This page illustrates how to use FlightGear Mac OS X 1.0.0-r154, especially the use of the launcher. See Users Guide for 1.0.0 through r150 for 1.0.0-r150 and Users Guide for 0.9.10 for 0.9.10.

Note

Users Guide will soon be updated for 1.9.0, so be patient please.

Installing FlightGear

Full Package

Installing FlightGear is as easy as other Mac applications.

1. Download the disk image file of the dmg file from Downloads page (should be FlightGear-1.0.0-r152.dmg or something like that)
2. Mount the disk image file by double-clicking it (Safari may automatically do it).
3. Copy the FlightGear icon from the mounted disk to the Applications folder.

Note

You MUST install FlightGear by copying FlightGear icon from the mounted disk into /Applications folder. Launching FlightGear from the mounted disk is no good since it doesn't allow you to add new aircraft / downloaded scenery data

GUI updater (r152)

Update the contents of FlightGear launcher by double-clicking the pkg file. FlightGear Mac OS X 1.0.0 is required to install this launcher updater.

Note

If FlightGear.app is not at /Applications/FlightGear.app, move it to /Applications folder and open the updater. You may move FlightGear.app anywhere after the installation process.

Using FlightGear Mac OS X

Launching FlightGear Mac OS X

Launch FlightGear by double-clicking its icon at the Applications folder, and the window of the launcher shows up (Figure 2)

Selecting an aircraft and an airport

At the launcher window, you can select an aircraft and an airport by clicking gear buttons at the right end of the airport/aircraft name. The thumbnail image of a selected aircraft will be shown at the image panel on the window. The airport that you select here will be the starting point of your flight. FlightGear uses ICAO 4-letter airport codes, which is composed with one or two prefix letters followed by two or three airport code. For example, the ICAO code for San Francisco International Airport is KSFO. “K” in this case shows The United States, and SFO is the airport code for San Francisco International Airport. You can use "Advanced features" >> "Position" or "Aircraft" tab to find an airport or an aircraft. You can also find ICAO airport codes from Air code database search.

Enabling on-the-fly scenery downloading

By checking "Download scenery on the fly" at the launcher window, you can download scenery while you're flying through the network. Keep it checked if you're not sure.

Launching FlightGear - the simulator

Clicking "Start Flight" button at the window opens up another window - the FlightGear main window (Figure 3). FlightGear immediately starts loading tons of data required for simulation. It may take a while on slower machines to load everything.

Using advanced features of FlightGear

FlightGear has many features and options that you can specify at the time you launch it. Some of these are not changeable from the menu in the FlightGear main window. To enable / disable these features, click the triangle-shaped button at the left-bottom of the launcher window. Then the advanced features tabs come up (Figure 4). All option values are saved so you don't have to specify these every time.

Note

Not all availabe options are implemented on the launcher. We selected the options by the follwoing criteria:

• command-line options that you cannot change from the menu on the FlightGear window
• frequently used options

If you have any suggestion on adding options to the launcher, please let us know.

General

There are some options available at this moment as shown in Figure 4.

Save preferences on exit

lets FlightGear save preferences that you changed from the menu in the FlightGear (fgfs) main window will be saved to $HOME/.fgfs/autosave.xml

Control

specifies the control device you will use in FlightGear. "auto," "joystick," "mouse," and "keyboard" are available. You can leave it as "auto" unless you really want to change it manually.

Unit

specifies the unit used in FlightGear. "feet" and "meters" are available.

Time of day

specifies the time of day. Available options are real, dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, evening, and midnight.

Season

specifies the season of FlightGear world. You can choose either summer or winter

Features

Sound

Disabling this will cut all the sound in FlightGear.

Instrumental panel

specifies if 2D panel is drawn from the beginning. You can also enable/disable the 2D panel from FlightGear menu

Random objects

specifies whether FlightGear draws random objects or not

Clock never advances

specifies whether the clock advances in FlightGear or not

No fuel consumption

makes aircraft consume no fuel while it's flying

Start in a frozen state

starts FlightGear with frozen state. it doesn’t seem working at this moment.

Display HUD

displays HUD at the beginning, I guess. You can turn HUD on/off by pressing 'h' while you are flying.

3D HUD

enables 3D HUD if an selected aircraft supports it

Real weather fetch

enables fetching real weather condition using METAR

Horizon effect

enables horizon effect

Clouds

enables drawing clouds

3D clouds

enables drawing 3D clouds. You need to enable 3d clouds by checking "3D clouds" from the View >> Rendering option from the FlightGear main program (fgfs)

Turbulence

specifies the strength of turbulence. 0.0 is calm and 1.0 is severe. You need to specify value from 0.0 through 1.0

Visibility

specifies the visibility in meter. You can specify 3000 or 2000 if FlightGear runs slow on your machine.

Rendering

Fullscreen mode

Enabling this will launch FlightGear as full-screen mode

Window size

specifies the size of FlightGear window. It will be ignored when full-screen mode is enabled

Sky blending

enables or disables FlightGear to blend the sky depending on time and surrounding environment. DO NOT disable this option, or FlightGear crashes.

Textures

enables or disables textures on runways, buildings, and scenery objects. Disabling this will give you some more fps, effective especially on G4 Macs.

Wireframe

lets FlightGear draw wire-frames so you can see how the world of FlightGear is drawn. This should be enabled only for debug / development purpose.

Fog

specifies how fog is drawn. "disable," "fastest, "nicest" are available.

