USENIX Association Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Boston, MA, USA June 27–July 2, 2004 © 2004 by The USENIX Association All Rights Reserved For more information about the USENIX Association: Phone: 1 510 528 8649 FAX: 1 510 548 5738 Email:
[email protected] WWW: http://www.usenix.org Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein. The FlightGear Flight Simulator Alexander R. Perry PAMurray, San Diego, CA alex.perry@flightgear.org http://www.flightgear.org/ Abstract convenience most open source projects, in order to to run on Intel x86, AMD64, PowerPC and Sparc processors. The open source flight simulator FlightGear is developed from contributions by many talented people around the world. In addition to running the simulation of the aircraft in The main focus is a desire to ‘do things right’ and to min- real time, the application must also use whatever peripher- imize short cuts. FlightGear has become more configurable als are available to deliver an immersive cockpit environ- and flexible in recent years making for a huge improvement ment to the aircraft pilot. Those peripherals, such as sound in the user’s overall experience. This overview discusses the through speakers, are accessed through operating system ser- project, recent advances, some of the new opportunities and vices whose implementation may be equivalent, yet very dif- newer applications. ferent, under the various operating systems.