FlightGear-2.6.0 - runs on Mac OS X 10.5 or later - Intel Only. Note: If you have any problem in downloading FlightGear, try downloading it from the following site: Sourceforge FlightGear Mac OS X download page. Clicking FlightGear-2.6.0-r319.dmg will start downloading it. Development snapshot (Latest snapshot pulled from git) -Jun-02-2011. Discover the latest games for Mac: minecraft, plants vs zombies, noxplayer. Download them for free and without viruses. FlightGear-2.4.0 - runs on Mac OS X 10.7, 10.6, and 10.5, intel and ppc; fgcom fix for Mac OS X 10.5 users. Fgcom in 2.4.0 release package does not work on OS X 10.5 since a part of it is built for OS X 10.6 or later. This causes the simulator running on OS X 1.5 unexpected exit when fgcom is enabled. To fix this, you can download and install.

Chapter 2
Want to have a free flight? Take FlightGear!

2.1 Yet Another Flight Simulator?

Did you ever want to fly a plane yourself, but lacked the money or ability todo so? Are you a real pilot looking to improve your skills without having totake off? Do you want to try some dangerous maneuvers without risking yourlife? Or do you just want to have fun with a more serious game without anyviolence? If any of these questions apply to you, PC flight simulators are just foryou.

You may already have some experience using Microsoft’s © Flight Simulator or anyother of the commercially available PC flight simulators. As the price tag of those isusually within the $50 range, buying one of them should not be a serious problem giventhat running any serious PC flight simulator requires PC hardware within the $1500range, despite dropping prices.

With so many commercially available flight simulators, why would we spendthousands of hours of programming and design work to build a free flight simulator?Well, there are many reasons, but here are the major ones:

• All of the commercial simulators have a serious drawback: they are made by a small group of developers defining their properties according to what is important to them and providing limited interfaces to end users. Anyone who has ever tried to contact a commercial developer would agree that getting your voice heard in that environment is a major challenge. In contrast, FlightGear is designed by the people and for the people with everything out in the open.
• Commercial simulators are usually a compromise of features and usability. Most commercial developers want to be able to serve a broad segment of the population, including serious pilots, beginners, and even casual gamers. In reality the result is always a compromise due to deadlines and funding. As FlightGear is free and open, there is no need for such a compromise. We have no publisher breathing down our necks, and we’re all volunteers that make our own deadlines. We are also at liberty to support markets that no commercial developer would consider viable, like the scientific research community.
• Due to their closed-source nature, commercial simulators keep developers with excellent ideas and skills from contributing to the products. With FlightGear, developers of all skill levels and ideas have the potential to make a huge impact on the project. Contributing to a project as large and complex as FlightGear is very rewarding and provides the developers with a great deal of pride in knowing that we are shaping the future of a great simulator.
• Beyond everything else, it’s just plain fun! I suppose you could compare us to real pilots that build kit-planes or scratch-builts. Sure, we can go out a buy a pre-built aircraft, but there’s just something special about building one yourself.

The points mentioned above form the basis of why we created FlightGear. Withthose motivations in mind, we have set out to create a high-quality flight simulator thataims to be a civilian, multi-platform, open, user-supported, and user-extensible platform.Let us take a closer look at each of these characteristics:

• Civilian: The project is primarily aimed at civilian flight simulation. It should be appropriate for simulating general aviation as well as civilian aircraft. Our long-term goal is to have FlightGear FAA-approved as a flight training device. To the disappointment of some users, it is currently not a combat simulator; however, these features are not explicitly excluded. We just have not had a developer that was seriously interested in systems necessary for combat simulation.
• Multi-platform: The developers are attempting to keep the code as platform-independent as possible. This is based on their observation that people interested in flight simulations run quite a variety of computer hardware and operating systems. The present code supports the following Operating Systems:
  • Linux (any distribution and platform),
  • Windows NT/2000/XP/Seven (Intel/AMD platform),
  • Windows 95/98/ME,
  • BSD UNIX,
  • Sun-OS,
  • Mac OS X

  At present, there is no other known flight simulator – commercial or free – supporting such a broad range of platforms.

• Open: The project is not restricted to a static or elite cadre of developers. Anyone who feels they are able to contribute is most welcome. The code (including documentation) is copyrighted under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

  The GPL is often misunderstood. In simple terms it states that you can copy and freely distribute the program(s) so licensed. You can modify them if you like and even charge as much money as want to for the distribution of the modified or original program. However, when distributing the software you must make it available to the recipients in source code as well and it must retain the original copyrights. In short:

  ”You can do anything with the software except make it non-free”.

  The full text of the GPL can be obtained from the FlightGear source code or from http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.

