immediate end to glut, only that I'm going through and cleaning up (and
taking inventory of the actual glut dependencies in case I want to investigate
SDL.)
The jitter is most likely caused by the irregular frame rate and CPU clock dependent intervals. There's no easy way around that. I tried some fancy interpolation and all that -- to no avail.
I have added a fledgling replay system that records flight data and control
positions during the flight.
I have added an internal command called "replay" which will trigger a replay
of the entire saved flight data set. This could be bound to a keyboard or
menu command, in fact this entire module is screaming for someone to build
a gui to control playback speed, amount of playback, etc.
This is the initial version so there are kinks that still need to be worked
out, please be patient.
Square the normalized direction acceleration for the y and z axes, so
that turbulence predominantly affects pitch.
Bind to the /environment/turbulence/magnitude-norm and
/environment/turbulence/rate-hz properties in FlightGear.
The current chase view respects heading but ignores roll & pitch. And it follows heading without delay, which makes the viewer behave quite strange. This change makes the chase view feel more natural. You aren't fixed behind the plane, but follow all its movements with a delay.
Erik Hofman:
I've decided not to add the patch to preferences.xml in the base package because something feels funny with that. I think there needs to be some more discussion about it.
between temperature at altitude vs. temperature at sea level. The dialog
box asked for temperature at altitude which makes sense, but all the
internal crunching expected temperature at sea level. However, it makes no
logical sense to specify the sea level temperature for different layers so
I changed the internal processing to work with temperature at altitude and
then derive an approximate sea level temperature at the end.
If you know the ground temperature, you can just enter this temperature
for the first boundary layer and the system should do the right thing.
/sim/rendering/horizon-effect
toggle sun and moon resizing effect near the horizon
/sim/rendering/enhanced-lighting
toggle enhanced runway lighting on or off
/sim/rendering/distance-attenuation
add distance attenuation to the enhanced runway lighting
etc.
Improved the weather system to interpolate between different
elevations and deal with boundary-layer conditions. The configuration
properties are now different (see $FG_ROOT/preferences.xml).
Normally for smoothest frame rates you would configure to sync
to your monitor's vertical refresh signal. This is card/platform
dependent ... for instance with Linux/Nvidia there is
an environment variable you can set to enable this feature.
However, if your monitor is refreshing at 60hz and you can't quite sustain
that with flightgear, you can get smoother frame rates by artificially
throttling yourself to 30hz. Note that once you are about about 24fps, it
is *change* or inconsistancy in frame rate that leads to percieved jerkiness.
You want to do whole divisors of your monitor refresh rate, so if your
display is syncing at 75 hz, you might want to try throttling to 25 hz.
Melchior FRANZ:
The reason: these models are to be added to the scenery, but the
scenery isn't yet set up at this point. The correct order is:
- set up model_lib (needed by the scenery)
- set up scenery (needed by the model manager)
- set up model manager
What is actually happening is the camera is pointing to the right place (try zooming in), but the camera is also travelling up and down with the nose and it should be staying more steady (in sync with the CG altitude).
Attached is a fix for this. There is still something a little funky going on with the camera, but this solves the biggest problem. You will note that I deleted an unecessary reference to scenery.hxx in the patch.
I split the FGModelPlacement code out into it's own set of source files.
I created two versions of the fgLoad3DModel() routine. One that is
unecumbered by a panelnode dependency and one that is. acmodel.cxx is
the only place that needs to load an aircraft with instrument panels.
model.[ch]xx are now pretty much free to move over into simgear.
loader.[ch]xx should be able to follow closely behind.
This will be a big step towards being able to move the material management
code over into simgear.
the ascii scenery file format has actually worked in quite some time, and the
ADA runway light code has been supersceded by a slightly different mechanism.
requested parameters to determine if this should be an on-ground vs. in-air
start. The problem was that we never defaulted the value to anything so
if we didn't match an in-air condition, we simply inherited whatever value
was there from before.
scene management code and organizing it within simgear. My strategy is
to identify the code I want to move, and break it's direct flightgear
dependencies. Then it will be free to move over into the simgear package.
- Moved some property specific code into simgear/props/
- Split out the condition code from fgfs/src/Main/fg_props and put it
in it's own source file in simgear/props/
- Created a scene subdirectory for scenery, model, and material property
related code.
