in creating new aircraft for FlightGear.

• AC3D. A shareware 3d modeler.
• Blender. An open-source 3d modeler.
• Demo of an Applied Aerodynamics Digital Textbook
• NASA Virtual Wind Tunnel project
• ALLSTAR Network Theory of Flight - Level 3 - Nicely done introduction to the theory of flight. Goes into pretty good detail.
• http://aeroweb.brooklyn.cuny.edu/aircraft/l17a.html - Navion info
• The Airstrip - Collection of rather detailed aircraft pictures.
• Airplane 3-View Drawings - lots of 'em (mixed quality).
• Aerospaceweb.org - Online info for over 150 aircraft.

Other Flight Sim Related sites on the Net

• The Flightsim Aviation Zone - Source for aviation and flight simulator related news and forums.
• LaRCsim - A set of ANSI C routines that implement a full set of equations of motion for a rigid-body aircraft in atmospheric and low-earth orbital flight, suitable for pilot-in-the-loop simulations on a workstation-class computer.
  You should click on the "Free Utilities", fill in the form to declare your USA citizenship, and then you can download LaRCsim.
  
• Nasa Ames Research Center - The Aeronautical Test and Simulation Division at Ames Research Center operates two world class piloted flight simulation laboratories, the Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) and the Crew Vehicle Systems Research Facility (CVSRF).
• Silent Wings - Soaring Simulator.
• ACM - Air Combat Maneuvers. A neat combat sim. (Unix/X11)
• Vertigo - Another promising sim that models several different aircraft and has some decent graphics. (DOS)
• Build your own full motion cockpit
• FGFLY - a public domain flight simulator. MS-DOS only.
• FLYG-SIM by Anders E. Eriksson
• F??ation A?onautique Internationale - flight sim section.
• Flight Dynamics and Control (FDC) toolbox for Matlab and Simulink
• Matt Wietlispach's military cockpit project.
• Kent Lewis' Aviation Safety Blog

World Data

Geographical Data and Maps

• Open Street Map (street data)
• Open Aerial Map (satellite/aerial data)
• SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) data. 1 arcsec coverage is only available for the USA at this time.
• SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) data. 3 arcsec resolution for North_America.
• USGS DEM/DLG data and info (Top level)
• 1:2,000,000-scale Digital Line Graph (DLG) data (USGS)
• The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)
• The Global Land One-km Base Elevation (GLOBE) Project
• Global 30 Arc Second Elevation Data Set
• Yukon 180 Meter DEM
• ESRI Data - World GIS data in Shapefile format.
• Manifold Systems - Free maps and GIS data (including Digital Chart of the World "DCW")
• Guide To Mostly On-line And Mostly Free U.S. Geospatial and Attribute Data
• Another USGS site for DEM & DLG data (and other stuff)
• USGS Coastline Extractor
• The U.S. Department of Defense World Magnetic Model 2000
• Software that computes magnetic variation anywhere on (or above) the earth's surface
• National Geographics Maps
• Code to model and calculate positions of astronomical objects
• National Atlas of the United States - Tons of various feature data (in shape file format)
• Global Unified land mass polygons
• Canadian Spatial Data - GeoGratis.
• Global Land Cover Characterization 1km resolution.
• NOAA Land Use Land Cover (shapefile) [ Description ] [ Download ]
• Other GIS data in various formats from the NOAA
• Terrain Viewer - a "free" tool to visualize various terrain data sets. Includes pointers to free terrain data sets (nothing not already listed here as of 2/27/2003.)

Land Use Data

• Global Land Use Datasets - Nasa Goddard Institute - Country codes, Cultivation intensity, Fractional inundation, Normalized difference vegetation index, Population density, Soil units, Vegetation, Wetland ecosystems ...

