will delay it's reply by 50ms. The ground station can change it's reply delay
to trick the airborn dme unit into reporting a distance that is offset from
the true distance by some constant value. In FG we model this by subtracting
a fixed distance from the actual distance.
It is thus possible in our implimentation for the displayed distance to become
negative. This patch clamp DME distance to a minimum value of 0.00 so it can
never go negative.
A good elevation is critical for proper glide slope modeling. This patch
assigns the average field elevation to any ILS component that doesn't have
a valid elevation.
Also, for an ILS approach, use the GS transmitter elevation for glide slope
calculations rather than the localizer elevation, in some cases this can
make a big difference.
- FG now directly supports Robin's native nav database file format.
- His latest data now separates out dme, gs, loc, and marker beacon
transmitters rather than lumping them all into a single "ILS" record.
- These new data structure changes prompted me to do some code restructuring
so that internally these different types of navaids are all kept as
separate lists and searched and handled separately.
- This structural change had a cascading affect on any code that
references or uses the nav databases. I've gone and "touched" a lot of
nav related code in a lot of places.
- As an added bonus, the new data (and code) adds DME bias so these will
all now read as they do in real life.
- Added Navaids/navdb.cxx and Navaids/navdb.hxx which provide a front
end loaders for the nav data.
- Added Navaids/navrecord.hxx which is a new "generic" nav data record.
- Removed Navaids/ils.hxx, Navaids/ilslist.cxx, Navaids/ilslist.hxx,
Navaids/mkrbeacons.cxx, and Navaids/mkrbeacons.hxx which are all now
depricated.
Add FGPredictor class to xmlauto. Add support for horizontal navigation based
on flight track as opposed to heading. Add crosstrack-error support to nav.
Simplify error adjust calculation for horizontal nav (better interception).
Fixed potential divide by zero that was producing nan issues in the xmlauto
code.
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.)
clarity:
nav_radial => nav_target_radial (same as selected, except for a LOC)
nav_heading => nav_reciprocal_radial
nav_magvar => nav_twist (it's not always the same as magvar)
nav_heading_needle_deflection => nav_cdi_deflection
nav_gs_needle_deflection => nav_gs_deflection
Added nav_radial back in, but now it shows the current radial from the
VOR, as one would expect. This value also appears in the
/radios/nav[*]/radials/actual-deg property.
This patch exposes the nav_id--Navaid (VOR/ILS) IDs--in the property tree for use in EFIS displays. Both the string and individual integer (char) values are published.
Erik Hofman:
I have converted all sprintf() functions in navcom.cxx into snprintf() for some extra securety.
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.
I believe.) :-)
- The height of the navaid was not being properly converted to meters
before being used in our internal calculations. This caused the GS
to be placed too high.
- I was using the wrong trig function to calculate the current approach
angle of the aircraft. The distance to the GS source is the euclidean
point to point distance and represents the hypotenuse (not the ground
distance) so I need to use asin() rather than atan() to calculate the
angle.
- I was calculating distance directly to the GS source, rather than
taking into consideration that the GS transmitter projects a plane,
so I need to take the distance to the line where that plane intersectso
the ground. Previously, the way I modeled my distance calculation, the
GS transmitter effectively formed a 3 degree cone from the source. The GS
transmitter is usually placed a 100 meters or so off the runway edge so
the cone model could never bring you in to the touch down point precisely.
With these changes, the GS will bring you in precisely to the touchdown
point as defined in the default.ils.gz file (it wouldn't before.) The only
issue that remains is that it will bring you in to the elevation defined
in the ILS database, which doesn't necessarily match the DEM/SRTM terrain
at that point. Still on average, this will be a big improvement until we
can do a better job of getting the runway end elevations nailed correctly.
New panels are loaded now
New 3D model gets loaded
Reinitialize more subsystems
Add reinit() to FGFX, sound gets reinitialized
Still a lot needs to be done though.
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
The "switch" layer type now takes any number of child layers, and will
use the first child that has a condition that evaluates to 'true' (no
condition is automatically true). Previously, it could take only two
children, controlled by a boolean property.
I've updated the instrument modulator code to allow tricks like the one
described by Andy. It is now possible to define <min>, <max> and
<modulator> in one layer and if <min> and/or <max> ore within the range
of the <modulator> tag, their value will be honoured.
So, if you define
<layer>
<min>0</min>
<max>50</max>
<modulator>100</modulator>
</layer>
The value will stay at 50, until the modulator forces it back to 0.
better scheme.
While it's true that the actual ILS indications are unreliable when
far off the approach path, the ILS is not out of range -- you can
still ident it (an essential part of any approach procedure), and the
indicator will usually be doing something, however bizarre. The
current scheme did not allow the user to ident the ILS until
practically on the approach path.
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.)
hemisphere the distance is positive, if you are in the departure hemisphere
the distance is negature. (Possible use for graphing approach distance
vs. glide slope or cdi.)
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.
Ensure that if a condition for a panel mouse binding fails, other
bindings for the same area will have a chance to run.
Add a repeatable flag for panel mouse bindings (defaults to true).
I wrote:
> I can confirm this. Layers on the 2D panels (but oddly, only the 2D
> panels) aren't drawing over the background with the current ATI
> drivers.
OK, this turns out to be a trivial fix, although I still think it's a
driver bug. There are two calls to glPolygonOffset in the panel
rendering code (shared by both 2D and 3D panels). One is called
per-layer, and sets up a layer-specific offset. The other is called
for drawing the background textures, to lift them off of any
underlying cockpit geometry.
I was using different "factor" values for each, incorrectly. Patch
attached. It was affecting only 2D panels because the 3D ones don't
use background images.
Problem is, by my reading of the specification the bug should have had
the effect of pushing the background texture *farther* behind the
instruments, instead of pulling it on top of them. Either I'm reading
the spec incorrectly or ATI has inverted the sense of the factor
argument. Dunno, I'll submit a bug report to them and see what
happens.
> Jim Wilson wrote:
> > How hard would it be to have a property that toggles hotspot
> > visibility? It'd be nice to be able to turn it on and have yellow
> > rectangles show up on the hotspots...
>
> That's not a bad idea.
It's actually an astoundingly good idea, and implementable over lunch
to boot. :)
Try the attached patch, which predicates the boxes on the
/sim/panel-hotspots property. I mapped a toggle event on this to a
spare joystick button, and had fun. :)
[dpm: bound to Ctrl-C]
avoid having the 2D instruments obscure 3D objects in front of them):
It's related to depth buffer precision. On my Geforce cards (2MX and
3), it never happens with the 24 bit depth buffer you get by default
at 32bpp. At 16bpp, it picks a slimmer depth buffer (probably 16 bit)
and the texture layers bleed through.
The code is using a pretty big argument to glPolygonOffset, and I've
never investigated how small it can be. If someone has a little time
the next time they see this issue, try changing the value of
POFF_UNITS at the top of Cockpit/panel.cxx. Decrease it until the
textures *just* start to interfere with each other, and post the value
that works for you.
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?
really see anything different in the day, but as day turns to night the
panel smoothly darkens and the lighting component becomes visible.
Lights are wired to electrical system so if you kill power, you lose the
lights.
