Posted on by Curt O.

FlightGear v3.2 Released

The FlightGear development team is delighted to announce the v3.2 release of FlightGear, the free, open-source flight simulator. This new version contains many exciting new features, enhancements and bugfixes. Highlights in this release include an experimental aircraft manager allowing users to download and load aircraft in-sim, a very capable built-in HTTP server, built-in voice synthesizer for ATIS messages, and many improvements to the Canvas rendering framework.

Founded in 1997, FlightGear is developed by a worldwide group of volunteers, brought together by a shared ambition to create the most realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and distribute. FlightGear is used all over the world by desktop flight simulator enthusiasts, for research in universities and for interactive exhibits in museums.

FlightGear features more than 400 aircraft, a worldwide scenery database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking options, multiple display support, a powerful scripting language and an open architecture. Best of all, being open-source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

Download FlightGear v3.2 for free from FlightGear.org.

FlightGear – Fly Free!

Major enhancements in this release

Aircraft Modeling

  • A Failure Management Framework for FlightGear has been added
  • The JSBSim flight dynamics model now has support for ground effects like bumpiness, solid-ground detection and adjusting of friction factors. Additionally, bogey type contact points sink in non-solid surfaces, making it no longer possible to ride on water.
  • YASim now has versioning support. The YASim FDM now checks a version tag in it’s configuration file to allow improvements to the YASim FDM without risking breaking older aircraft.
  • Additional aircraft have started adopting the Canvas navigation display that was introduced with FlightGear 3.0.

Graphics

  • Improved rendering of VASI, PAPI, runway and taxiway lights.
  • Orbital rendering using textures from the NASA Visible Earth project
  • Additions to the Atmospheric Light Scattering (ALS) rendering include:
    • an experimental framework to render cloud shadows on the ground (requires Advanced Weather)
    • a substantial extension of cloud layer visibility using impostor techniques to 150 km
    • a new agriculture effect allowing to render fields without tiling artifacts
    • a new forest effect to simulate managed forest, varying tree size by patch
    • sparkle and fog effect on runway lights
    • much improved visual appearance of rock faces

Usability

  • An experimental aircraft package manager allows the download of new aircraft, and changing the current aircraft in-sim.
  • A new internal web server (aka httpd) based on mongoose httpd has been added. It supports various AJAX requests, a screenshot server, a property tree browser, and a web-based moving map and much more.
  • The integrated Map dialog now uses an azimuthal equidistant projection, for better representation in polar regions and across the International Date Line.
  • Windows users are now able to use the scroll wheel in dialog lists

Canvas System

Improvements to Canvas, FlightGear’s scriptable 2D rendering system include

  • Better performance
  • MapStructure-based layers can now be customized and styled
  • Support for mouse button and modifiers
  • CanvasImage now supports the http:// protocol for dynamically retrieving raster images.
  • An experimental Map dialog using Canvas is available under the Equipment menu.
  • Canvas Layout Engine

Nasal Scripting

  • A new fully-interactive Nasal GUI console based on Canvas has been added: Interactive Nasal Console
  • the hard-coded flight path history subsystem which samples aircraft position is now exposed via Nasal.

Documentation

  • Nasal documentation is now included,

Highlighted new and improved aircraft

Other

  • A text-to-speech system based on flite+hts_engine has been implemented, which is used for ATIS and other messages.
  • Improved loading behaviour for AI/MP aircraft

Bug fixes

  • A serious bug was found late in the release causing large numbers of crashes. Fixing this delayed he release, but had a nice side-effect of improving performance on some systems that were previously CPU-limited.
  • See our bugtracker for an extensive, yet incomplete, list of the bugs fixed in this release.

22 Replies to “FlightGear v3.2 Released”

  2. The new version of flightgear is the best yt. Still, there is room for improvements, especially as far as damage is concerned; collisions, g-force damage,disintegration etc. Nevertheless, it is unparalleled. Keep up the good work!

  3. There is no working torrent for the windows application and I was wondering if/when that’ll be fixed so I am able to download the program.

  4. I want download world scenery 2.12 with torrent but in your sites torrent link is old world scenery 2.10.Can you help me?I want download all of world scenery.I tried this with terrasync but i didn’t do it.I wait your reply please help me.Good work.

  5. So happy it’s finally released! I have no doubt that this will be the best version of FG yet, and I am extremely excited for the sinkable planes! This is like an early Christmas gift! Thank you!

  7. Just installed it and flew a quick sector around Australia and New Zealand in the 777-300ER – nice work! I tried both with and without rembrandt – rembrandt looks great on my system, and doesn’t seem to tax the GPU (GTX 560Ti) at 2560×1440 too much even with shadow settings much higher than default. Without rembrandt ALS also seems to work well, and the new cloud shadows look good, especially over mountains and rough terrain where the shape of the shadows is not so obvious. Big ups to the devs and contributors… 🙂

  9. Parabéns a todos que participa dessa fantástica Equipe!
    Sem dúvida, mostram que não medem esforços
    para dar o melhor de si. O Flightgear tem surpreendido a
    cada versão.
    Que todos vocês possam ser recompensados!
    Obrigado por vocês existirem!

  12. I’m very happy for this release and I can report that it performs tremendously well on my quiet, new GTX 750 Ti card (which I can really recommend). Getting 35-40 fps at KSFO with every effect and shader tweaked to the maximum.

    I for one would like to look into and see how I can contribute towards the Flightgear Missions and Adventures system.

    I’m just an enthusiast simmer but I still like the dimension of friendly competition towards a common challenge. For example, landing in such and such cross-wind conditions, soft landing with a particular airplane etc etc.

    I’m having tremendous fun flying on my own but many times I’m just wondering just how well I’m really doing when I’m performing some particular maneuver. I can always know that I did land the aircraft and that it’s still on the runway but I’m not sure if I followed the procedures or actually made what could be considered a soft landing in terms of Gees imparted on the passengers.

    I guess I’m really talking about a scoring system in addition to actual missions.

    1. According to our main OSX developer, the FlightGear program itself should work fine in OSX 10.7 on up. But the launcher fails in OSX 10.10 because it is written in ruby/cocoa and Apple took away the ruby/cocoa library in OSX 10.10. We are looking into a few ideas to see if we can find a quick workaround.

      1. are there any news for yosemite?

        from what i understand the problem is in the launcher app, but not in the simulator, right?

        1. We are working towards a fuller solution for v3.4. In the meantime there are some forum threads where people have provided some temporary work arounds.

  17. Well, glad its out. Hope my old Acer E1-531-4406 with Intel HD Graphics is good enough. Getting 3 FPS with textures off, 800×600, bpp at 16, wireframe on, over ocean.

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