I have prepared a patch that:
- Introduces a FGTileMgr::scenery_available method which asks the tilemanager
if scenery for a given range around a lat/lon pair is already loaded and make
use of that method at some -9999 meter checks.
- Introduces a FGScenery::get_elevation_m method which queries the altitude at
a given position. In constrast to the groundcache functions this is the best
choice if you ask for one *single* altitude value. Make use of that thing in
AI/ATC classes and for the current views ground level. At the current views
part the groundcache is reused if possible.
- The computation of the 'current groundlevel' is no longer done on the
tilemanagers update since the required functions are now better seperated.
Alltogether it eliminates somehow redundant terrain level computations which
are now superseeded by that more finegrained functions and the existence of
the groundcache. Additionally it introduces an api to commonly required
functions which was very complex to do prevously.
Changes
=======
- shadowvolume.cxx, renderer.cxx :
- reduced the polygon offset a bit to eliminate some artifact ;
- changed again the cleanup code for objects inside a tile because it could crash on rare occasion ;
- the culling of shadow casters has been rewritten to traverse the scene graph, it should be
a bit faster when there is a lot of objects ;
- the range selector was not correctly handled, sometimes the wrong LOD was casting shadows.
- added the option to display aircraft's transparent objects after the shadows, this will
reduce the problem of shadows being hidden by the transparent object (propeller disk,
rotor, etc). A side effect is that aircraft's transparent objects won't receive shadows
anymore. This is usually a good thing except when the aircraft use a 'transparent'
texture where it should not. A transparent texture in the plib context is a texture
with an alpha channel or a material with alpha <= 0.99.
- model.cxx, animation.cxx, shadowvolume.cxx :
- added an optional <condition> under the <noshadow> animation
- tower.cxx
- correct a rare bug where all occurences of the aircraft are not deleted from the
departure list causing a crash in FGTower::CheckDepartureList function.
I have done a patch to eliminate the jitter of 3D-objects near the viewpoint
(for example 3D cockpit objects).
The problem is the roundoff accuracy of the float values used in the
scenegraph together with the transforms of the eyepoint relative to the
scenery center.
The solution will be to move the scenery center near the view point.
This way floats relative accuracy is enough to show a stable picture.
To get that right I have introduced a transform node for the scenegraph which
is responsible for that shift and uses double values as long as possible.
The scenery subsystem now has a list of all those transforms required to place
objects in the world and will tell all those transforms that the scenery
center has changed when the set_scenery_center() of the scenery subsystem is
called.
The problem was not solvable by SGModelPlacement and SGLocation, since not all
objects, especially the scenery, are placed using these classes.
The first approach was to have the scenery center exactly at the eyepoint.
This works well for the cockpit.
But then the ground jitters a bit below the aircraft. With our default views
you can't see that, but that F-18 has a camera view below the left engine
intake with the nose gear and the ground in its field of view, here I could
see that.
Having the scenery center constant will still have this roundoff problems, but
like it is now too, the roundoff error here is exactly the same in each
frame, so you will not notice any jitter.
The real solution is now to keep the scenery center constant as long as it is
in a ball of 30m radius around the view point. If the scenery center is
outside this ball, just put it at the view point.
As a sideeffect of now beeing able to switch the scenery center in the whole
scenegraph with one function call, I was able to remove a one half of a
problem when switching views, where the scenery center was far off for one or
two frames past switching from one view to the next. Also included is a fix
to the other half of this problem, where the view position was not yet copied
into a view when it is switched (at least under glut). This was responsible
for the 'Error: ...' messages of the cloud subsystem when views were
switched.
FGAIMgr::GenerateSimpleAirportTraffic() tries to determine the airport's local
hour from the /sim/time/gmt-time string, which fails, because at this time the
property is still empty. That's why I don't get ATIS at LOWG (where it is *not*
midnight right now. :-) -> use sg's get_cur_time() instead
I just heard from John Wojnaroski that you and he are going to work on getting
a flightgear demo machine up for the linux expo thursday and Friday. John
indicated that he would very much like to get a CVS version with the new
traffic code up and running before the expo.
a single apt.dat.gz file which is in the native X-Plane format.
To do this I wrote a front end loader than builds the airport and runway
list. Some of the changes I needed to make had a cascading effect, so there
are minor naming changes scattered throughout the code.
