To run FlightGear you need to install the binaries. Once you’ve done this you may install additional scenery and aircraft if you wish.
Pre-compiled binaries for the latest release are available for
To download them go to
http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/binary.shtml
and follow the instructions provided on the page.
Detailed FlightGear scenery is available for the entire world, allowing you to fly everywhere from the Himalaya mountains to rural Kansas. The FlightGear base package contains scenery for a small area around San Francisco, so to fly elsewhere you will need to download additional scenery.
Each piece of scenery is packaged into a compressed archive, or tarball, in a 10 degree by 10 degree chunk. Each tarball is named after the 10x10 degree chunk it represents, for example w130n50.tgz.
You can download scenery from a clickable map here:
http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/scenery.html
Alternatively, you can support the FlightGear project by purchasing a complete set of scenery for the entire world from here:
http://www.flightgear.org/cdrom/
Once you have downloaded the tarball onto your computer, you need to find the Scenery directory of your FlightGear installation.
c:\Program Files\FlightGear\data\Scenery.
/usr/local/share/FlightGear/data/Scenery.
To install the scenery, uncompress the tarball into the Scenery directory. Most operating system provide tools to uncompress tarballs. If you cannot uncompress the tarball, install an extractor program such as 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/.
Note that you should not decompress the numbered scenery files inside the tarball like 958402.gz - this will be done by FlightGear on the fly.
Once you have uncompressed the tarball, the Terrain and Objects direcories will contain additional sub-directories with your new scenery inside.
To use the new scenery, simply select a starting airport within the new scenery. If you are using the FlightGear Launcher, you will need to press the Refresh button before you select your airport.
If you are using Windows Vista, you may find that Windows installs downloaded scenery (and aircraft) to your Virtual Store:
c:\Users\(Your Name)\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\FlightGear\Scenery
If it does this, you need to copy the Terrain and Objects directories manually to your real FlightGear Scenery directory as described above.
If you would prefer to keep your downloaded scenery separate from the core installation, you can do so by setting your FG_SCENERY environmental variable.
This is where FlightGear looks for Scenery files. It consists of a list of directories that will be searched in order. The directories are separated by “:” on Unix and “;” on Windows.
For example, a FG_SCENERY environmental variable set to
/home/joebloggs/WorldScenery:/usr/local/share/Flightgear/data/Scenery
searches for Scenery in /home/joebloggs/WorldScenery first, followed by /usr/local/share/Flightgear/data/Scenery.
FlightGear comes with a tool TerraSync which allows to fetch the Scenery as you fly, if you have a permanent Internet connection at your disposal. Create an empty ’working’ directory for TerraSync, writable to the user and point FlightGear at this directory using the FG_SCENERY variable (as explained above). Do not let TerraSync download Scenery into your pre-installed Scenery directory.
TerraSync expects you to feed FlightGear’s current position via the ’Atlas’ protocol, so call FlightGear with the:
–atlas=socket,out,1,localhost,5505,udp
command line parameter and tell TerraSync about the port number you’re using as well as the respective directory:
terrasync -p 5505 -S -d /usr/local/share/TerraSync
There is a chicken/egg problem when you first start up in a brand new area. FlightGear is expecting the Scenery to be there now but it may not have been fetched yet. Therefore it’s suggested to exit FlightGear after TerraSync has caught up and finally to restart FlightGear.
Note that TerraSync (when called with the "-S" command line switch, as recommended) is going to download Scenery via the Subversion protocol over HTTP. Thus, is your Internet access is set up to use a HTTP proxy, plase make yourself aware how to configure the "libsvn" Subversion client for use of a proxy.
Benefit: TerraSync will always fetch the latest and greatest Scenery from the FlightGear World (Custom) Scenery Project and therefore allows feeding incremental updates to the user independent from comprehensive World Scenery releases.
If you are interested in generating your own Scenery, have a look at TerraGear - the tools that generate the Scenery for FlightGear:
The most actively maintained source tree of the TerraGear toolchain is co-located at the FlightGear landuse data Mapserver:
http://mapserver.flightgear.org/git/gitweb.pl.
The base FlightGear package contains only a small subset of the aircraft that are available for FlightGear. Developers have created a wide range of aircraft, from WWII fighters like the Spitfire, to passenger planes like the Boeing 747.
You can download aircraft from
http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/aircraft/index.shtml
Simply download the file and uncompress it into the data/Aircraft subdirectory of your installation. The aircraft are downloaded as .tar.gz files. Some computers will download them as .tar.gz.zip files. If so, simply rename the file to .tar.gz before uncompressing them. If you are successful, there will be a new sub-directory in your FG_ROOT/data/Aircraft directory containing the aircraft. Next time you run FlightGear, the new aircraft will be available.
Most of the packages named above include the complete FlightGear documentation including a PDF version of The FlightGear Manual intended for pretty printing using Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, available from
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
Moreover, if properly installed, the ḣtml version can be accessed via FlightGear’s help menu entry.
Besides, the source code contains a directory docs-mini containing numerous ideas on and solutions to special problems. This is also a good place for further reading.