Orbiter is now open source

It's been a while ...

Dear Orbiter users and developers,

I haven't been around this place in quite some time, and for personal reasons haven't been able to push Orbiter development along for a few years now. In order to keep Orbiter alive and allow others to work on it, I have decided to publish the sources under an open source license: This is essentially the 2016 Edition with some minor (and at least one major) fixes. I hope this is of use to somebody. The code is somewhat unorganised and sparsely documented, but it should compile and leave you with a working Orbiter installation. Note that the repository doesn't include all the required planetary textures, so you need to install those separately (e.g. by reusing an existing Orbiter 2016 installation - this is explained in the Readme and only requires setting a CMake option before configuring the build).

I am still hoping to work on future enhancements of Orbiter, but I can't make any promises or commitments. One of the most pressing issues is switching the code over to 64-bit, but this requires ditching the DX7 dependency (and ideally replacing it with DX11), but that is a major undertaking which I may or may not be able to do).

Please let me know of any compilation problems or any other issues with the repository, either here or by raising an issue on github. I am also happy to consider merge requests.

Happy coding!