I've finished the emigration of the radiostack, and I've also removed it
completely. It turned out that the comm radio is completely implemented in
the ATC subsystem. I've changed the affected ATC files to point
to /instrumentation/com, but I guess that the maintainer of the ATC code
should decide wether to make it configureable, and how.
I also had to change some files in Network and Main. The changes in network
should be obvious, but the changes in Main were a bit suspect. The files
included radiostack.hxx, but they weren't directly depending on
radiostack-hxx. They were depending on other files that were included by
radiostack.hxx. I got it to compile, but I'm not sure if I included the
correct directly depending file.
For the data directory I changed every occurrence of /radios/
with /instrumentation/ with this simple one-liner that I found on the net:
find -name '*.xml' -type f | xargs perl -pi -e
's/\/radios\//\/instrumentation\//g'
Instead of me sending all the files that got changed by this I suggest that
you execute the one-liner yourself. Of course I can not guarantee that this
will work perfectly, but I considered hand editing to be not an option (I'm
lazy). I don't want to test every aircraft to see if everything still works,
I think it's better to wait and see if anyone complaints about broken nav
radios/instruments.
configure and compile out-of-the-box on a MinGW target:
Use -lSDL instead of -lglut32 on windows builds when --enable-sdl
is set.
Link against alut.dll in addition to openal32.dll.
Replace BSD bcopy() with ANSI C memmove() in a few places. This is
simpler than trying to abstract it out as a platform dependency in a
header file; bcopy() has never been standard.
The ENABLE_THREADS handling has changed to be set to 0 when threads
are not in use. This breaks expressions like #ifdef ENABLE_THREADS.
Replace with a slightly more complicated expression. It might have
been better to fix the configure.ac script, but I didn't know how and
this whole setting is likely to go away soon anyway.
The MinGW C runtime actually does include snprintf, so only MSVC
builds (and not all WIN32 ones) need _snprintf in JSBSim/FGState.cpp
Building on a platform with no glut at all exposed some spots where
plib/pu.h was being included without a toolkit setting (it defaults to
glut). Include fg_os.hxx first.
And when still using glut, glut.h has a bizarre dependency on a
_WCHAR_T_DEFINED symbol. It it's not defined, it tries to redefine
(!!) wchar_t to disasterous effect.
places now use sgCartToGeod() instead of rolling their own
approximation. And YASim is now using exactly the same 3D coordinate
system as the rest of FlightGear is.
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).
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.
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.
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.
KEMT (w120n30 scenery), and you will have to set the property
/sim/ai-traffic/enabled to 'true' to see the other plane (and tune
comm1 to 121.2 to hear the other plane's radio calls).
- 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.
Animations are now contained within the scene graph itself and are
updated whenever the graph is traversed -- that saves time by not
updating animations not currently in sight, and it allows animations
to be used for static objects and random objects as well.
Added new FGModelLoader and FGTextureLoader classes. These are intern
tables for models, to guarantee (mostly) that no model is loaded more
than once. FGTextureLoader is not yet used anywhere, but
FGModelLoader is now in place everywhere that ssgLoad* used to be
used (thus adding the ability to use animations).
In the future, FGModelLoader will add some interesting functionality,
including the ability to reload 3D models on the fly.
This patch eliminates about 10 of valgrind's "Use of uninitialised
value of size ..." messages. They are all caused by approachlist building
incomplete FGApproach class instances and then copying them into the
approchlist container, hence copying data garbage.
I know, I couldn't win a beauty contest with this patch, but the
alternative approach -- letting operator<< always leave complete
entries -- didn't look any better. And I do only add those seemingly
useless initialization where the values would be used uninitialized
else. The constructors are only run during setup and won't slow fgfs
down at runtime.
Removed configuration option --with-new-environment and
FG_NEW_ENVIRONMENT macro.
Added configuration option --with-weathercm and FG_WEATHERCM macro.
FGEnvironment is now the default; use --with-weathercm to get the old
weather.
- changed FGSubsystem::update(int) to
FGSubsystem::update(delta_time_sec); the argument is now delta time
in seconds rather than milliseconds
- added FGSubsystem::suspend(), FGSubsystem::suspend(bool),
FGSubsystem::resume(), and FGSubsystem::is_suspended(), all with
default implementations; is_suspended takes account of the master
freeze as well as the subsystem's individual suspended state
- the FDMs now use the delta time argument the same as the rest of
FlightGear; formerly, main.cxx made a special case and passed a
multiloop argument
- FDMs now calculate multiloop internally instead of relying on
main.cxx
There are probably some problems -- I've done basic testing with the
major FDMs and subsystems, but we'll probably need a few weeks to
sniff out bugs.
