Free lighting fixtures 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.

FITpro for Eclipse allows easier creation of FIT tests and suites, more flexible test execution, and more.
Main features:
- Create Fit tests in WYSWIG HTML Editor
- Create suites, ordered collections of Fit tests and sub-suites.
- Execute tests and suites.
- Link from tests to related fixtures.
- Insert Test Template into a Fit test, based on an existing fixture.

FlatFrag is a multiplayer action shooter game. With its deathmatch fights it strives to be an entertaining arcade-style experience.
The game is played from a birds eye view and contains some 3D effects in order to make it not seem too flat. Currently only the game mode deathmatch is available, but others will probably be developed in the future.
The game has been built from scratch, though a few important libraries were used in the process. For example, OpenGL is used for fast 3D graphics and SDL provides the game with many cross-platform functions.
It is developed by a single person as a hobby project, but it is released under the terms of the GPL (GNU General Public License), which makes it Open Source software. So everybody is able to get the sourcecode and do his own changes to the project.
Main features:
- Cross-platform support currently for Linux and Microsoft Windows (planned: Mac OS X, BSD, though you can try it anywhere with the provided sourcecode)
- 3D graphics using OpenGL -- the game is played from a birds eye view, but the individual tiles are 3D cubes
- 3D sound using OpenAL -- 2D would probably be more appropriate
- SDL is used for cross-platform input, networking and window creation
- Multiplayer network games with up to 32 players (actually there is no fixed limit set yet)
- Support for Lua-scripted modifications (more like planned, but the console already expects Lua code as input)
- File types: Ogg Vorbis used for sound compression, PNG used for image compression
- Advanced particle system
- Dynamic lighting
- Bots
- Ridable cars and usable stationary guns
- 14 different weapons (some of them very unconventional)
- In-game map editor
- Game modes: deathmatch (more planned)
- Dedicated game server
- A server list function, which fetches a list of servers. You can also see the list of servers here.
- Completely free software -- free as in speech and free as in beer -- Licensed under the GPL

StoryTestIQ is a tool for creating "Executable Requirements" which have also been known as acceptance tests or functional tests. STIQ was developed based on two other open source acceptance testing tools, Selenium and FitNesse.

This combination allowed StoryTestIQ to capture the web browser based testing facilities and elegant command language of Selenium along with the wiki based editing and pluggable Fit fixture loading of FitNesse. We believe that this increases the productivity of working with StoryTestIQ and also enhances the capabilities of Selenium to test beyond the user interface.

When developing web applications it is helpful for the cross-functional team to have a definitive and executable view of the requirements for a specified iteration.

StoryTestIQ may be used to record what the teams customer needs and get sign off before developing even a single line of code. Most of the test cases which are recorded will be failing. It is the responsibility of the team to implement the requirements in order to make the test cases pass. These practices are based in the tradition of Test-Driven Development.

Although teams would benefit greatly from the above approach in which your entire cross-functional team including the customer, business analyst, QA, development, and anybody else providing input on the product benefits, StoryTestIQ does not enforce this approach.

StoryTestIQ may also be used in traditional development teams to create acceptance and functional tests. They may be used to supplement the teams unit tests with a Test-Driven Development approach or even to automate existing manual test cases.

Check out the page on how to get started. Once you have StoryTestIQ running successfully, take a look at the users guide for more details on how to create test suites and test cases. As you become familiar with creating test cases you may take advantage of more StoryTestIQ commands in your functioanl tests.

Glest is a project for making a free 3D real-time customizable strategy game.
Current version is fully playable, includes single player game against CPU controlled players, two factions with their corresponding tech trees, units, buildings and some maps.
Main features:
Customize every aspect of the game
- Custom units can be defined using XML files. Its posible to define its basic parameters (hp, mp, armor, sight, requirements and much more), its skills and commands and the 3d models associated with them.
- Custom upgrades can be defined. Its posibble to define how and what units they affect, its requirements and more.
- Custom factions can be defined by grouping a set of units and upgrades.
- Custom resources can be defined.
- Custom tech-trees can be defined by grouping a set of factions and resources.
- Custom tilesets can be defined. Its posible to define the surface textures, object 3d models (such as trees os rocks), ambient sounds and more.
- Maps can be edited with the glest map editor.
Graphics: OpenGL 1.3 graphics
- Heightmap terrain.
- Free camera movement (translation, rotation and zoom).
- Own 3d format that can be exported from 3dsmax using the g3d export plugin.
- Real-time shadows, projected or shadow mapped.
- Keyframe animated 3d models.
- Particle systems for rain, snow, fire and spells.
- Classical 3d effects: transparency, lighting, fog etc...
A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELIGENCY
- A* based pathfinding algorithm.
- Basic AI for computer controlled players.
Enhancements:
- New Magic units:Tower of Souls, Golem, Daemon giant, Drake rider
- New Tech units:Aerodrome, Air ballista, Rider, Ornithopter, Airship
- New Magic upgrades
- New Tech upgrades
- New animations for existing units
- Shared vision between allies
- New particle blending
- Players now start on the location indicated in the game settings menu
- Score system
- HTML documentation
- Increased projectile accuracy
- Optimized particle rendering
- Loads of balance changes

The "Virtual Universe" is a 3D cyberspace which offers more possibilities than just chat: it is a combination of the Web, chat, and instant messaging within a realistic, three-dimensional cyberspace.
The "Virtual Universe" is a virtual reality environment which runs on top of the Internet.
Main features:
- chat with each other
- see the chat-partner as a virtual, three-dimensional person
- interact and communicate
- be creative in many ways
- create own worlds for any desired subject
Enhancements:
- A lighting bug in .COB/.SCN loader has been fixed.