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.
This adds supports for a language specific font, defined in locale.xml
I've also moved the fgInitLocale() routine from main.cxx to fg_init.cxx
to prevent an ungly extern definition in options.cxx.
When the scroll bar slider is dragged, the list scrolls only far
enough to see all items; only the arrow buttons can scroll it so far
that the last item goes to the top of the view.
Fix scroll bar proportional size: was wrong when the list was only
a little longer than the visible area.
Minor fixes such as "delete files[i];" -> "delete[] files[i];"
(where the item being deleted is an array of characters) and removal of
global variables.
Smooth scrolling when dragging the slider: one item at a time,
rather than one tenth of the list at a time.
Fix a bug that would have occurred if instantiated with arrows=2.
Sort properties primarily by name and then by numerical index
order, rather than a simple ASCII string order. E.g. "js[1]", "js[2]",
"js[10]" rather than "js[1]", "js[10]", "js[2]".
Avoid crashing if the selected property path does not exist;
display an empty list instead. This cannot happen when the property
picker is working properly, but did happen due to missing indices prior
to this patch, and could happen if the user is allowed to type a
pathname, as in the http and telnet interfaces.
Fix truncation of strings to PUSTRING_MAX: was wrong when string
length was exactly 80.
Fix: move the scroll bar to the top each time a new list is
displayed. It was left at its previous position, while the top of the
new list was displayed, not corresponding to the slider.
Use getDisplayName instead of duplicated code: gives a better
decision on whether to display the index, and avoids invalid property
paths being generated which would previously crash find_props().
Replace unnecessary node lookups by name with direct access: tidier
and more efficient. E.g. "getValueTypeString
(node->getNode(name.c_str()))" -> "getValueTypeString (child)".
Here is a FGIO class derived from FGSubsystem that replaces the fgIOInit()
and fgIOProcess() functions. The FGIO::update(double delta) doesn't use the
delta argument yet. I suspect it could be used as a replacement for the
calculated interval value but I'm not familiar enough with that piece of code
just yet.
I've also added two "command properties" to fg_commands.cxx that select the
next or previous view. Writing any value to these properties triggers the
corresponding action. As an example I modified my keyboard.xml:
<key n="118">
<name>v</name>
<desc>Next view</desc>
<binding>
<command>property-assign</command>
<property>/command/view/next</property>
<value type="bool">true</value>
</binding>
</key>
<key n="86">
<name>V</name>
<desc>Prev view</desc>
<binding>
<command>property-assign</command>
<property>/command/view/prev</property>
<value type="bool">true</value>
</binding>
</key>
And of course these actions can also be triggered from external scripts via
the props server.
- Removed some old cruft.
- Removed some support for older versions of automake which technically was
correct, but caused the newer automakes to squawk warnings during an
initial sanity check (which isn't done very intelligently.)
NOTE: this fix is technically not correct for older version of automake.
These older version use the variable "INCLUDES" internally and could have
them already set to an important value. That is why we were appending
our values to them. However, newer versions of automake don't set this
value themselves so it is an error to append to a non-existant variable.
We seem to "get away" with overwriting the value on older versions of
automake, but if you have problems, consider upgrading to at least
automake-1.5.
When the scroll bar slider is dragged, the list scrolls only far enough to see all items; only the arrow buttons can scroll it so far that the last item goes to the top of the view.
Fix scroll bar proportional size: was wrong when the list was only a little longer than the visible area.
Minor fixes such as "delete files[i];" -> "delete[] files[i];" (where the item being deleted is an array of characters) and removal of global variables.
Smooth scrolling when dragging the slider: one item at a time, rather than one tenth of the list at a time.
Fix a bug that would have occurred if instantiated with arrows=2.
Sort properties primarily by name and then by numerical index order, rather than a simple ASCII string order. E.g. "js[1]", "js[2]", "js[10]" rather than "js[1]", "js[10]", "js[2]".
Avoid crashing if the selected property path does not exist; display an empty list instead. This cannot happen when the property picker is working properly, but did happen due to missing indices prior to this patch, and could happen if the user is allowed to type a pathname, as in the http and telnet interfaces.
Fix truncation of strings to PUSTRING_MAX: was wrong when string length was exactly 80.
Fix: move the scroll bar to the top each time a new list is displayed. It was left at its previous position, while the top of the new list was displayed, not corresponding to the slider.
Use getDisplayName instead of duplicated code: gives a better decision on whether to display the index, and avoids invalid property paths being generated which would previously crash find_props().