- Moved location.[ch]xx into simgear/scene/model/
- The location and condition code had dependencies on flightgear's global
state (all the globals-> stuff, the flightgear property tree, etc.) SimGear
code can't depend on it so that data has to be passed as parameters to the
functions/methods/constructors.
- This need to pass data as function parameters had a dramatic cascading
effect throughout the FlightGear code.
Set a random value for a numeric property
Params:
<property> - the name of the property to randomize
<min> - the minimum allowed value
<max> - the maximum allowed value
The one to fg_init.cxx initialises the AI subsystem regardless of whether it's enabled or not so that later enabling by the user doesn't crash it, and the one to main.cxx avoids running the ATC manager and ATC display system unless enabled.
This is just a port of an old 3D HUD patch to the new view code.
This pans the HUD with the view, by pasting it onto a quad fixed in front of the viewer. It also fixes the awful, arbitrary scaling problems the HUD code has. The old HUD only looks right when viewed at 1024x768 and 55 degree FOV. This works the scale out magically so that it looks right in all views. It also redefines the "<compression-factor>" tag in the ladder to (1) mean compression instead of expansion and (2) have non-psychopathic units (now "1" means 1 degree per degree). Fix this in your existing HUD ladder files before reporting bugs. It's definitely a cosmetic win -- the velocity vector points at the right thing and the horizon lines up properly.
Norman wrote:
I have created a modified version of Andy's patch that implements the 3D HUD as the 'normal' and the 2D HUD as the 'minimal' HUD. < i > and < shift I > keys
I've fixed a bug in FGRunways::search(aptid, tgt_hdg) which wasn't working properly for airports with multiple parallel runways. I've also firmed up and pulled out into it's own function the GetReverseRunwayNo code, and done some input checking.
As a result of fixing the above in runways.cxx, I've pulled out the
parallel implementation in the functions that set position by airport and
heading/runway number in fg_init.cxx and called the runways functions
instead.
earlier, before fgInitSubsystems().
Modify fgInitPos() so that the plane is not automatically aligned with
a runway when an airport is the reference point unless (a) a runway
was explicitly requested, or (b) the plane is on the ground with no
offset distance specified. To set up the plane lined up on an
approach to a runway, use something like
fgfs --airport=CYOW --runway=32 --altitude=300 --offset-distance=0.5
This way, it's possible to specify a starting position relative to an
airport without getting snapped onto a runway approach (unless you
want to be).
04Feb. Actually been running since the beginning of January with these
patches. All changes work without crashing with the current base package cvs,
but there are some visual problems with the views (other than pilot view)
without changes to the base package.
As soon as you can build test and commit I can add in those base package
updates that will make it all work nicely. I will also go through all the 3D
Aircraft configs to make sure the change in the "pitch-offset" for cockpit
views (see below) are made to maintain current behavior.
Here are the files (changes listed below):
http://www.spiderbark.com/fgfs/viewerupdate.diffs.gzhttp://www.spiderbark.com/fgfs/viewerupdate.tar.gz
All logs and log entries are now disabled by default, unless
explicitly enabled by an 'enabled' property. This works much more
intuitively with the GUI dialog.
if the station is too far away. Instead, simply return the closest station.
All the code that searches navaids does it's own range checking anyway.
This will make the navlist query functions a bit more useful for other
types of functionality where you may need to lookup a station without
consideration of range (i.e. presetting your position relative to a navaid.)
(I thought I'd slip this in along with David's change to the default menu
configure option. I believe that will cause a new config.h to be generated
which will cause a near complete rebuild of FG (as will this globals.hxx
change) so it shouldn't cause additional grief to have these happen at the
same time.)
input bindings. They will work only with the latest CVS; otherwise,
./configure will disable them. There is a new command, 'script',
which takes a single argument, also called 'script', containing PSL
code (currently PSL requires a main() function).
Erik Hofman has written some more elaborate code for triggering PSL
code from drop-down menus and scheduling events; I will look at
integrating that next.
and property-multiply:
Firstly, change back to wrapping modulo the interval, with "min <= x <
max" semantics. I believe the previous implementation did that. The
inline function that Norman mentioned also does that.
Secondly, make it snap to the nearest value (min + N*resolution) when a
"resolution" tag is present, taking special care of floating-point
precision. Or perhaps specify "number of divisions in the interval" as
an integer, instead of "resolution" by which I meant a floating-point
"size of a division".
