* Improved groundnetwork routing algorithm. Don't uncesscarily block taxiways. Instead, use a "just-in-time" blocking system. The unblocking algorithm still needs some work, but the current version is already a major improvement over the previous version.
* Some tweaks to the handover from ground to tower controller. Aircraft could refuse to take-off of even refuse to taxi onto the runway. This now seems to be solved.
* Landing AIAircraft now land properly!!!
* Fixed problems with takeoff scheduling.
* Untangled several vertical speed calculation algorithms.
* No more bent-over-backwards and jump-in-the-air AI aircraft initializations.
* Fixed intermixed target speed and target altitude during climb phase.
* Implemented beginnings of a "line up and wait" procedure.
* Tried to use actual runway elevation for calculating the decent profile.
- Better transistion between taxi and takeoff phases.
- Skipping the pushback stages when a gate doesn't require push-back.
- Some test code always chooses the user aircraft as the one that has to hold position.
- Change AIFlightPlan::waypoint into an independent class FGAIWaypoint
- Don't update leg count until the aircraft has passed the last waypoint that was created by the corresponding leg
- Clear ground network rendering for controllers that are no longer active.
- Fixed a bug in AI aircraft ground steering code: When aircraft were not moving, the value of headingchangeRate kept increasing to insane levels. Although this was clamped to a maximum of 30 degrees per second, the initial rate could still push the aircraft in the wrong direction. In practice, this bug would be visible when an AI aicraft would be pushed back, when it tended to veer to the right.
- Make sure that the aircraft slows down well ahead of the pushback point. This change ensures that the AC will actually reach the pushback point. It also ensures a slightly tighter steering range.
- AI ground steering rate is tuned to 30 degrees per second at a nominal taxispeed of 15. I now modulate the heading adjustment rate by manipulating the adjustment using a non-linear function (the sqrt). This allows for a slightly tighter turn radius at speeds < 15 and slightly looser turns at speeds > 15.
- The AI Flightplan generation code can return false. This can be used to determine whether any additional AI aircraft may be created. Currently, the function returns false when no more parkings are available. This should limit the build-up of huge AIAircraft tower stacks.
- The ground network can now graphically display all aircraft actitivy on the ground network by using a virtual marker system.
* New features
- More realistic descent paths
- Separation during descent and approach
- ATC approach controller (still silent)
- inbound traffic flow will start immediately
* Bug fixes
- Properly handle vertical speed when on ground
- Departing aircraft now wait for taxiclerance before moving
- Traffic manager waits for proper weather initialization
- Fixed instabilities in the preferential runway usage code
- Fine tuning of waypoint following code.
The current code still has some rough edges, in particular memory still
needs to be deallocated where possible, and the actual use of the code
needs more testing. This code has been running without noticable problems,
so I think it's ready for some wider exposure. Detailed changes include:
- Finetuning of the SID/STAR data concept.
- Preloading of all SIDs, from one xml file.
- ATC determines which SID should be used and echoes this over the com1 or
com2 radio.
experimental: Only one SID per runway is supported, and the waypoints are
read from file at every request, which is not very efficient. The current
code is only executed when FlightGear is configured to use airport dynamics
data from the scenery repository, instead of the base package. Since the
latter is still the default, I believe that this will provide enough safe-
guarding to commit SID/STAR support in small, incremental steps.
Next step will be buffering and support for multiple departure routes per
runway.
* Changed the runway XX. ATC message to actually report the real
designated departure runway
* In case of multiple active runways, select the one with a heading that is
closest to the direction of the ultimate departure destination / lines up
with the arrival path.
* Some support for geometry information provided by the custom scenery
project. Current support is for AI groundnets and runway use files only
since this is a switch that involves a lot of data verification and
updating, during the transistion the actual path where the data can be
read from is user configurable. setting the property
/sim/traffic-manager/use-custom-scenery-data to true
will cause flightgear to read the ground networks from the scenery
directory (--{fg-scenery}/Airports/[I]/[C]/[A]/[ICAO].groundnet.xml to be
precise). Setting this property to false will retain the original
behvior.
* For departing aircraft, runway takeoff calculations will be done on the
basis of the performance database. For testing purposes, a performance
estimate for a heavy jet has been added.
notion of a 'displacedThreshold'. Now there's just a real threshold,
displaced or otherwise, and people who care about the paved area can use
'begin' and 'end'. Thanks to John Denker for pointing out the confusion this
leads to. Using 'end' also gets rid of the 'reverseThreshold' name, which was
clearly a bad choice of mine.
Convert FGRunway to be heap-based, and inherit FGPositioned. This is a large, ugly change, since FGRunway was essentially a plain struct, with no accessors or abstraction. This change adds various helpers and accessors to FGRunway, but doesn't change many places to use them - that will be a follow up series of patches. It's still a large patch, but outside of FGAirport and FGRunway, mostly mechanical search-and-replace.
An interesting part of this change is that reciprocal runways now exist as independent objects, rather than being created on the fly by the search methods. This simplifies some pieces of code that search for and iterate runways. For users who only want one 'end' of a runway, the new 'isReciprocal' predicate allows them to ignore the 'other' end. Current the only user of this is the 'ground-radar' ATC feature. If we had data on which runways are truly 'single-ended', it would now be trivial to use this in the airport loader to *not* create the reciprocal.
