55 lines
2 KiB
Text
55 lines
2 KiB
Text
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Internals
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The core of FlightGear is the property system. This is a tree like internal
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representation of global variables. The property system is explained more
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in detail later on.
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FlightGear' way of doing things is breaking it up into small pieces. There is
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(for example) animation code that reacts on property changes. There is also a
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Flight Dynamics model (FDM) that (amongst other things) updates properties.
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There is a menu system that can display and alter properties. Then we have
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sound code that plays sound based on ... properties.
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Maybe you see a pattern evolve by now.
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All subsystems are almost self containing. Most of the time they only read the
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values of some properties, and sometimes they alter other properties. This is
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the basic way of communicating between subsystems.
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Property System
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---------------
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The property system is best described as an in-memory LDAP database which holds
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the state of global variables. The system has a tree like hierarchy (like a
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file system) and has a root node, sub nodes (like subdirectories) and end-nodes
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(variables).
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All variables are kept internally as raw values and can be converted to any
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other supported type (boolean, int, float double and string).
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Like a file system, every node can be accessed relative to the current node, or
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absolute to the root node.
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The property system also allows aliasing nodes to other nodes (like symbolic
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linking files or directories to other files or directories) and may be assigned
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read-only or read-write.
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If necessary it would be possible for parts of the program to hold it's own
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property tree, which is inaccessible from the global property tree, by keeping
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track of it's own root-node.
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Property I/O code allows one to easily read the tree from, or write the tree to
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an XML file.
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Scripting
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---------
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The scripting langage Nasal can also read and modify properties but it can also
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be incorporated into the menu system. The documentation for Nasal can be found
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here: http://www.plausible.org/nasal/flightgear.html
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