Airport and Navaid info

• Robin Peel's Airport and Navaid data homepage.
• The FAA's NASD
• AirNav - Provides free access to detailed aeronautical information on airports and navigational aids in the USA.
• FCC Databases and Info
• Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File (DAFIF)
• A query page for a Master Stations Library, a database of all "major" airports, worldwide.
• Various ATC links.
• Standards/Specifications for Aeronautical Surveys
• Approach lighting info
• US Army's Airfield Runway and Approach Lighting Systems (Ch 2)

World Weather Info Sources

• National Weather Service METAR/TAF Information
• NOAA Metar Observations
• Snow Depths for the Midwest (USA)
• The DataStreme Project - potential for some interesting weather data.

World Modeling Tools

• RemoteSensing.org - A site dedicated to developing remote sensing algorithms, code, and technology.
• Linux programs to manipulate cartography data
• drawmap processes 250K Digital Elevation Model (DEM) files, 100K Digital Line Graph (DLG) files (in the 'optional' format), and Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) files. (GPL'd)
• Terragen landscape generator
• Shapefile processing code
• Arcinfo grid processing code
• Digital Dawn Graphics Toolkit
• Geospecific rendering of alpine terrain
• Virtual Terrain Project (VTP)
• SRI's Digital Earth Project
• GeoVRML Working Group

Development Links

Philosophy and Tips

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. Required reading for anyone involved in a cooperative software development project.

Computer Graphics/OpenGL

• OpenGL
• Graphics Gems
• Ray tracing news
• The Mesa 3-D graphics library - software only OpenGL implementation for many platforms, now with support for hardware acceleration begin built in.
• Experimental 3dnow patch for Mesa
• OpenGL Game Developer's Mailing list (archives)
• GLUI - a GLUT-based C++ user interface library (portable).
• PLIB - STEVE'S PORTABLE GAME LIBRARY. Includes GUI Widgets (PUI), Sound Library (SL), Matrix/Vector math Simple Geometry Library (SG), Simple Scene Graph Library (SSG), and Joystick (JS). Intended to be very portable to be used with OpenGL and GLUT to produce very portable 3D applications.

OpenGL for Win32

• GLUT for win95/nt - OpenGL Utility Toolkit

OpenGL for Mac

• http://www.conix3d.com/ - OpenGL for the Macintosh.

OpenGL Hardware Acceleration

• http://cyclone.cs.clemson.edu/~rmg/linux.html

Data Manipulation (Gridding, Triangulation, Triangle Strips, etc.)

• Mesh Generation & Grid Generation on the Web
• http://tofu.alt.net/~grantham/meshifier/show.html - Convert Polygon models into more efficient "strips".
• A Generic Polygon Clipping Library
• Triangle - A Two-Dimensional Quality Mesh Generator and Delaunay Triangulator.
• GTS - GNU Triangulated Surface Library.

Terrain Rendering Techniques

• James Stewart - Interesting research into terrain illumination (self shading, and shadow casting) and visibility culling in terrains.

Cloud Rendering Techniques

• Real-time Cloud Rendering - by Mark Harris.
• SkyWorks Demo - by Mark Harris.

Free Development Tools

• EGCS Development Toolchain for GNU-Win32 b19 - installs over the top of Cygwin32-beta19 and fixes C++ template problems with Cygwin32.
• Recompiled EMX GNU C/C++ port for Win32 and DOS - You need nt09* as well as rsxnt*.
• Perl - A powerful, high level scripting language.
• Gnu Autotools book

Math

• Basic Geometry - U of MN Geometry Center.
• Aviation Formulary - By Ed Williams
• comp.graphics.algorithms Frequently Asked Questions
• Finding the convex hull of a set of points.

Sound

• OpenAL</> is responsible for handing FlightGear audio output over to the platforms native audio system.
• PenguinPlay - Potential source for a portable sound library.
• NetStreamer - Stream audio across the net.
• SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer. Multiplatform, free sound library in development.

Other

• Mumit's STL Newbie guide
• Standard Template Library Overview

Other Tools

3d Modeling Tools

• http://www.multigen.com - Comercial.
• http://radsite.lbl.gov/mgf/HOME.html
• http://www.3dnature.com/ - comercial.

Other Useful Sites

• Aviationist.com - an interesting general aviation site.

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