+New in 0.7.6
+* December 15, 2000
+* Added night ground cover lights with user controllable densities on
+ a per texture basis. Lights have a bit of a "fog punch through" effect.
+* Support added for "shaped" instrument panels.
+* Added support for virtual panels that are larger than the screen
+ space which can scroll.
+* Added waypoint and route flying support to the autopilot and HUD.
+* New highly detailed runway textures with accurate markings.
+* Added a basic piston engine model, with support for rpm, egt, cht, mp,
+ and mixture.
+* Many tweaks and improvements to the c172 instrument panel.
+* Corrections and additions to the airport and navaid database.
+* Added an external interface to the property manager so you can
+ "telnet" into a running copy of FlightGear, cd through the property
+ tree and examine and even change values, all from a remote computer.
+* Improvements to flight model initialization.
+* Fixes and improvements to the save/restore code.
+* Added a load/save dialog box for saving/restoring your current flight.
+* Program notes max texture size for your card/driver so it can load
+ higher resultion textures if they are available and if you can use
+ them.
+* Added a visibility= command line option for setting intial visibility
+ distance.
+* Range of tiles loaded and drawn are now directly calculated from the current
+ visibility distance so that the ground always blends smoothly into sky.
+* Rewrote the tile caching scheme so it is now more flexible, more dynamic,
+ simpler, and more robust.
+* Updates to the FDM bus.
+* Many clean ups with the view code to prepare the way for a greater
+ variety of external views.
+* MSVC project files now included in the source distribution.
+* Fixed a view bug that could make the aircraft model appear rotated
+ incorrectly
+* Fixed a bug with the autopilot rate of climb hold.
+* Internal property manager tweaks.
+* Additional materials can be aliased to an existing material to save
+ texture space (at the expense of less texture variety)
+* MSVC tweaks.
+* MacOS tweaks.
+
+New in 0.7.5
+* September 18, 2000
+* Aircraft now starts at end of runway closest to desired heading.
+* Runways now have accurate markings.
+* Addition of a completely reconfigurable instrument panel.
+* Tons of panel tweaks and fixes. Gyro now drifts, relocated whisky compass,
+ skid ball moves in the right direction, etc.
+* Updates and tweaks to network multiplayer code.
+* Tweaks to ground steering sensitivity.
+* Updates to the UIUC flightmodel and icing research code.
+* Fixed the sound problem in the previous version.
+* Current scenery normal is now available for use.
+* Current load queue size is now available for use.
+* Added a configure time check for proper simgear version.
+* Explicitely link in -lpthread if it exists.
+* Fixed a couple namespace problems.
+* MacOS and MSVC tweaks.
+* Renamed JSBsim to JSBSim
+* Added support in the material library for non-repeating textures.
+
+New in 0.7.4
+* July 19, 2000
+
+* VOR reception now scales with altitude.
+* Added differential braking support.
+* Landing gear modeling code now works in JSBSim
+* Overhauled cloud code substantially, new cloud textures.
+* Added support for Ray Woodworth's 5 axis motion chair.
+* Red light the panel at night and shade based on time of day.
+
+* Fixed autopilot altitude hold increment bug.
+* Fixed screen snap shot function.
+* Fixed mach number for LaRCsim.
+* --start-date-gmt option fixed.
+* Fixes to uiuc includes and initializations
+* Fixes to periodic scheduler.
+* Fixed a tile loading bug if the load queue wasn't empty before a reset or
+ teleport.
+
+* Some additional MSVC5 portability fixes.
+* Tweaks to build with newest gcc under Irix contributed by Erik Hofman.
+
+* Clean out a pile of old junk in the material manager library from the
+ pre-ssg days, and majorly overhauled it.
+* Complete reengineering of the panel code in preparation for moving the
+ configuration out into a data file.
+* Lots of hashing around with Joystick support trying to achieve something
+ that is flexible enough to handle the zillions of possible configurations
+ out there. Hopefully we are approaching a workable solution.
+* Better windows support in our joystick module.
+* View code simplifications and optimizations contributed by Norman Vine.
+
+* Added support for $FG_SCENERY and --fg-scenery=path so scenery can have a
+ different location from the base package.
+* Moved drop in sky module, world time module, ephemeris module, and low
+ level communications modules over to simgear.
+* Replaced gdbm with metakit
+* Added David Megginson's property manager
+
+
+New in 0.7.3
+* May 18, 2000
+* Added a radio stack 2 VOR/ILS and an ADF to the instrument panel.