- Runways are now part of an airport, instead of a separate list
- Runways are no longer represented as a boring struct, but as a class
of their own.
-Improved runway access to unify various runway access methods.
and "isOnRunway".
- Added initial support for AI controlled pushback operations, making use of the
current editing capabilities of TaxiDraw CVS / New_GUI_CODE. The current
implementation is slightly more computationally intensive than strictly
required, due to the currently inability of taxidraw to link one specific
pushBack point to to a particular startup location. FlightGear now determines
this dynamically, and once we have that functionality in TaxiDraw, the
initialization part of createPushBack() can be further simplified.
- Smoother transition from pushback to taxi. No more skipping of waypoints, and
aircraft wait for two minutes at pushback point.
- The classes FGTaxiNode, FGTaxiSegment, and FGParking, now have copy
constructors, and assignment operators.
- Removed declaration of undefined constructor FGTaxiNode(double, double, int)
- Array boundry checks and cleanup.
- Modified Dijkstra path search algoritm to solve partial problems. Currently
limited to include pushback points and routes only, but can probably be
extended to a more general approach.
- Added initial support for giving certain routes in the network a penalty, in
order to discourage the use of certain routes over others.
- Ground network slow-down finally works as expected
(although occasionally causing a traffic jam)
- Hold position instruction now really sets speed to zero, in addition
it actually works now for crossing and two-way traffic
- Attempt to limit execution time of ground network trace algorithm
to make performance acceptable at high-density networks
- Removed remaining terminal messages
- Various minor tweaks and clean-ups
- Moved AIModels/Traffic Manager related AI functions to a new file
- Rewrote the traffic manager so that the containers use pointers to
objects instead of the objects themselves, which will allow for a
more flexible memory management.
- Rewrote parts of the airport groundnetwork code, also because the
stl containers now contain object pointers instead of the objects
themselves.
- Fixed an uninitialized iterator in the AI distance tracking code
- Fixed flawed logic in some of the traffic controller's while loops
- Added a tower controller, which paces take-off behavior of AITraffic
in a more realistic way.
- Various other minor fixes and fine tuning.
maintain a resonable distance from each other while taxiing on the same
route. The current code does not yet take crossing routes or aircraft
taxiing into opposite directions into account.
work for ground based distance separation of AIAircraft.
Traffic manager initialization related changes:
- Schedules initialize "on the fly", instead of during initialization
- Invalid routes are no longer deleted, but marked as BOGUS and ignored
- Changed loading order from a distance based prioritization to a point-
score based prioritization, resulting in a much faster establisment of
AIAircraft near the user's plane.
Preparatory work for ground-based separation of Aircraft.
- The groundnetwork findShrortestRoute function not only returns a list
of waypoints, but also a list of taxi "segments" (a.k.a. taxiways).
- The taxiway list is stored in the Flightplan, and updated everytime
a new taxi leg is created.
using Curt's new speed adjustment code. 2) Separated the function
FlightPlanCreateCruise() into a new source file in preparation of a more
elaborate airway following scheme.
When AIFlightPlanCreateTaxi() function is called with the firstFlight
argument set to true, this is supposed to handle situations where the
the aircraft's timetable indicates it should have left between about 5 to
20 minutes earlier. In the previous version, all these aircraft started
taxiing from the first parking location available in the network, due
to the fact that the variable gateId was not assigned a value. In this
patch, route tracing starts from an assigned gate and the network node
following code is fast forwarded to a random location along the taxiways
to give a more realistic and natural distribution of taxiing aircraft
after startup.
This patch further addresses some weird ballet-dancing behavior that
aircraft were showing just prior to/right after parking and which was
related to a number of more or less duplicate waypoints in the transition
from createTaxi() to createParking() to createPushBack() to createTaxi().
Finally, a blatant typing error in the getParking() function was fixed.
* Use "const string&" rather than "string" in function calls when appropriate.
* Use "const Point3D&" instead of "Pint3D" in function calls when appropriate.
* Improved course calculation in calc_gc_course_dist()
* Safer thread handling code.
Vassilii Khachaturov:
Dont use "const Point3D&" for return types unless you're absolutely sure.
Erik Hofman:
* Use SGD_(2)PI(_[24]) as defined in simgear/constants.h rather than
calculating it by hand every time.
Auf Niederlandisch:
Bij deze de patch voor de taxiway code. Deze code is nog gebaseerd
op de bestaaande architectuur, gebaseerd op de FGAirport class in simple.[ch]xx
Ik heb me voornamelijk gericht op nieuwe functionaliteit; de volgende
submissie zal waarschijnlijk bestaan uit opschoning, opsplitsing en een
implementatie van de nieuwe airport architectuur, zoals voorgesteld door
David Luff.
En Anglais:
Here is the patch for the taxiway code. This code is still based on the
exsisting architecture, which is based on the FGAirport class in simple.[ch]xx
I've aimed mostly at new functionality; The next batch will probably contain
code cleanups, splitups and the implementation fo the new airport architecture,
as proposed by David Luff.
