This eliminates many conversations between ft and m and gives us runway start/end
points that are needed for many calculations. Also, this prepares the internals for
the upcoming apt.dat 850+ format that uses the metric system as well as start/end points.
Cache the parsed navigation and airport data in a binary file to reduce
startup times and memory consumption (since only referenced FGPositioned
elements are held in memory).
Data will be reimported when the mod-time of any input file is changed.
If a global file is changed (nav.dat, awy.dat, apt.dat, etc), the cache
will be completely rebuilt, which takes approximately 30 seconds on
moderate hardware. (Future work may reduce this).
* 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.
This makes taxiways smaller (important since at present there are so many).
Restructure the apt.dat parsing code to use a helper class instead of one long
function, and to do less work when parsing the file.
Some of these ideas come from Yon Uriarte's patches - thanks Yon.