FlightGear 0.9.10 review
DownloadThe FlightGear simulator for Mac OS X.
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The FlightGear simulator for Mac OS X. By installing a package you can fly around the world in the comfort of your own home.
If you have tried FlightGear on Mac OS X before, try again.
Here are some key features of "FlightGear":
Over 20, 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.
What's New:
New plane models, 3D clouds, volumetric shadows, seasonal terrain textures, air carrier operations, more weather effects, redout/blackout on high G loads, heat haze, and more AI capabilities were added.
A major rework of the multiplayer code was done, with a WWW-based multiplayer server status page (based on the Google Map).
The GUI was also reworked, and is more friendly to new users now; the ATC dialogs no longer impede flying.
A lot of bugs were fixed.
Requirements:
Flight Gear is a fairly typical OpenGL application in terms of it's performance and hardware requirements. It requires a reasonable hardware accelerated 3D card with full OpenGL drivers to achieve smooth frame rates. Software only rendering typically yields frame rates in the neighborhood of 1 frame per second. But, with a 3d accelerated card you can expect much higher. On a 1Ghz class CPU with a GeForce card, frame rates in excess of 60 fps are reasonable to expect in many situations. The actual frame rate varies of course with scene complexity (which changes from area to area and changes as your view direction changes.)
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