Free summer software for linux

The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

There are many exciting possibilities for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas.

FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

There are a wide range of people interested and participating in this project. This is truly a global effort with contributors from just about every continent. Interests range from building a realistic home simulator out old airplane parts, to university research and instructional use, to simply having a viable alternative to commercial PC simulators.

Flight Dynamics Models

With FlightGear it is possible to choose between three primary Flight Dynamics Models. It is possible to add new dynamics models or even interface to external "proprietary" flight dynamics models:

1. JSBSim: JSBSim is a generic, 6DoF flight dynamics model for simulating the motion of flight vehicles. It is written in C++. JSBSim can be run in a standalone mode for batch runs, or it can be the driver for a larger simulation program that includes a visuals subsystem (such as FlightGear.) In both cases, aircraft are modeled in an XML configuration file, where the mass properties, aerodynamic and flight control properties are all defined.

2. YASim: This FDM is an integrated part of FlightGear and uses a different approach than JSBSim by simulating the effect of the airflow on the different parts of an aircraft. The advantage of this approach is that it is possible to perform the simulation based on geometry and mass information combined with more commonly available performance numbers for an aircraft. This allows for quickly constructing a plausibly behaving aircraft that matches published performance numbers without requiring all the traditional aerodynamic test data.

3. UIUC: This FDM is based on LaRCsim originally written by the NASA. UIUC extends the code by allowing aircraft configuration files instead and by adding code for simulation of aircraft under icing conditions.

UIUC (like JSBSim) uses lookup tables to retrieve the component aerodynamic force and moment coefficients for an aircraft... and then uses these coefficients to calculate the sum of the forces and moments acting on the aircraft.

Extensive and Accurate World Scenery Data Base

Over 20,000 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 DVDs. (Im not sure thats 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.

Accurate and Detailed Sky Model

FlightGear implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time and date. FlightGear can track the current computer clock time in order to correctly place the sun, moon, stars, etc. in their current and proper place relative to the earth. If its dawn in Sydney right now, its dawn in the sim right now when you locate yourself in virtual Sidney. The sun, moon, stars, and planets all follow their correct courses through the sky. This modeling also correctly takes into account seasonal effects so you have 24 hour days north of the arctic circle in the summer, etc. We also illuminate the correctly placed moon with the correctly placed sun to get the correct phase of the moon for the current time/date, just like in real life.

Flexible and Open Aircraft Modeling System

FlightGear has the ability to model a wide variety of aircraft. Currently you can fly the 1903 Wright Flyer, strange flapping wing "ornithopters", a 747 and A320, various military jets, and several light singles. FlightGear has the ability to model those aircraft and just about everything in between.

FlightGear has extremely smooth and fluid instrument animation that updates at the same rate as your out-the-window view updates (i.e. as fast as your computer can crank, and not artificially limited and chunky like in some sims.)

FlightGear has the infrastructure to allow aircraft designers to build fully animated, fully operational, fully interactive 3d cockpits (which even update and display correctly from external chase plane views.)

FlightGear realistically models real world instrument behavior. Instruments that lag in real life, lag correctly in FlightGear, gyro drift is modeled correctly, the magnetic compass is subject to aircraft body forces -- all those things that make real world flying a challenge.

FlightGear also accurately models many instrument and system failures. If the vacuum system fails, the HSI gyros spin down slowly with a corresponding degradation in response as well as a slowly increasing bias/error.

Moderate Hardware Requirements

The intention of FlightGear is to look nice, but not at the expense of other aspects of a realistic simulator. Our focus is not on competing in the "game" market and not on the ultra-flashy graphic tricks.

The result is a simulator with moderate hardware requirements to run at smooth frame rates. You can be reasonably happy on a $500-1000 (USD) machine (possibly even less if you are careful) and dont necessarily need $3000 (USD) worth of new hardware like you do with the many of the newest games.

That said, the more hardware you throw at FlightGear, the better it looks and runs, so dont feel like you have to chuck your expensive new hardware if you just purchased it. :-)

Internal Properties EXPOSED!

FlightGear allows users and aircraft designers access to a very large number of internal state variables via numerous internal and external access mechanisms. These state variables are organized into a convenient hierarchal "property" tree.

Using the properties tree it is possible to monitor just about any internal state variable in FlightGear. Its possible to remotely control FlightGear from an external script. You can create model animations, sound effects, instrument animations and network protocols for about any situation imaginable just by editing a small number of human readable configuration files. This is a powerful system that makes FlightGear immensely flexible, configurable, and adaptable.

Networking options

A number of networking options allow FlightGear to communicate with other instances of FlightGear, GPS receivers, external flight dynamics modules, external autopilot or control modules, as well as other software such as the Open Glass Cockpit project and the Atlas mapping utility.

