Saturday, March 24, 2012

GNU Aerospace: Reborn from the Ashes of ACES?

There was another recent interesting announcement in the world of flight simulation this week.  The GNU Aerospace project has been announced.  The goal of the project appears to be to create a new development paradigm for flight simulation, using the "crowd funding" model: the products will be free, but interested customers can sign up to sponsor and fund development of the product.  The initial product will be known as TestPilot, which appears to be intended to be an open source drop-in replacement for FSX.  It will be compatible with FSX add-ons, but will reimplement and update the sim engine's graphics, effects, and interfaces such as SimConnect.  It seems unclear how they are going about this - not sure whether it will be a scratch effort, or whether they will leverage existing open source projects such as GNU FlightGear.  I will have to do some more investigation into this, but it looks very interesting.

Oh, they have recruited two former ACES developers to contribute to the project, too!

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