Thanks for the feedback!
As I think about it more I guess I actually have two different use cases in mind which may be treated differently.
To explain more about my situation, my proprietary project is an animation/modeling program I've been working on for years, called Ecstasy Motion (ecstasymotion.com). It is built on top of the MIT-licensed Torque engine, and my business model so far has been to stick with a traditional closed source application, with licenses costing a couple of hundred bucks, intended market being independent film makers, machinima artists and game developers. I have already open sourced certain major subcomponents of the application, and intend to do more, but I'm still not convinced of the free speech vs free beer argument (my real beers actually do cost me money, lol) and for now at least feel the need to play it safe, keep my source closed and sell the binaries.
However, where this connects to flightgear is I have recently had a brainstorm connected to some work I did last year, establishing a socket connection between flightgear and a standalone game engine. (
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19626&hilit=unity3d
) The new brainstorm is that I just realized it probably would be very easy to also send a stream of data re: an airplane (position/orientation/flight surface controls/bombable shots fired/etc) to my client application, and hence be able to render the plane flying around in Unity or Torque, either from a static camera or by attaching the camera to the flightgear viewpoint.
Doing this into Ecstasy Motion would also give me the ability to save the plane's motion (and actual mesh/texture data) into fbx files for import into another destination app, such as Maya, 3DS Max or Unity.
Beyond general interest in including this ability as a feature or add-on for Ecstasy, I am also involved in production of my own war movie, which is going to require at least attack helicopters and possibly other aircraft. I had been assuming we would just fake the helicopter flight by moving it at a constant velocity, but now that I can actually start to fly the things in flightgear it is quickly becoming obvious how much better it will look if it is run by an actual FDM instead.
So, in reality I have two distinct license questions, but I suspect they have the same answer: one is to include a single airplane model with Ecstasy Motion or an add-on package, and the second is to use a rendering of an airplane or helicopter model in a movie. The answer is probably that they are both commercial projects and in both cases I need to buy the art, unless I'm lucky enough to find a totally free and unencumbered model. Which is cool, there are reasonably priced models out there. It would be great to be able to buy models from FG contributors for this purpose instead of finding models elsewhere though, since they would be guaranteed to have all required moving parts and match the flight characteristics precisely.
Anyway, thanks for helping me figure this out!
Statistics: Posted by chriscalef — Sun Sep 14, 2014 9:31 pm