+ You can change the frequencies by clicking on the knobs on the
+ instrument panels. You can now navigate with VOR/ADF/DME and fly
+ ILS approaches.
+* Added a chronometer to the instrument panel.
+* Added a "wet" compass to the top of the instrument panel.
+* Compass, vsi, and altitute instruments and vacuum system are more
+ accurately modeled.
+* Added a magnetic variation model.
+* Added navaid database management and query code.
+* Added magvar offset to VOR radials.
+* Heading bug now display magnetic heading rather than true heading.
+* Autopilot now has modes to track a VOR and GS.
+* Added custom joystick client support so sim can be flown from a
+ remote joystick connected to another machine. This is in support of
+ some custom hardware located in the human factors research lab of the
+ university of minnesota.
+* HUD controls are a bit different "h" toggles through day/night/off
+ modes and "H" cycles through brightness levels.
+* Norman Vine contributed code to optionally do antialiased hud lines
+ on hardware that supports this. Norman also contributed additional
+ hud cleanups and updates.
+* Updates to JSBsim flight dynamics code that includes a generic
+ reconfigurable flight control system, a initial state trimming routine,
+ support for wind and weather, support for flaps, independent trim control,
+ config files changes
+* Updates to LaRCsim flight dynamcis code contributed by UIUC that
+ allows loading aircraft specifications at runtime from config files.
+ UIUC is using flightgear as a platform to do icing research. The UIUC
+ aircraft use the c172 gear model for now which causes some weirdness
+ on the ground for some of the larger aircraft.
+* Flight model no longer has to be chosen at compile time.
+* Separated ephemeris code from the actual sky rendering code and gave
+ this whole section a big overhaul. The moon should now consistantly
+ have the correct phase.
+* Rebuilt the sky dome using ssg.
+* Removed dependencies on mat3.h and friends (old srgp support lib)
+* Airport lookups now done through gdbm (a light weight embedded database.)
+* Converted ssgVTable's to ssgVtxTables which do proper memory
+ management and should facilitate use of compiled vertex arrays once
+ ssg add support for these.
+* Overhauled autopilot internals, separated out the gui controls from
+ the actual autopilot code.
+* Cygwin32 build fixes
+* MSVC++ build fixes
+* Mac build fixes
+
+New in 0.7.2
+* February 17, 2000
+* Lots of code reorganizations
+* Build requires plib-1.1.x
+* Build requires SimGear-0.0.x
+* LaRCsim/c172 is now the default aircraft model.
+* Added flaps support to control model.
+* Lots of updates and tweaks for the LaRCsim/c172 model.
+* Use a more standard texture/blend mode combination for sun/moon halos to
+ avoid render path that's not supported by all cards/drivers.
+* Change reported speed on hud from V_equiv_kts to V_calibrated_kts
+* Instrument panel rewrite by David Megginson. This isn't quite as flashy
+ as the first pass, but is much more functional, plays much better with
+ opengl, and it should be relatively easy for someone with graphical skills
+ to make it look more spiffy.
+* MacOS fixes contributed by Darrell Walisser.
+* Many JSBsim updates.
+* Added a screen snapshot facility (F3).
+* Added a load/save state function contributed by David Megginson.
+* Added support for various I/O protocols and channels so that flightgear
+ can communicate with itself and other programs through a variety of means.
+* Bug fix: The aircraft model used for external views was being included in
+ the height above terrain check so when the view position and the aircraft
+ model collided the current altitude kept getting pushed up to compensate,
+ but of course the aircraft model would get pushed up as well because it
+ tracks the current aircraft position and orientation. Thus you had a never
+ ending cycle ...
+* Oliver's multiplayer network code now moved to his own subdirectory:
+ NetworkOLK
+* Added simulated cloud puffs as we pass through the cloud layer.
+* Cleaned up some memory leaks occuring between ssg and flightgear.
+* Update to Christian's weather data base code.
+
+New in 0.7.1
+* Durk Talsma added a nifty cloud layer.
+* Default to Christian Mayer's new weather system.
+* Added routines to do screen printing contributed by Mark Vallevand.
+* Added routines to do screen shots to ppm graphics file (all platforms)
+ contributed Rich Kaszeta.
+* Added a magic carpet (aka slew) mode.
+* Added a hot air balloon simulator mode. (alpha)
+* Added a simple (direct lincage) autocoordation feature.
+* Added a mode to control view (side to side and up and down) with the mouse.
