Yet Another **NG Flightsim

Well, it's true that FSNG is basically dead. OTOH, I have worked in the term break on another flightsim, which was built from ground-up.

I have promised myself not to announce yet another flightsim project without having something to download.
Unfortunetly, the term break was busier than I thought, and now that it's coming to an end with the winter-term just about to begin, I have to face, that I didn't manage it to come close to a milestone that would justify a file release.

But because there won't be much time left in the winter term for programming stuff, I've decided to show you some screenshots, to document that this sim is really there, so here we go... http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=169340.

Now some background information.

The source code is fully GPL'd, so you could download the current branch using subversion if you want. Anyway, I doubt it will be of any use for you, because there are no scenery files included, and I have never tried to run a flight without a scenery installed, I guess the sim would probably crash. There is a SRTM-converter-pipeline included, but I doubt anyone except me is able to use this command line utility.

Features implemented yet:

• Terrain mesh and overlay, runtime-loading in a thread, no scenery stuff/autogen/water/whaterver yet; just shape and noisy color.
• Module pipeline for vehicles.
• The NPSNET Flight Model implementation from FSNG, altough still some bugs in it (vibrations).
• Incorporated the JSBSim flightmodel into the module pipeline, altough JSBSim doesn't fit into the module pipeline very pretty, and JSBSim itself is not very pretty IMHO. So I probably drop this feature again.
• SRTM-to-scenery-converter-pipeline.
• Joystick input.
• Realtime sky according to Preetham and Hoffman.
• Fully self-contained .NET/MDX GUI library to have forms in fullscreen mode. Works independently from any rendering API, so an OpenGL renderer could be written as well.
• Property system similar to the PropertyGrid built on top of the GUI-API.
• Shades of a math- and algorithm library (the point is, that all algorithms and datastructures go into a separate libarary, so they can be used in other projects as well).
• Language customization.
• ...

The project is not far from the state of FSNG presented on my website. Note that CSNG has been built from ground-up again - there is no FSNG stuff in it. I have made some things better that I have learned from FSNG. For example, I have used MDX 1.0 again, and not MDX 2.0 beta ... what a lucky decision looking at the state of MDX 2.0 now.

The "C" in CSNG stands for combat. Not that I'm much into the combat thing, but there are some advantages: Combat simulators have limited maps ... this simplifies the whole data organization and data reloading stuff ... now I use tiles and I cannot fly near the poles ... :) .

OK, my good old FSNG website will stay where it is, because it's some kind of "monument" and it looks quite good. Maybe I'll replace it, when I have a downloadable version of CSNG in place. But that won't be too soon from now.