SimGear project mission statement

Version 1.0  7/4/2000  Curtis Olson  curt@flightgear.org

The purpose of this project is to develop open-source libraries and
building blocks to assist with rapid construction/prototyping of 3d
simulation, game, and visualization software.

1. Open-Source: The libraries developed as part of this project will
be released under the Gnu LGPL license.

2. Building blocks: SimGear intends to provide a common, standardized
set of building block (libraries) which can be used by a variety of
software projects including 3d realtime simulations, visualization
software, and games.  Some of the types of things we intend to include
in SimGear are:

  - Lower level:

    o On the fly compression (zlib)
    o Console output/debugging infrastructure
    o Various linear algebra, spherical, and wgs84 math routines
    o Various routines to hide crosss platform differences
    o A sophisticated registry of data values
    o XML input/output
    o Serial I/O encapsulation
    o Network I/O encapsulation
    o OpenGL screen snapshots
    o

  - Higher level:

    o Magnetic variation model
    o METAR weather parsing
    o Timing and event handling routines
    o Sky model (sun, moon, stars, skydome, clouds, visibility)
    o Ephemeris model (calculates positions of astronomical objects)
    o Simple scenery renderer
    o Simple vehicle dynamics models