A generic input/output option allows for a user defined output protocol to a file, serial port or network client.

A multi player protocol is available for using FlightGear on a local network in a multi aircraft environment, for example to practice formation flight or for tower simulation purposes.

The powerful network options make it possible to synchronize several instances of FlightGear allowing for a multi-display, or even a cave environment. If all instances are running at the same frame rate consistently, it is possible to get extremely good and tight synchronization between displays.

Flight Gear and its source code have intentionally been kept open, available, and free. In doing so, we are able to take advantage of the efforts of tremendously talented people from around the world. Contrast this with the traditional approach of commercial software vendors, who are limited by the collective ability of the people they can hire and pay. Our approach brings its own unique challenges and difficulties, but we are confident (and other similarly structured projects have demonstrated) that in the long run we can outclass the commercial "competition."

Contributing to Flight Gear can be educational and a lot of fun. A long time developer, Curtis Olson, had this to say about working on Flight Gear:

Personally, Flight Gear has been a great learning experience for me. I have been exposed to many new ideas and have learned a tremendous amount of "good stuff" in the process of discussing and implementing various Flight Gear subsystems. If for no other reason, this alone makes it all worth while.

Pineapple is an adventure game.

You are sherif of a small village in the far west.

During a dark night of summer, the gang of reds, a bad group of crazy minded people, come to your town to kill every one.

You must kill them all before all citizens are killed !

PHP began as a quick Perl hack written by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994.
Over the next two to three years, it evolved into what we today know as PHP/FI 2.0. PHP/FI started to get a lot of users, but things didn`t start flying until Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans suddenly came along with a new parser in the summer of 1997, leading to PHP 3.0. PHP 3.0 defined the syntax and semantics used in both versions 3 and 4.

Quarters Board Game project is a strategy game for two players.

Although its rules are relatively simple, it still offers some of the same opportunities for skill as in chess.

This program was originally conceived in the summer of 1986 during a study of the mini-max algorithm for chess playing computers, and was thus designed to offer some of the same type of strategies.

The game was originally written in BASIC, then ported to Turbo Pascal, then to C, and finally to Java.

The Java version is not necessarily object oriented, since it is a crude port from the C version.

IrssiBot is an IRC bot written in pure Java. IrssiBot is a powerful IRC automation - a "bot" - that was written for my personal needs & fun in summer/fall 2000. It is written in 100% Java, giving it advantages to traditional platform dependent counterparts in flexibility and ease of development.
IrssiBot is released under GNU Public Licence (GPL). A newest version of both source and binaries is downloadable, and possibly some older versions also. Required Java Runtime Environment 1.3.1 or newer may be downloaded from Sun Microsystems.
The latest MySQL JDBC driver may be downloaded from here.
Main features:
- Multinetwork support
- Configuration data as standard XML
- Dynamically (un)loadable java .class modules
- Built-in ability to "connect" channels, even across networks
- Effectiveness through simplicity; easy to configure and use
- Platform independent: runs anywhere required Java Environment is installed.
Enhancements:
- removed IrcMessage object reuse causing problems with message muxing

The following is an excerpt from a poster presented at the American Astronomical Societys 2000 Summer meeting in Rochester, NY.

ADS roughly 1,000,000 scanned pages contain numerous diagrams and figures for which the original data sets are lost or inaccessible. Having scans for the figures invites digitizing the data points to recover at least a part of these data.

Performing this digitization automatically is still beyond the capabilities of current OCR systems, but the computer can ease this process for a human.

This was the starting point for Dexter, a Java applet that runs in the users browsers and provides an interface for selecting the part of the page that is of interest. On that selection, coordinate axes, points and error bars can be marked and, of course, corrected. [...]

In the future, we plan to implement some recognition algorithms that would, e.g., trace a line for the user or automatically search for markers.

KNewz project is a binary newsgroup client for KDE4. I wrote it because there is no one client out there that does what I want it to. Planned features include automatic PAR2 checking (via kpart, whee), automatic unpacking of downloaded files, System tray support (trivial I know), DBUS support, automatic queue save and restore upon shutdown/startup. Feel free to request more.
Enhancements:
- Development has been on hold for the summer vacation :) KDE Beta 1 has just come out however, so I made the code compatible with it. I hadnt been developing it lately since the KDE API was constantly in flux, and I got sick of adding new features only to have my code not compiling with the next SVN revision because the API had been changed. However, the API has been frozen now so Ill be developing this actively now again.
- The good news is that I have been using this exclusively to download my binaries, and I have found and fixed lot of bugs. A few remain though, and will be fixed for the 0.1 release. Queue saving and editing features will be introduced in the 0.2 release, and the connection code will be rewritten.