ATCmgr.cxx:148 says:
// Returns true if the airport is found in the map
Yes, it returns true if the airport has been found. But it fails
to return the airport data. Just plays around with a local pointer. ;-)
graph as the terrain, except for internal cockpit view. The SSG
scene-graph variables (except for the lighting root -- I'll get that
later) are now held in globals.hxx.
FGModelMgr::draw() is obsolete; I'll remove it in a future revision.
system. A chap from Germany called Alexander Kappes (cc'd) got
in touch with me a few weeks ago and has written the start of
Approach control. At the moment tuning in to a valid approach
frequency (Dortmund or East Midlands) should result in vectors to
a spot about 3 miles from the active runway, and a telling off if you
stray too far from the correct course, in the console window. He
seems to know what he's doing so expect this to improve rapidly!!
I've added a rudimentry AI manager and a hardwired Cessna at
KEMT on the runway - I'll remove it before the next release if I don't
have it flying by then. There seems to be an issue with framerate
which drops alarmingly when looking at it - I've a feeling that I've
possibly created several Cessnas on top of each other, but am not
sure.
* src/ATC/atislist.cxx
Patch from Melchior Franz:
- merged the _MWERKS_ & generic #ifdef branch, only the loop head needs
different treatment
- commented out a "n >> skipeol" that is used in navlist.cxx to gobble
the starting C++-style comment from default.nav.gz; atis inherited
that, but there is no such comment in default.atis.gz, so the first
data entry got thrown away
- commented out min/max frequency exploration (-> only for debugging)
- enhanced the constructor; the operator>> wouldn't have initialized all
variables in case of a broken default.atis.gz entry, so we would have
got a mixture of the broken one and the previous one;
- move the automatic FGATIS variable into the loop, so that it gets
cleanly constructed for every database entry.
- don't access a.type before it is initialized
- updated the commented out debug output statements; they were still
designed for the FGNav class ...
subsystem to Flightgear. No more functionality is implemented
than at present (apart from an ATIS bug-fix - station wouldn't
change if the radio was switched directly from one station to
another) but it is much neater than the current hack and should be
easily extendable.
Some cruft is still probably left over in radiostack.[ch]xx such as
the bindings to the comm frequencies but I'll leave removing those
until I'm sure they're not needed there.
properties have been renamed from wind-(north|east|down)-fps to
wind-from-(north|east|down)-fps, and the FDMs modified appropriately.
No other changes should be visible unless FG_OLD_WEATHER is defined.
are being driven from an external data source.)
Akso found and fixed a bug in the simgear that caused the time to go goofy
temporarily while scenery was being loaded.
- automake-1.4 sets default values for INCLUDES which we can't
overwrite.
- automake-1.5 renames this to DEFAULT_INCLUDES and leaves INCLUDES
open for the developer to use.
Thus for automake-1.4 we are forced to 'append' to INCLUDES and in
automake-1.5 we can just set the value to whatever we like.
Unfortunately, the behaviors of the two versions are mutually
incompatible.
The solution I am committing now works for both versions but
automake-1.5 generates a lot of spurious warning messages that are
annoying, but not fatal.
Here's an unusual patch for FlightGear -- I've created .cvsignore
files for every source directory, to make CVS output more informative.
This is especially nice when using cvs-examine from (X)Emacs to look
for changes.
(the global temperature property returns that at the aircrafts altitude) and
adding "information" to the airport name to avoid having to store it
in the default.atis file 1200 odd times.
Heres an update to the ATIS stuff. In brief:
The possible buffer overflow in the display with wind should
hopefully be fixed.
Temperature is taken from the global temperature property instead
of being hardwired.
The display class now includes an implementation of the member
function to change the repeating message.
The message callsign is no longer hardwired. The first message
from each station is generated with a random callsign.
Subsequent messages from the same station have the callsign
incremented every hour. A map of airport-id vs. last callsign and
transmission time is kept for each station that has transmitted for
the duration of the FlightGear session. The logic might be flaky if
FlightGear is run for more than 24 hours at a stretch between
visiting the same ATIS station though! (ie I don't check the day.)
This map is kept in the atislist class. This might not be the best
long-term place for it (in an ATC class of some sort might be
better), but it works for now.