Replace unnecessary node lookups by name with direct access: tidier and more efficient. E.g. "getValueTypeString (node->getNode(name.c_str()))" -> "getValueTypeString (child)".
Turns out it was a problem with a long string, not the font. Plib is limited
to 80 characters in things like this listbox. BTW I checked and all the fonts
are missing those characters. So, no point in changing.
Description:
Fixed segfault caused by long string.
These are the updates for the View manager properties. Removed the last of
items (within the viewer/viewmgr) hard coded to view number. Added support
for per view configuration of ground level nearplane value. Tower views look
very nice with little or no z-buffer problem in the models. Pilot offset
dialog can be used to move eye in all views.
Description:
This update includes the new viewer interface as proposed by David M. and
a first pass at cleaning up the viewer/view manager code by Jim W.
Note that I have dropped Main/viewer_lookat.?xx and Main/viewer_rph.?xx and
modified the Makefile.am accordingly.
Detail of work:
Overall:
The code reads a little easier. There are still some unnecessary bits in
there and I'd like to supplement the comments in the viewer.hxx with a tiny
bit on each interface group and what the groupings mean (similar but briefer
than what you emailed me the other day). I tried not to mess up the style,
but there is an occasional inconsistency. In general I wouldn't call it done
(especially since there's no tower yet! :)), but I'd like to get this out
there so others can comment, and test.
In Viewer:
The interface as you suggested has been implemented. Basically everything
seems to work as it did visually. There is no difference that I can see in
performance, although some things might be a tiny bit faster.
I've merged the lookat and rph (pilot view) code into the recalc for the
viewer. There is still some redundancy between the two, but a lot has been
removed. In some cases I've taken some code that we'd likely want to inline
anyway and left it in there in duplicate. You'll see that the code for both
looks a little cleaner. I need to take a closer look at the rotations in
particular. I've cleaned up a little there, but I suspect more can be done
to streamline this.
The external declaration to the Quat_mat in mouse.cxx has been removed. IMHO
the quat doesn't serve any intrinsic purpose in mouse.cxx, but I'm not about
to rip it out. It would seem that there more conventional ways to get
spherical data that are just as fast. In any case all the viewer was pulling
from the quat matrix was the pitch value so I modified mouse.cxx to output to
our pitchOffset input and that works fine.
I've changed the native values to degrees from radians where appropriate.
This required a conversion from degrees to radians in a couple modules that
access the interface. Perhaps we should add interface calls that do the
conversion, e.g. a getHeadingOffset_rad() to go along with the
getHeadingOffset_deg().
On the view_offset (now headingOffset) thing there are two entry points
because of the ability to instantly switch views or to scroll to a new view
angle (by hitting the numeric keys for example). This leaves an anomaly in
the interface which should be resolved by adding "goal" settings to the
interface, e.g. a setGoalHeadingOffset_deg(), setGoalPitchOffset_deg(), etc.
Other than these two issues, the next step here will be to look at some
further optimizations, and to write support code for a tower view. That
should be fairly simple at this point. I was considering creating a
"simulated tower view" or "pedestrian view" that defaulted to a position off
to the right of whereever the plane is at the moment you switch to the tower
view. This could be a fall back when we don't have an actual tower location
at hand (as would be the case with rural airports).
ViewManager:
Basically all I did here was neaten things up by ripping out excess crap and
made it compatible as is with the new interface.
The result is that viewmanager is now ready to be developed. The two
preexisting views are still hardcoded into the view manager. The next step
would be to design configuration xml (eg /sim/view[x]/config/blahblah) that
could be used to set up as many views as we want. If we want to take the easy
way out, we might want to insist that view[0] be a pilot-view and have
viewmanager check for that.
interface instead of string. This will result in a lot more
efficiency later, once I add in a simple hash table for caching
lookups, since it will avoid creating a lot of temporary string
objects. The major considerations for users will be that they cannot
use
node->getName() == "foo";
any more, and will have to use c_str() when setting a string value
from a C++ string.
separate header file. This change will help integrate properties into
JSBSim.
Also, I (David Megginson) removed most of the SimGear include
statements from globals.hxx, reducing the amount of recompilation
every time SimGear changes. This required making minor changes to a
lot of files that were depending on the side-effects of the inclusions
in globals.hxx.
- implement the standard FGSubsystem interface, for consistency
- eliminate current_autopilot and add get/set_autopilot to FGGlobals,
for consistency
- use private methods rather than static functions for tying
properties
There should be no change in functionality.
