Implement simple help system with global and aircraft specific dialogs:
The gui.nas changes have been discussed with Andy. All ac have a help dialog,
but some are empty. (This wouldn't have been necessary, as the system falls
back to the "Common Aircraft Keys" if an aircraft has no help defined, but an
empty dialog is less confusing and encourages to be filled with interesting
information. :-) I scanned all aircraft files for interesting performance
data and added some to the dialogs (stall speed, etc.) The Concorde and the
p51d have (over?)complete dialogs and can serve as examples. The format is
documented in $FG_ROOT/Nasa/gui.nas.
There is also a couple of other, minor fixes.
The following files have ugly MSDOS line endings:
$FG_ROOT/Aircraft/Hunter/hunter{-2tanks,}-set.xml
$FG_ROOT/Aircraft/A380/A380-set.xml
The Concorde-jsbsim.nas file is a useless copy of the real */nas file, which is
in Nasal/. I'was debugging the Concorde and wondered why changes to this file
had no effect ...
(Fixed Concorde in the help-ac.diff patch: don't use "interpol" keyword as
variable.)
Re-organisation: <diffuse>, <ambient>, <emission>, <specular> are
now groups with members <red>, <green>, <blue>, <factor>, <offset>,
and their <*-prop> forms. Additionally, there's an option <property-base>
that can be used to set a path that is prepended to all <*-prop> paths.
It defaults to an empty string. Rationale: see model-howto.html.
Changes:
o new skids (yet again)
o sun shield for the panel
o beautified exhausts
o new door handling:
"d" ... toggle selected door (default: pilot door)
"D" ... select next door (indicated with popup)
"Ctrl-d" ... remove selected door if opened (all bo105 doors can easily
get removed in RL; it is even flown without doors!)
o dropped shadow boxes (once necessary workaround for the disappearing
shadow problem, and the reason why the bo105 was so tiny in fgrun)
o automatically selects the emblem of the national Red Cross/Red Crescent
society on startup
o 5 variants, that can be switched at runtime, with different emblems,
colors(!), and extra equipment:
"c" ... switch to next variant
"C" ... pop-up material dialog, as a demonstration of the new
"material" animation, well ... and for entertainment
purposes :-)
The bo105 was and is a testbed for the "material" animation. It uses one to
change a texture at runtime. This has the advantage, that only the currently
selected texture uses up memory (unlike the textranslate method), and it
saves a lot of disk space because it doesn't duplicate all textures (unlike
the current <texture-path> method. You can change the texture in the browser:
http://localhost:5501/sim/model/bo105/material/emblem/texture
(choose one of: emblems/{red-cross,red-crescent-[lr],star-of-life}.rgb
(the built-in property browser doesn't grok it, because I used quite long
path names. Needs to be fixed in the GUI.)
I suggest to add the material.nas file to the global Nasal/ dir, not only
because the bo105 update expects it. The Nasal module creates a dialog for
material editing, which is quite useful for development purposes, for gaining
better understanding of the OpenGL color properties, and finally: it's fun.
http://members.aon.at/mfranz/material.jpg [45 kB]
The dialog needs to be initialized with a property dir where material
redirects are placed. It isn't available from the menu, but may be useful
for other aircraft. Also, it's quite small and doesn't get in the way.
If people want it removed, I can still move its contents into bo105.nas.
The bo keyboard binding says:
material.showDialog("/sim/model/bo105/material/fuselage/", "Bo105");
This is documented on top of the *.nas file.