+* Fixed a DEM decoding problem which caused most of the terrain to be 256
+ meter too high (and regenerated the world scenery with proper elevations.)
+* Updates to JSBsim.
+* Added support for a pilot view offset from the center of gravity.
+* Various platform portability fixes.
+* Updated time-offset/syncing command line options.
+* Updated the FDM <==> Flight Gear interface to be more object oriented.
+ This should hopefully pave the way for being able to simulate several
+ concurrent entities.
+* Removed unimplemented menu entries.
+* Various scenery tools changes and enhancements in preparation for adding
+ runways (hopefully for the next release.)
+
+New in 0.7.0
+* Autopilot can now fly great circle routes.
+* Incorporated a first stab at some networking code contributed by Oliver
+ Delise.
+* Added Christian Mayer's new weather subsystem.
+* Started adding support for "external" views ... still needs some work.
+* Added a flight model acceleration funtion.
+* Added support for mouse yoke control contributed by David Megginson.
+* FDM model hertz now definable from the command line.
+* Added initial timezone support so the user can have better control and more
+ options for setting the starting time of the sim.
+* We now draw nonexistant tiles as ocean which means we only have to create
+ and distribute tiles that contain some sort of land mass.
+
+* Replaced basic render engine with plib's ssg (simple scene graph).
+* Now expect plib to be installed in it's one true and official location.
+* Added support for timegm() if it exists which explicitely expects GMT input.
+* A bit of your basic code reorganization and shuffling.
+
+* Removed tools dependency on libgfc. Functionality is now covered by
+ shapelib which has been added into the Tools tree.
+* Added support for the wonderful GSHHS global land mass data set.
+* Removed dependecy on process-dem.pl script.
+* Created a new distributed/parallel tile build system ... hmmm kind of super
+ computer or beowulf style stuff for getting large chunks of scenery built
+ as fast as possible.
+* Only generate tiles that have land mass data since the sim can recreate pure
+ ocean tiles on the fly.
+* First stab at a water flattening scheme to prevent oceans, lakes, and rivers
+ from running up and down the sides of hills.
+* Changed the default "Work/" subdirectory layout.
+* Updates to better handle segment boundaries in preparation for real airport
+ runway and lighting modeling.
+* Updates and enhancements to my polygon management class.
+
+* Updates to JSBsim.
+* Updates to Tony's c172 model.
+* Updated getting started guide from Micheal Basler.
+
+* FreeBSD portability tweaks.
+* MACos portability tweaks.
+* Borland C++ tweaks.
+* MSVC++ tweaks.
+
+New in 0.6.0
+* Tons of improvements with scenery creation. Inter-tile gaps have been
+ fixed, distorted textures have been fixed, real coastlines have been added,
+ and many other subtle improvements.
+* Tools for parallelizing the scenery building tasks. For instance by using
+ 20 machines in parallel, scenery for the entire USA can be regenerated in
+ just over 4 hours vs. 70+ hours on a single machine.
+* Texture scale can be specified (and changed)( in the materials file. The
+ sim must be rerun for the change to take effect.
+* Windows now uses plib joystick code so rudder pedals should now work.
+* Now builds against Steve Baker's plib (portable game devel library)
+ distributed separately (www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker/plib/)
+* Many source code changes for the MacOS port contributed by Darrell
+ Walisser (the port isn't quite there yet ...)
+* Source code changes for better compiling with the Borland compiler.
+* Source code changes for better compiling with the native Irix compilers.
+* Fixed a bug so you can now fly across the international date line (or
+ more precisely the division between longitude = +/-180.
+* Tweaks to the Astro section contributed by Durk Talsma.
+* Autopilot improvements contributed by Norman Vine.
+* Fonts/characters now drawn with texture maps for increased speed.
+* Instrument panel can be toggled on and off with "P".
+* GUI interface for tweaking some autopilot parameters.
+* HUD appearance and layout changes contributed by Norman Vine, includes
+ faster font drawing for much better performance.
+* Reset function added to reset you to your starting conditions.
+* GUI function to enter a new airport id (and be transported there)
+* Added serial output support for an "in-development" full motion cockpit.
+* "Just in time" texture loading to reduce initial sim loading time.
+
+
+New in 0.59 (This is an intermediate/stepping stone release. Skip this
+ release if you are interested in stability.)
+* IRIX portability changes and support for native SGI compilers.
+* Solaris portability tweaks
+* Incorporated some MacOS portability changes (although the port is not
+ yet complete.)
