The primary goal of this work is to provide a alternative to multiplayer property transmission, one that is more efficient and event driven. By using notifications in the model bindings these control messages can be bridged and do not require extra code to implement dual controls.
Using this alternative permits the modeller much greater control of which properties are transmitted, how these are encoded, and how often the updates are needed.
Please remember that this is a use case for Emesary, it is not all that Emesary can provide and there are still many other uses for the event driven object oriented system that Emesary provides.
Briefly the changes are:
- New PropertySyncNotificationBase to permit property transfer between ownship and MP versions using notifications instead of the pre-defined MP messages. This gives a much more flexible way to seutp multiplayer property transfer - and can probably support more properties because of the more efficient packing. There is a corresponding parameter (/sim/multiplay/transmit-only-generics) that will only transmit the bare minimum of parameters; making more space for notifications.
- new AircraftControlNotification to allow for animation bindings in the model, these notifications can be easily bridged over MP thus adding a simple method to implement dual controls.
- more efficient packing of encoded notifications over MP saving roughly 30% (by using a much larger encoding space and also changing to use fixed length encoding). This breaks compatibility with previous MP bridges, however at this time I don't think anything is using the current code.
There can be different types of PropertySyncNotification (with unique ID's) sent at a different schedule (so you could have a 10 second update of very slow moving items). However bear in mind that the messages have a lifetime of 10 seconds to ensure receipt - so to optimise space would require > 15 seconds to make much difference, and that is very slow moving.
This is mainly to make it clear that the "translation" in (after this
commit) Translations/default, a priori corresponding to en_US, has a
special status: it acts as the source describing the set of translatable
strings, each with its id (an XML tag name) and numeric index (a
PropertyList index, often 0 but not always).
In the upcoming i18n infrastructure, the files in Translations/default
will be used to:
- detect all translatable strings (~ string extraction);
- detect obsolete translated strings (those in XLIFF files but not in
Translations/default anymore);
This will allow a script to update the XLIFF files containing real
translations, i.e., update the source strings and possibly remove
obsolete entries.
So, the files in Translations/default have a special "master" status in
this process, and are technically quite different from those in
Translations/de, Translations/es, Translations/fr, etc. The latter XML
files (those not in Translations/default) will be replaced with their
XLIFF equivalent, by the way (conversion script already working).
See discussion at
<https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/35910579/>.
This makes the "Rendering options" menu entry consistent with its
siblings in the same menu as well as with the section title with the
same name in Translations/es/options.xml.
It's not that leading or trailing whitespace in translated strings is
forbidden *in principle*, but I think it is unwanted in most of these
cases. Remove these spaces that could cause confusion, possibly useless
work for translators and/or ugly displays.
The only cases where the spaces seem to have been intentional are the
trailing ones in menu labels (Translations/*/menu.xml), in order to
obtain right alignment of keyboard shortcuts. However, there is only one
case in English where the spacing looks approximately correct
(File -> Reset). In all other cases, it looks awful. And this poor way
of obtaining right alignment gives bad results in other languages, where
translators use the same number of spaces as in English.
Bottom line: if right alignment of keyboard shortcuts is indeed desired
in the menu labels (I think it is), it should be done in a smarter
way...
The 'enable-skyblend-desc', 'disable-skyblend-desc',
'enable-intro-music-desc', 'disable-intro-music-desc',
'enable-game-mode-desc', 'disable-game-mode-desc' and
'disable-ai-scenarios' translated strings have been removed from
Translations/en/options.xml in commit
4f660c96a5. Remove them from
Translations/nl/options.xml where they are still present.
The tips are not enabled in Translations/locale.xml yet, because the
font currently used to display them in FlightGear's splash screen
doesn't have the required glyphs (see [1] for more details). Better
display English tips than empty rectangles on the startup screen.
Merging this in disabled state now has a few advantages compared to
waiting for the font problem to be solved:
- avoid that someone ignoring the merge request[1] duplicates the
translation work;
- allow easy updating of these tips;
- make sure they aren't forgotten when FG's localization files are
converted to XLIFF format.
Ship an empty Translations/zh_CN/options.xml, otherwise
'fgfs --language=zh_CN --help --verbose' won't work at all.
[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/fgdata/merge-requests/92/