Shading

Favorite

Favorite list provides a means of preserving a named set of current options like a book mark of Safari. To save the current set of options, press "+" button on the top window or at the bottom of the Favorite tab. Once favorites are added, You can switch from one configuration to another by double-clicking a row in the table view in the Favorite tab. Pressing "-" button (or delete key) on a favorite in the table view, the selected favorite will be deleted.

Position

You can find airports or aircraft carriers by searching with a keyword into the filter text area. Available keywords are:

• For airports
  • a part of airport name (e.g. international, ranch, or civil)
  • country name (such as Japan, USA, or France) if available
  • location name (such as city or county or U.S. state abbrev. if available)
  • IATA code (such as SFO, LAX, HND) if available
  • ICAO code (such as KSFO, KLAX, RJTT) - works on all airports
• For aircraft carriers
  • carrier name (nimitz or eisenhower)
  • "carrier"

Airports and carriers that match the keyword are shown at the table view below the filter text area. The airport name at the upper pane is synchronized with the currently selected airport or carrier. You can also open this tab by clicking the gear button at the right end of airport name on the top pane.

Choosing a runway

When you choose an airport, available runways are shown at the "runways" pop-up button. You can choose a runway or leave it as "default".

Aircraft

You can find aircraft by searching with a keyword into the filter text area. Available keywords are:

• a part of aircraft name (e.g. p172, zero, shinden)
• configuration file name without -set.xml (e.g. a6m2b, p51d)
• fdm (Flight Dynamics Model) name (e.g. yasim, jsb)
• status (e.g. alpha, beta, production, development)

Aircraft that match the keyword are shown at the table view below the filter text area. The aircraft name at the upper pane is synchronized with the currently selected aircraft. You can also open this tab by clicking the gear button at the right end of aircraft name on the top pane.

If you want to find more aircraft data from the internet, click "Get Aircraft" button at the bottom of the Aircraft tab. It opens a web browser to lead you to the Aircraft Links page on this site. you can visit some links there and download an aircraft you want. Once an aircraft is downloaded, open "Others" tab to install it. Note that you must not launch FlightGear from mounted disk image that you downloaded from this site since the folder in the mounted disk image is read-only, which prevents you from installing any add-on data. you need to install FlightGear by copying the FlightGear icon from the mounted disk image to /Applciations folder.

Note:

If you encounter some weird behavior in searching aircraft, removing a cache file for aircraft database might solve your problem. The cache file is at /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/AircraftCache.rb. you can remove it by typing:

% rm /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/AircraftCache.rb

from /Applications/Utility/Terminal.app

Network

Multi Player

Enable Multiplay

enables or disables multi-player mode. Enabling this will open a new browser window to show the map on a multi player server.

CallSign

specifies the name shown in the map. Username must contain only alphabet letters, numbers, underscores, and dots. FlightGear will exit when you specify a call sign with invalid characters. A user name with 8 or more characters will be truncated into the first 7 characters.

Server

specifies the server to connect. mpserver02.flightgear.org are available at the time of writing this.

Your Mac

specifies your Mac's IP address. Usually the launcher detects the address automatically.

Port

should be 5000.

Voice ATC (FGCOM)

FGCOM enables you to make a real voice communication using radio setting. You can talk at a selected radio frequency (COM1) while pressing space bar. You can listen to some other player's talking in the frequency if some others are using the same frequency and you are in range.

User Name

specifies an account name for fgcom. You need to get an account to use FGCOM. see How to get an FGCOM account for detail.

Password

specifies a password for the fgcom account.

Note:

• CallSign, IP address, User Name and Password are ignored unless "Enable Multiplay" is checked.
• FGCOM starts automatically when User Name and Password are set (no username / password validation check will be made)

How to get an FGCOM account

At the time of writing this, there's no fancy WEB tool to get an FGCOM account. You need to send a request via email to the author for an account. Please read the FGCOM website and send a request to the author. You need to specify a user name that you want (or maybe a few in case the user name is already taken). 'Please DO NOT send me an email asking how to obtain an account for FGCOM. I'll ignore it.

Others

You can specify any options other than aircraft, airport, and the options shown in the launcher. Entering space-separated options as shown in Figure 11 will pass additional options to FlightGear. You can see all available options by pressing "View Options.'' Some options might cause FlightGear crash. If you encounter such crashes with a specific option, please let us know.

To install additional aircraft and scenery data, press "Install Add-on Data." You can specify multiple files and/or folders to install to the FlightGear data folder. Acceptable file types are:

• zip
• tar
• tar.gz
• tar.bz2
• folder

You will see the message window when all the data are successfully installed, otherwise error message will show up. You can select both aircraft and scenery data at a time. If you select an archived file that does not contain aircraft files, it will be extracted into the data folder, but will be ignored. When you finish installing new aircraft, restart FlightGear.app and these aircraft will appear on the list.

Taking a snapshot

To take a snapshot, you can use either F3 key (Option-F3 or Option-Fn F3 key on some Macs) or Command-s key. The former stores ppm file into /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources folder, and the latter stores tiff file to a designated folder. I recommend using the latter way since there's no pre-installed ppm image viewer in Mac platform. The best way to take a good shot is press 'p' key to pause FlightGear, tweaking the viewpoint to find a great angle using either mouse or joystick, and press Command-s to save it. If you want to hide menu bar, press F10 (option-F10 or option-fn-F10 on some Macs).

Resetting to default options

You can trash $HOME/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.macflightgear.plist to restore the default option values.