FFGo 1.0.0

A powerful graphical launcher for FlightGear

This software is a fork of the excellent FGo! program written by Robert “erobo” Leda, see HISTORY in the docs/README/README_en file for details. It is a graphical launcher for FlightGear, i.e., a program whose purpose is to allow easy assembling and running of an fgfs command line.

FFGo is written in Python 3 and is based on CondConfigParser, which allows many interesting things as shown at:

http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/projects/FFGo/doc/README-conditional-config/

Screenshots

Home page

FFGo’s home page is located at:

http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/projects/FFGo/

Requirements

FFGo relies on the following software:

• Operating system:

  • GNU/Linux surely works, as should any Unix-like system;

  • Windows should work, please report;

  • MacOS X should also work, except maybe for MacOS-specific Tcl/Tk bugs as explained at https://www.python.org/download/mac/tcltk/. Please report.

• FlightGear;

• Python 3.4 or later;

• Tkinter (part of the Python standard library; often known as python3-tk or python-tk in Linux package managers);

• CondConfigParser.

• Pillow (a PIL fork that supports Python 3) [1];

Note:

The home pages of FFGo’s dependencies indicated here are current at the time of this writing (August 2015) but might change over time.

Download

Release tarballs or zip files can be downloaded from:

http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/projects/FFGo/dist/

Git repository

FFGo is maintained in a Git repository that can be cloned with:

git clone https://github.com/frougon/FFGo.git

Installation

The detailed installation guide for FFGo is in the docs/INSTALL directory in any release tarball or zip file. In short:

• FFGo may be run without installation, provided that all software requirements are installed.

• Otherwise, FFGo can be installed in the standard way for Python packages, i.e. with:

  pip install FFGo

  If you have never used pip before, or if you need more details, read the guide in docs/INSTALL before running this command, and don’t invoke it as the superuser unless you really know what you are doing!

  Besides FFGo, you may want to also install Pillow in order to see the aircraft thumbnails in FFGo. The presence of Pillow is detected at run time, therefore it doesn’t matter if Pillow is installed before or after FFGo.

Running

• If you chose to run FFGo without installing it:

  From your file manager, you may click on the ffgo-launcher.py file in the top-level directory obtained after unpacking a release tarball or zip file. Alternatively, you can run it from a terminal with a command such as ./ffgo-launcher.py or python3 ffgo-launcher.py. Just make sure you are running ffgo-launcher.py with the Python interpreter for which you installed the dependencies.

• Otherwise, if you installed FFGo with pip:

  pip should have installed an ffgo executable in the directory it normally installs scripts into. This directory may be a Scripts subdirectory of your Python installation, or a bin subdirectory of the virtual environment if you ran it in a venv, etc. It depends on how you ran pip (inside or outside a venv, etc.). More details are given in docs/INSTALL, and if this is not enough, please refer to the pip documentation.

Documentation

Apart from this text (which corresponds to README.rst in a release tarball or zip file), FFGo’s documentation can be found in the docs top-level directory after unpacking a release tarball or zip file. Once FFGo is installed, users should start by reading docs/README/README_en (en being for the English version; this text is also accessible from FFGo’s Help menu). In a second time, docs/README.conditional-config (available online) explains how to use the full power of the configuration system used by FFGo.

If you got FFGo from the Git repository instead of a release tarball, part of the documentation is in source form only (written for Sphinx). There is a special section in docs/INSTALL which explains how to build it in this situation [2]. In any case, this documentation (for the latest FFGo release) is always available online.

License

FFGo is distributed under the terms of the WTFPL version 2, dated December 2004.