• User-supported and user-extensible:Unlike most commercial simulators, FlightGear’s scenery and aircraft formats, internal variables, APIs, and everything else are user accessible and documented from the beginning. Even without any explicit development documentation (which naturally has to be written at some point), one can always go to the source code to see how something works. It is the goal of the developers to build a basic engine to which scenery designers, panel engineers, maybe adventure or ATC routine writers, sound artists, and others can build upon. It is our hope that the project, including the developers and end users, will benefit from the creativity and ideas of the hundreds of talented “simmers” around the world.

Without doubt, the success of the Linux project, initiated by Linus Torvalds, inspired severalof the developers. Not only has Linux shown that distributed development of highlysophisticated software projects over the Internet is possible, it has also proventhat such an effort can surpass the level of quality of competing commercialproducts.

Fig. 1: FlightGear under UNIX: Bad approach to San Francisco International - by oneof the authors of this manual…

2.2 System Requirements

In comparison to other recent flight simulators, the system requirements for FlightGearare not extravagant. A medium speed AMD Athlon64 or Intel P4, even a decent AMDAthlon/K7 or an Intel PIII should be sufficient to handle FlightGear pretty well, givenyou have a proper 3D graphics card.

One important prerequisite for running FlightGear is a graphics card whose driversupports OpenGL. If you don’t know what OpenGL is, the overview given at theOpenGL website

http://www.opengl.org

says it best: “Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry’s mostwidely used and supported 2-D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API)...”.

FlightGear does not run (and will never run) on a graphics board which onlysupports Direct3D/DirectX. Contrary to OpenGL, Direct3D is a proprietary interface,being restricted to the Windows operating system.

You may be able to run FlightGear on a computer that features a 3D video cardnot supporting hardware accelerated OpenGL – and even on systems without3D graphics hardware at all. However, the absence of hardware acceleratedOpenGL support can bring even the fastest machine to its knees. The typicalsignal for missing hardware acceleration are frame rates below 1 frame persecond.

Any modern 3D graphics featuring OpenGL support will do. For Windows videocard drivers that support OpenGL, visit the home page of your video card manufacturer.You should note that sometimes OpenGL drivers are provided by the manufacturers ofthe graphics chip instead of by the makers of the board. If you are going to buy agraphics card for running FlightGear, an NVIDIA GeForce card is recommended, asthese tend to have better OpenGL support than AMD/ATI Radeon. 256MB of dedicatedgraphics memory will be more than adequate - many people run FlightGear happily onless.

To install the executable and basic scenery, you will need around 500 MB of free diskspace. In case you want/have to compile the program yourself you will need aboutanother 500 MB for the source code and for temporary files created during compilation.This does not include the development environment, which will vary in size dependingon the operating system and environment being used. Windows users can expect to needapproximately 300 MB of additional disk space for the development environment.Linux and other UNIX machines should have most of the development toolsalready installed, so there is likely to be little additional space needed on thoseplatforms.

For the sound effects, any capable sound card should suffice. Due to its flexibledesign, FlightGear supports a wide range of joysticks and yokes as well as rudder pedalsunder Linux and Windows. FlightGear can also provide interfaces to full-motion flightchairs.

FlightGear is being developed primarily under Linux, a free UNIX clone (togetherwith lots of GNU utilities) developed cooperatively over the Internet in much the samespirit as FlightGear itself. FlightGear also runs and is partly developed under severalflavors of Windows. Building FlightGear is also possible on a Mac OS X and severaldifferent UNIX/X11 workstations. Given you have a proper compiler installed,FlightGear can be built under all of these platforms. The primary compiler for allplatforms is the free GNU C++ compiler (the Cygnus Cygwin compiler underWin32).

If you want to run FlightGearunder Mac OS X, you need to have Mac OS X 10.4 orhigher. Minimum hardware requirement is either a Power PC G4 1.0GHz or an IntelMac, but We suggest you have MacBook Pro, Intel iMac, Mac Pro, or Power Mac (PowerPC G5) for comfortable flight.

2.3 Choosing A Version

It is recommended that you run the latest official release, which are typically producedannually, and which are used to create the the pre-compiled binaries. It is availablefrom

http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/

If you really want to get the very latest and greatest (and, at times, buggiest) code,you can clone the sources at

http://www.gitorious.org/fg.

to get the recent code. A detailed description of how to set this up for FlightGear canbe found at

http://wiki.flightgear.org/GIT.

2.4 Flight Dynamics Models

Flightgear Download For Windows 10

Historically, FlightGear was based on a flight model it inherited (together with theNavion airplane) from LaRCsim. As this had several limitations (most importantly,many characteristics were hard wired in contrast to using configuration files),there were several attempts to develop or include alternative flightmodels. As aresult, FlightGear supports several different flight models, to be chosen from atruntime.