+* Changes to allow adjustment of the autopilot settings while it is
+ activated.
+* Began complete overhaul of scenery generation tools.
+* Fixed a view frustum culling bug.
+* separated lib GPC (generic polygon clipper.) GPC is not "freeware" and
+ the author has explicitely refused our request to distribute source code
+ for this library with Flight Gear.
+* updated installation and getting started guide
+* switched to a simpler, lighter weight frame rate calculation method.
+* new tile division scheme.
+* GPS serial *output* fixes.
+* Added a nifty halo to both the sun and moon. Preparation for allowing
+ subtle moon lighting effects at night.
+* Incorporated Jon Berndt's new C++ flight model rewrite.
+* Autopilot settings can be adjusted while active.
+* Updates to the instrument panel.
+* Fixed AOA reading on the HUD.
+* Added random splash screens.
+* Modified scenery loader to accept tri-fans.
+* Other non-backwards compatible changes to scenery file format and tile
+ layout.
+
+
+New in 0.58
+* Added JSBsim alpha code ... this is Jon S. Berndts alpha FDM rewrite.
+ Still lots to do, but you can watch a balistic flight for a short time.
+* Renamed Simulator/Flight to Simulator/FDM
+* Tweaks to assist building FGFS on solaris platforms.
+* Moved Lib/DEM to Tools/DEM
+* Started preparations for scenery generation tools overhaul.
+* More MSVC++ support.
+* Removed code that made the sun bigger at the horizon since this is just
+ an optical illusion in real life.
+* Bug fixed so that the sim can start out at an airport below sea level.
+
+New in 0.57
+* Converted to a simpler frame rate counting method.
+* Fixed the AOA reading on the HUD.
+* Removed gpc from the Lib section of distribution by request of the
+ gpc Author. The gpc license is unfortunately not compatible with
+ the GPL. I may look for an alternative library, or just require
+ that developers download this library separately.
+* First slew of changes from the MacOS porting effort contributed by
+ "Robert Puyol" <puyol@abvent.fr>.
+* Support for an arbitrary number of serial ports + additional serial port
+ output tweaks.
+* Serial output tweaks to make things more robust and act more like a GPS.
+* Portability enhancements for Borland, Solaris, and SGI.
+* Some internal class renaming and reorganizations. fgFLIGHT becomes FGState.
+ fgCONTROLS becomes FGControls.
+* Started work on an "external" flight model so the sim can be driven from
+ external input (serial port, network, file, etc.)
+* Fixed a problem that creeped in with setting the initial startup altitude.
+ This could cause an unrecoverable bounce and you'd end up flipped on your
+ back. Should be fixed now.
+* Sun now appears to grow in size as it gets very low in the horizon.
+* Fixed a view frustum culling bug where the scene was not accurately culled
+ when your view was anything other than straight forward.
+
+New in 0.56
+* Changed default HUD units to the more standard feet units. You can still
+ use meters by specifying the command line option "--units-meters".
+* Added some initial joystick support using Steve's joystick interface class.
+ This works great under Linux, but Steve's class now needs to be ported to
+ Windoze and other platforms.
+* Also added a fall back to the GLUT joystick routines for windows (until
+ we can find better joystick support.)
+* Added some initial serial port support for acting like gps and outputing
+ nmea data such that could be fed into a flight map software package.
+* Miscellaneous code clean ups, portability improvements, and optimizations.
+* Switched to a streams based error/debug logging system that can be
+ completely stripped out for a release build (./configure --without-logging)
+* Support for cygwin32 b20 compiler (latest release)
+* Continued progress on instrument panel
+* Support for starting fgfs at higher resolutions.
+
+New in 0.55
+* New version of gpc (generic polygon clipping library) from
+ http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/alan/software/
+* Brakes (use "b" to toggle)
+* Added an altitude hold module to the autopilot. Lock your current altitude
+ with "ctrl-a", "cntr-a" again will deactivate. (Also lock your current
+ heading with "ctrl-h", and again to deactivate.)
+* Added a terrain following module ... "ctrl-t" to activate.
+* Added an autothrottle ... "ctrl-s" to activate.
+* Fixes so that terrain tools will work in windoze.
+* More STL & Compiler compatibility fixes.
+* Changes to use a Point3 class.
+* Fixed win95/98 time problem that limited fps to about 18.3
+
+New in 0.54
+* Implimented audio envelopes so that pitch of engine changes with throttle
+* Textured moon, and rewritten/restructured Astro code.