[also fixed]
While working on this file I noticed some potentially serious warnings:
fg_commands.cxx: In function `bool do_property_adjust(const
SGPropertyNode*)':
fg_commands.cxx:435: warning: control reaches end of non-void function
fg_commands.cxx: In function `bool do_property_multiply(const
SGPropertyNode*)':
fg_commands.cxx:465: warning: control reaches end of non-void function
/usr/local/include/simgear/misc/props.hxx: At top level:
fg_commands.cxx:600: warning: `bool do_presets_commit(const
SGPropertyNode*)' defined but not used
Some more cmall changes to the SimGear header files and removed the
SG_HAVE_NATIVE_SGI_COMPILERS dependancies from FlightGear.
I've added a seperate JSBSim patch for the JSBSim source tree.
experimental lighting rendering (which is very expensive on my
machine, for example). To use distance attenuation,
/sim/rendering/distance-attenuation must also be true.
It adds a command line options to enable/disbale distance attenuation
using a property rather than using a #define inside the code. It also
adds a small change for systems that don't support the OpenGL extension,
so that the lights *do* fade away as they get furher away but they don't
get smaller in size.
property-adjust.
Modified property-adjust and property-multiply so that they always
work with double values, to simplify the code.
Factored out some common code.
Added a 'mask' argument to the property-adjust and property-multiply
commands. If mask is set to "all" (the default), then the command
works as before; if mask is set to "integer", it works only to the
left of the decimal point; and if mask is set to "decimal", it works
only to the right of the decimal place. This functionality is useful
for tuning VHF COM and NAV radios.
- dialog-open
- dialog-close
- dialog-update
- dialog-apply
The last two can copy a value from a property to a GUI field or
vice-versa either individually or across the whole dialog.
I have updated the lighting code to use fog to try to fade the runway lights
in smoothly, but still keep them from being visible until you are about 7-10
miles out, and then only have them be very faint at first. I think what I
have is a bit nicer than before since it completely avoids the "popping" effect,
but I've very open to tweaking the actual ranges based on people's real
world experiences.
option to specify a starting airport + specific runway. If you don't specify
a runway, you get the one that's closest to your specified (or default)
heading.
The general idea is to help clean up some aspects of the FDM init and be
able to provide startup conditions in a less ambiguous manner.
Previously, things like positions, orientations, and velocites were set on
"the bus". These had to be read by the FDMs which then were supposed to
initialized themselves to those values and turn write around and start
modifying those values. It was messy and cumbersome.
Now, all the initial fdm conditions are written to a sub-[property-]tree
under /sim/presets/
The values in /sim/presets/ always stay set to what the user has specified.
The user can change these at his/her liesure, and then request a "reset"
which will reset to the new conditions. I don't even want to say how this
worked before. :-)
Now, an script, or gui interface can stage a set of initial conditions while
the sim is running (without disrupting it), and then call "reset" to commit
the change.
People who should worry about all this are FDM writters, and a small few
others who care about over all program structure and flow.
The biggest and coolest patch adds mouse sensitivity to the 3D
cockpits, so we can finally work the radios. This ended up requiring
significant modifications outside of the 3D cockpit code. Stuff folks
will want to look at:
+ The list of all "3D" cockpits is stored statically in the
panelnode.cxx file. This is clumsy, and won't migrate well to a
multiple-aircraft feature. Really, there should be a per-model list
of 3D panels, but I couldn't find a clean place to put this. The
only handle you get back after parsing a model is a generic ssg
node, to which I obviously can't add panel-specific methods.
+ The aircraft model is parsed *very* early in the initialization
order. Earlier, in fact, than the static list of allowable command
bindings is built in fgInitCommands(). This is bad, as it means
that mouse bindings on the instruments can't work yet. I moved the
call to fgInitCommands, but someone should look carefully to see
that I picked the right place. There's a lot of initialization
code, and I got a little lost in there... :)
+ I added yet another "update" hook to the fgRenderFrame routine to
hook the updates for the 3D panels. This is only required for
"mouse press delay", and it's a fairly clumsy mechanism based on
frame rate instead of real time. There appears to be delay handling
already in place in the Input stuff, and there's a discussion going
on about different mouse behavior right now. Maybe this is a good
time to unify these two (now three) approaches?
