Fedora activity

Since a few weeks, I'm now a fedora maintainer of the FlightGear package. This is an exciting activity, that Hans de Goede convinced me to have. FlightGear is a well mature and realistic flight simulator. I spent a large amount of time, playing with it in the past months, and I appreciate this game a lot.

The reasons why I like this simulator are multiple. First, the scenery files are rich, and cover the whole earth. So it's very easy to just download the scenery of the area where you live, and to practice flying from a nearby airport. Coasts have a fine level of details, cities are mapped, and mountains are realistic. The second reason why I appreciate FlightGear is the accuracy of the simulation of environmental factors : weather can be rendered live, by querying in real-time the real weather information from various airports. This has an impact on the visibility distance, the altitude of the clouds layers, and wind and so on. The sun position also defines the scene lightning, and flying at the same location early in the morning, and late in the evening is a completely different experience. Finally, a third reason is the large variety of aircrafts, which also completely modify the fly feeling.

FlightGear is available in the Extras repository for Fedora Core 6, and will be available in Fedora 7 where Core and Extras have merged.