2016.3.0 -- impressions!

[legoboyvdlp]

Firstly, I can't find the CRJ700-family from nonGPL -- all I see is the first officer! So I'll have to use ffgo from now on... seems that only data/aircraft/ is being displayed.

[IAHM-COL]

double facepalm!

[legoboyvdlp]

Allright, that's it all sorted. FlightGear still thinks it is 2016.2.0, so I had to hack the version file to get FlightGear to load. I downloaded 2016.3.0, and it says 2016.3.0 in the install.exe file, so I'd expect it to be 2016.3.0

Anyways, let's get going with preflight!
Gate B21 at Reagan:

[IAHM-COL]

Lacking the Jetways? Certainly not terraGIT

[legoboyvdlp]

Nope!

[IM-RAN]

Hey, how's 2016.3.0, is it good, I am aaking both performance and quality. Cause my PC could run 3.4 better than 2016.1 and so I am still a 3.4 user. So, is the graphics good along with the performance and where did you get it and how did I you set it up?

[SHM]

2016.1.1 was better than 3.4 in terms of performance for me.

I'll get the 2016.2.1 this week since I prefer the stable versions.

[daweed]

I'm pretty disappointed, firstly I would have thought all the little problems that ruin life would have been corrected .. but it seems (well if I interpreted the answers that have been made to me) that these problems will not be corrected as we shall come up no trace of the devel list:

1) parking position ... still does not work from the launcher, in my fairly important sense, it is still there or we appear.

2) Resetting the flight plan. It is still impossible after a flight reset for a new flight plan, it makes crash FG because of the removal of active waypoint, this problem is known and concerns the FG code itself ..

3) The dev team seems more busy making tasks such as management of light, while the point (again in my opinion) are greater (see the first two points)

FG becomes I find increasingly unstable and I have not really found any improvement, either graphic, cosmetic or fluidity, I still have the same number of FPS, the scenerie of Paris still much crap .. etc, in short, I am very disappointed, this version is not worth the trouble.

[IAHM-COL]

</3 (heartbroke)

I actually like it very well. I see 2016 as an step forward from 3.x versions.
Gained some stability. Some memory (RAM) terrible issues that existed in 3x are cleaned.
(and if I recall correctly, it even works in Windows XP again)

Indeed, there are the usual rough corners that had been waiting in the non-FIFO queue for quite a bit, but as the dust settles in, I think we can cheerlead the Core developers on this mostly.

(Not denying daweed's 2 first points points above)

I think terrasync coming http as an alternative to svn is a good move (and terrafs rocks great!). I think planning ahead to fully remove svn support without creating an official scenery dev. repo is a big step backwards. terraGIT would be an awesome highway, but then there is the core dev resistance to change
I think the FGADDon is still some mistep, but there is apparently no hope to offer FGMEMBERS to the core devs. I wish they can reconsider this one, but verbatim last paragraph.

Indeed, eyecandy have had good amount of workout, and easy gone thru official, since it is a workload done by Thorsten, who can commit straight to core. Also, Phi, the effort by Torsten needed not revision. It is cool. But mostly eye-candy, IMHO. I don't think an http interface to push my flying instruments to a browser are such game change. But it is there, it had easy acceptance, and mostly works out of the box.

The HLA architecture work. I have not seen major progress on this arena. At all. And since I am not a developer, really; this is kind of a real foreign language to me. I quite dont know from the user perspective what would happen when the HLA is fully implemented. We'll see. Is FG core going multithread anytime? The past century is over for a decade and a half, I think.

Some work to improve rendering times in heavily developed areas via stgmerge is also been talked. I think that's good. And the scenery ws3.0 has more motivation now than for a good long time. (see Wlbragg and statto work. And this is contradicting, or in spite Martin gone for good)

The rain and precipitations are back. That's awesome. And Thorsten advanced weather had some fixes too. great stuff. (eye candy I know. but superb eye candy)

Then you have the Metar improvements and ATIS automated voices by R. Senior. Quite impressive. (and functional).

I think the community had have a great push from the FGMEMBERS situation. Globally. For those new developers able now to propose content without barriers, a great new source of content. For the core devs, it has been, in my opinion, and incentive to get their game together, and develop more and better. I also celebrate that. I understand for some 2016 had been a bad emotional year (read, ie, Hooray), but in my opinion, nothing is farther from the true, where Ive seen a lot of traction been given up, and a lot of thrust and lift, and momentum being gained.


I still think that moving FG house every 3 months is a bad design approach. Firstly, we are using developers time wrongly. Instead of being fixing bugs, and create additional FG core content, I see a lot of "let's test barcelona" time invested, and all of this for a 3 months gain. where is the profit/effort balance there? Most of the Barcelona content was already available and created before anyways. My point? We are wasting lots of Torsten's hours (a fine currency for FG development time).

In my case, I wont be siding with such efforts, for 2 reasons. First, as a non-core, my improvements are rarely -if ever- welcomed. Secondly, I focus mostly in the FG festival development, and thus, as it was evident, instead of focusing in old=news (Barcelona = FG Fest 2015*1), I focused in Japan. I certainly would not be giving my back to UK now, and jump to moving to Rio (again, old=news, and coincidentally FG Fest 2015*2)

In summary, I see great progress, and a more stable FG version since FG2.12. There is path to improve. But that's just life.