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Development Status
Fly! Legacy is currently at the Pre-Alpha stage of development. What does this mean?
Basically, it means that the design and implementation has not progressed far enough
for the application to operate as any kind of complete flight simulator.
There are major areas which have extremely limited or no implementation available.
Many other areas are in only very preliminary stages of implementation.
Some areas that may appear to be implemented may only use a limited prototype or placeholder
implementation that will require significant re-work in the future.
In the Pre-Alpha stage, the application is considered to be usable only be active developers,
not by typical end users.
The current objective is to progress the implementation to an Alpha technology demo.
At the Alpha stage, there is enough implementation for end users to begin to use the application.
Compared to the existing capabilities of Fly! II, there will still be significant limitations.
There will likely be quite a few design and coding defects, resulting in functional errors (bugs)
and stability problems (crashes).
Following achievement of the Alpha build, development will progress to the Beta stage.
At this stage, practically all functionality will be present in the simulator in order to achieve
a high level of functional parity with Fly! II version 2.5.240.
Any prototype or placeholder implementations should be replaced with "final" designs.
The user community will be invited to participate more actively in using the application as a
complete flight simulator package and reporting bugs to the development team.
The following table provides a summary of design and implementation progress in all major categories
of the application.
The % complete is a very arbitrary guess, given that in most cases there is not a complete design spec
that is being coded to.
The categories are very high-level and are just conveniences for grouping areas of the software.
| Application Framework |
70% |
Application startup/initialization and cleanup/shutdown, in addition to items such as logging,
general-purpose utilities, POD filesystem, DBD database loading, inter-subsystem messaging, etc.
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| Time |
80% |
Control of the simulation time, and utilities for manipulating dates and times.
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| User Interface |
20% |
Implementation of the FUI framework. Implementation of FUI callbacks for all application dialogs, menus, etc.
This currently also includes some PUI code for the main menu that will eventually be obsoleted.
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| Keyboard |
20% |
Interface with the user via keyboard input.
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| Terrain |
20% |
Rendering of the earth's surface. Terrain is limited to just the topography and texturing, not to any
additional Scenery rendering as described below. Includes both generic and sliced (e.g. TerraScene)
terrain data sources.
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| Scenery |
10% |
Rendering of objects on top of the terrain, such as airports (including taxiways and runways), buildings, etc.
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| Sky |
40% |
Rendering of the simulation sky, including the tweakable sky colouring, celestial objects and clouds.
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| Models |
50% |
Implementation of the model hierarchy, including scenery models, AI vehicles, up to and including
the basic framework for user vehicles. The specific functionality for each of the user vehicle types
is tracked separately.
|
| Airplanes |
30% |
Specific functionality for the Airplane user vehicle type.
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| Helicopters |
0% |
Specific functionality for the Helicopter user vehicle type.
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| Ground Vehicles |
0% |
Specific functionality for the Ground Vehicle user vehicle type.
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| Gauges |
20% |
Implementation of the many building block gauge types.
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| Subsystems |
20% |
Implementation of the internal vehicle subsystem building blocks that provide the electrical,
pitot/static, fuel, control, etc. behaviour of a vechicle. Special advanced subsystems such
as the KLN-89 GPS will be tracked separately.
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| KLN-89 GPS |
0% |
Implementation of both gauge and subsystem components of the KLN-89 GPS.
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| Controls |
0% |
Interface with user control devices such as joysticks, yokes, rudder pedals, etc.
Does not include keyboard controls which are tracked under the Keyboard category.
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| Flight Dynamics |
0% |
All aspects of vehicle flight dynamics and ground handling.
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| AI Aircraft |
0% |
Also known as Dynamic Scenery, support for computer-controlled vechicles operating around the user.
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| Weather Effects |
0% |
Visual and flight dynamics effects of weather phenomena such as wind, precipitation, icing, etc.
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| Air Traffic Control |
0% |
Rather than duplicate Fly! II's ATC system, I would prefer to incorporate a more extensible,
flexible implementation such as C4TO.
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| Special Effects |
0% |
Special visual effects such as smoke, fire, sparks, contrails, etc.
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