• Possibly the most important one is the JSB flight model developed by Jon Berndt. The JSB flight model is part of a stand-alone project called JSBSim:

  http://jsbsim.sourceforge.net/.

• Andrew Ross created another flight model called YASim for Yet AnotherSimulator. YASim takes a fundamentally different approach to many other FDMs by being based on geometry information rather than aerodynamic coefficients. YASim has a particularly advanced helicopter FDM.
• Christian Mayer developed a flight model of a hot air balloon. Curt Olson subsequently integrated a special “UFO” slew mode, which helps you to quickly fly from point A to point B.
• Finally, there is the UIUC flight model, developed by a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This work was initially geared toward modeling aircraft in icing conditions, but now encompasses “nonlinear” aerodynamics, which result in more realism in extreme attitudes, such as stall and high angle of attack flight. Two good examples that illustrate this capability are the Airwave Xtreme 150 hang glider and the 1903 Wright Flyer. More details of the UIUC flight model can be found at

It is even possible to drive FlightGear’s scene display using an external FDM runningon a different computer or via named pipe on the local machine – althoughthis might not be a setup recommended to people just getting in touch withFlightGear.

2.5 About This Guide

Flightgear For Mac Os X Download For Mac

There is little, if any, material in this Guide that is presented here exclusively. You couldeven say with Montaigne that we “merely gathered here a big bunch of other men’sflowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the strip to hold them together”. Most(but fortunately not all) of the information herein can also be obtained from theFlightGear web site located at

http://www.flightgear.org/

The FlightGear Manual is intended to be a first step towards a complete FlightGeardocumentation. The target audience is the end-user who is not interested in the internalworkings of OpenGL or in building his or her own scenery. It is our hope that somedaythere will be an accompanying FlightGear Programmer’s Guide a FlightGear SceneryDesign Guide, describing the Scenery tools now packaged as TerraGear; and aFlightGear Flight School package.

We kindly ask you to help us refine this document by submitting corrections,improvements, suggestions and translations. All users are invited to contributedescriptions of alternative setups (graphics cards, operating systems etc.). We willbe more than happy to include those in future versions of The FlightGear Manual(of course not without giving credit to the authors).

Chapter 3
Preflight: Installing FlightGear

Pre-compiled binaries for the latest release are available for

• Windows - any flavor,
• Mac OS X,
• Linux.

To download them go to

http://www.flightgear.org/download/main-program/

and follow the instructions provided on the page.

3.1 Installing scenery

Detailed FlightGear scenery is available for the entire world, allowing you to flyeverywhere from the Himalaya mountains to rural Kansas. The FlightGear base packagecontains scenery for a small area around San Francisco, so to fly elsewhere you will needto download additional scenery.

Each piece of scenery is packaged into a compressed archive, or tarball, in a 10degree by 10 degree chunk. Each tarball is named after the 10x10 degree chunk itrepresents, for example w130n50.tgz.

You can download scenery from a clickable map here:

http://www.flightgear.org/download/scenery/

Alternatively, you can support the FlightGear project by purchasing a complete set ofscenery for the entire world from here:

http://shopping.flightgear.org/

Once you have downloaded the tarball onto your computer, you need to find theScenery directory of your FlightGear installation.

• For Windows, this directory is likely to be

  c:Program FilesFlightGeardataScenery.

• For Unices, it is usually

  /usr/local/share/FlightGear/data/Scenery.

• For Mac OS X, it is usually either

  /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/Scenery.

To install the scenery, uncompress the tarball into the Scenery directory. Mostoperating system provide tools to uncompress tarballs. If you cannot uncompress thetarball, install an extractor program such as 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/).

Note that you should not decompress the numbered scenery files inside the tarballlike 958402.gz - this will be done by FlightGear on the fly.

Once you have uncompressed the tarball, the Terrain and Objects directorieswill contain additional sub-directories with your new scenery inside.

To use the new scenery, simply select a starting airport within the new scenery. If youare using the FlightGear Launcher, you will need to press the Refresh button before youselect your airport.

3.1.1 MS Windows Vista/7

If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you may find that Windows installsdownloaded scenery (and aircraft) to your Virtual Store:

c:Users(Your Name)AppDataLocalVirtualStoreProgramFilesFlightGearScenery

If it does this, you need to copy the Terrain and Objects directories manually toyour real FlightGear Scenery directory as described above.