+* More optimizations and code cleanups. (Norman Vine, Bernie Bright, Charlie
+ Hotchkiss.)
+* Bug fixed that was causing odd display artifacts due to a degenerate
+ fragment being created for every tile.
+* Bug fixed that caused scenery generation to go bad (misplaced fclose on an
+ invalid file descriptor.)
+* Code changes to support g++ 2.7 STL (from Bernie Bright)
+
New in 0.53
* Some initial "GameGLUT" support contributed by Gary R. Van Sickle
(tiberius@braemarinc.com)
- Created a new directory Simulator/Airports/ to handle airport data
specific tasks
- Created Simulator/Object/ to handle basic rendering objects
+* Panel code update from Friedemann Reinhard (use --enable-panel to activate)
+* Contributions from Bernie Bright
+ - Created some new classes to enable pointers-to-functions and
+ pointers-to-class-methods to be treated like objects. These objects
+ can be registered with fgEVENT_MGR.
+ - File "Include/fg_callback.hxx" contains the callback class defns.
+ - Modified fgEVENT and fgEVENT_MGR to use the callback classes. Also
+ some minor tweaks to STL usage.
+ - Added file "Include/fg_stl_config.h" to deal with STL portability
+ issues. Added an initial config for egcs (and probably gcc-2.8.x).
+ Don't have access to Visual C++ so I've left that for someone else.
+ - This file is influenced by the stl_config.h file delivered with egcs.
+ - Added "Include/auto_ptr.hxx" which contains an implementation of the
+ STL auto_ptr class which is not provided in all STL implementations
+ and is needed to use the callback classes.
+ - Deleted fgLightUpdate() which was just a wrapper to call
+ fgLIGHT::Update().
+ - Modified fg_init.cxx to register two method callbacks in place of the
+ old wrapper functions.
+ - The new classes in libmisc.tgz define a stream interface into zlib.
+ I've put these in a new directory, Lib/Misc. Feel free to rename it
+ to something more appropriate. However you'll have to change the
+ include directives in all the other files. Additionally you'll have
+ add the library to Lib/Makefile.am and Simulator/Main/Makefile.am.
+
+ The StopWatch class in Lib/Misc requires a HAVE_GETRUSAGE autoconf
+ test so I've included the required changes in config.tgz.
+
+ There are a fair few changes to Simulator/Objects as I've moved
+ things around. Loading tiles is quicker but thats not where the delay
+ is. Tile loading takes a few tenths of a second per file on a P200
+ but it seems to be the post-processing that leads to a noticeable
+ blip in framerate. I suppose its time to start profiling to see where
+ the delays are.
+
+ I've included a brief description of each archives contents.
+
+ Lib/Misc/
+ zfstream.cxx
+ zfstream.hxx
+ C++ stream interface into zlib.
+ Taken from zlib-1.1.3/contrib/iostream/.
+ Minor mods for STL compatibility.
+ There's no copyright associated with these so I assume they're
+ covered by zlib's.
+
+ fgstream.cxx
+ fgstream.hxx
+ FlightGear input stream using gz_ifstream. Tries to open the
+ given filename. If that fails then filename is examined and a
+ ".gz" suffix is removed or appended and that file is opened.
+
+ stopwatch.hxx
+ A simple timer for benchmarking. Not used in production code.
+ Taken from the Blitz++ project. Covered by GPL.
+
+ strutils.cxx
+ strutils.hxx
+ Some simple string manipulation routines.
+
+ Simulator/Airports/
+ Load airports database using fgstream.
+ Changed fgAIRPORTS to use set<> instead of map<>.
+ Added bool fgAIRPORTS::search() as a neater way doing the lookup.
+ Returns true if found.
+
+ Simulator/Astro/
+ Modified fgStarsInit() to load stars database using fgstream.
+
+ Simulator/Objects/
+ Modified fgObjLoad() to use fgstream.
+ Modified fgMATERIAL_MGR::load_lib() to use fgstream.
+ Many changes to fgMATERIAL.
+ Some changes to fgFRAGMENT but I forget what!
New in 0.52
* Stars added in 8 stages as sky gets darker for a smoother more realistic
* command line option to set starting position by airport ID
* Cleaned up initialization sequence to eliminate interdependencies
between sun position, lighting, and view position. This creates a
- valid single pass initialization path.
+ valid single pass initialization path.
* use already calculated LaRCsim values to create the roll/pitch/yaw
transformation matrix