Re: [Flightgear-devel] Any FlightSim Source

[Curtis L. O. <cu...@fl...>]

Julius writes:
> Hello, I want to ask some questions:
>   1. Can anyone direct me to src of any free flight sim, which can I compile
> with borland compilers? (Like Xplane classic)

If cost is an issue for you (i.e. you have a copy of borland, but
can't afford a different compiler) then I would urge you to give the
cygwin compiler a try (www.cygwin.com).  This is a very nice port of
the gnu unix development environment.  Once you have cygwin installed,
you can compile FlightGear with it pretty much right out of the box.
There are several people on this mailing list that could answer
questions if you ran into hitches along the way.  You will need a fair
chunk of disk space to do this.

>   2. Can you give me any directions to www pages about writing my
> own flightsim? (don't think I want to conquer FlightGear )

There is a distinct lack of information on writing flightsims on the
net.  There aren't that many people in the world doing it, and most of
them are selling their product and have no interest in helping out
their competition.

There is a lot of disjointed bits of information available though
ranging from 3d graphics to software engineering to astronomy to
meterology to physics to aerospace engineering to etc. etc. etc.

The hard part is figuring out what the question should be in the first
place and then figuring out where to go to learn about the answer.

I bet if you got cygwin installed and asked a few questions (if you
ran into problems) you could get flightgear compiled and running.
Then you could dig in and tweak with the code and make changes
yourself.

Writing a flightsim from scratch is a tremendous undertaking, I
wouldn't necessarily recommend that people start from scratch on their
own, but I also wouldn't want to discourage anyone from trying if that
is what they want to do.  Either way, you will certainly learn a lot,
I know I have.

> P.S. Sorry for mistakes, i'm only 14...

There are quite a few people on our list that act much younger than
that, so we won't hold it against you. :-)

Curt.
--
Curtis Olson   Human Factors Research Lab       FlightGear Project
Twin Cities    cu...@hf...                cu...@fl...
Minnesota      http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt   http://www.flightgear.org