3.1.2 Mac OS X

You may install the downloaded scenery data and aircraft using the GUI launcher. PressingInstall Add-On data on the Advanced Features » Others tab opens up the file browserwindow. Selecting one or more scenery data files will install the scenery data into/Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/Scenery.Acceptable formats for the scenery data are one of zip, tar.gz, tgz, tar, and extractedfolder. If the installation via the GUI launcher failure for some reason, you still have analternative way to install the data. Opening the data folder by pressing “Open datafolder” on the Others tab will pop up an Finder window for the data folder. Dragging anaircraft folder to data/Aircraft folder (or a scenery folder to data/Scenery folder) under the data folder will get the job done.

3.1.3 FG_SCENERY

If you would prefer to keep your downloaded scenery separate from the core installation,you can do so by setting your FG_SCENERY environment variable.

This is where FlightGear looks for Scenery files. It consists of a list of directoriesthat will be searched in order. The directories are separated by “:” on Unix (includingMac OS X) and “;” on Windows.

For example, on Linux a FG_SCENERY environment variable set to

/home/jsmith/WorldScenery:/usr/local/share/Flightgear/data/Scenery

searches for scenery in /home/jsmith/WorldScenery first, followedby

/usr/local/share/Flightgear/data/Scenery.

On Windows, a FG_SCENERY environment variable set to

c:Program FilesFlightGeardataScenery;c:dataWorldScenery

searches for scenery in c:Program FilesFlightGeardataSceneryfirst, followed by c:dataWorldScenery

Setting up environment variables on different platforms is beyond the scope of thisdocument.

3.1.4 Fetch Scenery as you fly

FlightGear is able to fetch the Scenery as you fly, if you have a permanent Internetconnection at your disposal. Create an empty ‘working’ directory for TerraSync, writableto the user and point FlightGear at this directory using the FG_SCENERY variable (asexplained above). Do not let TerraSync download Scenery into your pre-installedScenery directory.

Within FlightGear itself, select the Scenery Download option under the Environmentmenu. Then simply select the directory you created above and enable automatic scenerydownload.

One major benefit of TerraSync is that it always fetches the latest and greatestScenery from the FlightGear World (Custom) Scenery Project and thereforeallows you to pick up incremental updates independant of the comprehensiveWorld Scenery releases, which are generally synchronized with FlightGearreleases.

Running TerraSync as a separate tool

It is also possible to run TerraSync as an external tool.

On Mac OS X or Windows, just checking “Download scenery on the fly” on the GUIlauncher launches TerraSync as a separate process automatically for downloading theScenery around your aircraft, so you don’t have to specify the atlas option orFG_SCENERY at all.

Alternatively you can run the terrasync program directly. It talks to FlightGear usingthe ‘Atlas’ protocol, so call FlightGear with the:

--atlas=socket,out,1,localhost,5505,udp

command line parameter and tell TerraSync about the port number you’re using aswell as the respective directory:

Flightgear For Mac Os X Download Free

terrasync -p 5505 -S -d /usr/local/share/TerraSync

Note that TerraSync (when called with the '-S' command line switch, asrecommended) is going to download Scenery via the Subversion protocol over HTTP.Thus, if your Internet access is set up to use a HTTP proxy, plase make yourself awarehow to configure the 'libsvn' Subversion client for use of a proxy. If you areusing Mac OS X 10.5, The GUI launcher automatically specifies -S if svn isavailable.

3.1.5 Creating your own Scenery

If you are interested in generating your own Scenery, have a look at TerraGear - the toolsthat generate the Scenery for FlightGear:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/TerraGear

The most actively maintained source tree of the TerraGear toolchain is co-located atthe FlightGear landuse data Mapserver:

http://mapserver.flightgear.org/git/gitweb.pl.

3.2 Installing aircraft

The base FlightGear package contains only a small subset of the aircraft that areavailable for FlightGear. Developers have created a wide range of aircraft, from WWIIfighters like the Spitfire, to passenger planes like the Boeing 747.

You can download aircraft from

http://www.flightgear.org/download/aircraft/

Simply download the file and uncompress it into the data/Aircraft subdirectoryof your installation. The aircraft are downloaded as .zip files. Once you haveuncompressed them, there will be a new sub-directory in your data/Aircraftdirectory containing the aircraft. Next time you run FlightGear, the new aircraft will beavailable.

On Mac OS X, you may use the GUI launcher to install the downloaded aircraft filesas described in section 3.1.2.

3.3 Installing documentation

Most of the packages named above include the complete FlightGear documentationincluding a PDF version of The FlightGear Manual intended for pretty printing usingAdobe Reader, available from http://get.adobe.com/reader/

Moreover, if properly installed, the HTML version can be accessed via FlightGear’shelp menu entry.

Besides, the source code contains a directory docs-mini containing numerousideas on and solutions to special problems. This is also a good place for furtherreading.

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