Free Flight, Free Speech

I think, the problem is in the definiton what an optimal launcher should be able to do. Some have ideas of changing planes in midair, which would call for an integrated launcher, others call fro non-restrictive in reference to where planes can be stored (for example aircraft folders in the user's home directory or somewhere with FG or somewhere entirely else and thus also brings up the question where libraries are), other users want to have access to all parameters in details while others want things to look as simple as possible. Every launcher does a part of all those demands, but none does it all. And now we have to multiply the mess by three because we have three operating systems in the game and then again by n where n is the number of people following the latest hypes to the potency of the actual number of hypes at any given point in time - the number of hypes supported by people they don't like. Something likes that. After you tried to model the political implications in it, the number of supported variants will be behind the scenes always lim->infinity-1. But it doesn't really matter because the regular user will only hear of the variants supported by the political heavy weights sitting on the communication channels, like forums for example.

The obsession of getting the best car, best computer, best phone, etc... for your money always bewilders me a bit. Do people not realize the amount of effort, time and money they have to put in finding the very best. I am always very quickly ready by thinking that very good is good enough, i do not need to look further for a milligram better.

Well about launchers i do not really care. Fgrun works fine. But i would not even mind to use a script. I see no gain in being able to switch the aircraft in-program. I have a ssd.

Kind regards, Vincent

Hi Vincent,

cars are a good example, because they prove, the idea, what is the "very best" is a very individual thing. Someone in the mid-20s maybe dreams of a Porsche, someone in the early 50s maybe prefers a midsize SUV or a regular sedan. The "very best" is not for everyone the same. Same problem with launchers. So I doubt, there is a one-size-fits-all-solution.

Hi All!
As the first poll on thejabberwocky.net forum closed, the major winner came to a major surprise to me

FGers had indicated they use command line to launch, and thus they don't find a launcher to be of central interest (IH-COL suprised!)

In any case, several alternatives exist, and will probably exist for the years to come.

Feel free to leave more comments below

Thanks to all that voted
IH-COL

The launcher problem is not alone the problem of "launching" alone anymore. With the increasing problems with TerraSync, future launcher projects will maybe have to include scenery preloads, special considerations for increasing numbers of custom sceneries and even part of additional network-functionality. With the increasing numbers of aircraft and vehicles, the old strategy just to make a list will become obsolete and has to be replaced by something more sophisticated (example, two years back, there was one 777 package, now there are at least three, all called 777, but with different features and pros & cons). So the old technique just to grab the description from the -set file is insufficient. Another point are the number of aircraft "sources" and "folders". Once, in the past, we had all folders, local directories full of planes. Now, any plane tinkerer had them at least double, one for the planes just to fly, one for development. And if they weren't where they were once assumed, thing broke down with includes, we all know the old stories. And since they were two, at least one of them couldn't be where FGRun assumed it, so there was a no win situation. Now, we have all the repos and that is a great thing, but we also have to integrate them on two levels into a future launcher if we decide to do such a thing. The requirement from the user-side is to get planes at a button-press. Even more, there will come the idea to load planes "on the fly" for exampel to see that other guy a mile to your port side. For developers, there will be the need to change usage-scenarios (am I developing today or just flying around). All of this will also force a new launcher to become instead of just being happy to launch FG a real background service while FG runs. I have stopped SkyNet a long time ago due to lack of time, but the tracker problems, the split MP infrastructure and the TerrySync problems made me think about it again.
So, before we program anything (I don't know who here is programmer enough to go there in the first place aside of me, who lacks always time to do things), we need to figure which of those requirements/ideas we want to take on and integrate and which we can leave out. Maybe we can figure a clean concept paper on this?