23 September 2005 - 23:00Mac FlightGear Project Report
It’s been a long time since I posted anything about FlightGear on Mac OS X and there have been some very good developments lately so here it goes….
Over the past couple of weeks I rewrote the GUI in C++ which really speeds things up and allows more features plus offers a lot more stability. The downside is that development time is increased because of the time needed to compile each change in the source code.
Overall C++ is a lot better than I thought. Especially with Xcode 2.2pre1 which makes things pretty simple. All you have to do is focus on the code.
Now sometime during June, 2006 Apple will introduce a Mac or two using the Intel proccessor. And if I’m correct, users won’t appreciate running FlightGear under Rosetta as you already need a good CPU in order to run FGFS smoothly.
So during the next two weeks I’ll have the following software ported to Universal Binary and optimized for altivec on PowerPC and sse3 on Intel:
- PLIB [DONE]
- SimGear [In Progress]
- FlightGear
- MacFlightGear
This will allow FGFS to run at the same relative speed on both platforms.
Improvements are also being made to MacFlightGear. TerraSync will be enabled by default. There will be builtin support for multiplayer and Atlas 3.0. Real weather, 3D clouds, drag-and-drop aircraft/scenery installer, and more.
This won’t all be done overnight, but I hope to have it all done in time for the 1.0 release of the FlightGear Flight Simulator (FGFS).
Beta releases are in the pipeline.
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