8:: AWOS is available at AWOS locations. (Previously only ATIS was
implemented.)
9:: ATIS phraseology now more nearly conforms to international
standard METAR pattern, and therefore to usual FAA practice.(*)
Items marked with a (*) are fully implemented in the /text/ of the
ATIS message, but the voiced version of the message is degraded by
limitations of the FGFS built-in text-to-speech system.
10:: ATIS now reports sky condition.(*)
11:: ATIS now reports multiple layers of clouds, not just the lowest
layer.(*)
12:: ATIS now takes field elevation into account when calculating
sky condition and ceiling.
13:: ATIS now reports dewpoint.(*)
14:: ATIS now can handle negative quantities (temperature and dewpoint).(*)
15:: ATIS can now report report fractional-mile visibility.(*)
16:: ATIS now uses magnetic (not true) wind directions, as it should.
17:: ATIS generates correct runway number and suffix (nine right,
one one left).
18:: ATIS can be received on nav frequencies, not just comm.
19:: Nothing bad happens if the same ATIS is tuned up on more than
one receiver.
20:: ATIS can be updated at times other than at the top of the hour.
21:: ATIS listens for an "attention" signal, and responds to changes
in the weather by issuing a new ATIS message (somewhat like a
"special observation").
22:: ATIS volume now responds to radio volume setting.
23:: Area-related services (i.e. approach radar) are handled
more-nearly consistently with radio-frequency related services.
24:: ATIS sequence-letter generation has been fixed.
25:: ATIS messages are now in the property tree, so they can be read
e.g. via the http interface.
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.
static FGAirport helpers. As a result, another global index goes away. Use
the helpers to avoid ugly FGPositioned down-casts in various places.
Also converts the environment/METAR code to deal with FGAirport pointers,
instead of string identifiers, and contains work-in-progress code to implement
the AirportList dialog using FGPositioned. This isn't enabled yet for various
reasons, but is the final piece to allow FGAirportList to be removed.
gone. This is good news, since the old query was implemented as a linear
search, sorted by Manhattan distance, and with a warning not to use the logic
at runtime. Various systems (such as the Mk-VIII) do query such data often,
eg every second.
Also gets Point3D out of Airports/simple.hxx, as a precursor to removing it
completely.
const) which were previously tricky but now easy. Make it possible not to
index certain types (used for taxiways) and exclude anonymous items from
the name index. Related to this, clean up FGRunway further - remove some public
members, and fix a dumb bug of mine, where we create reciprocal entries for
taxiways.
This should make startup (slightly) quicker, and shrinks FGRunway somewhat.
Trivial patch, but an important milestone:
Convert FGAirport to inherit FGPositioned. This concludes the first phase of the FGPositioned changes, and hopefully the most intrusive ones - adding in the base class. There's lots (and lots) of further work to do on the indexing and querying side, as well as cleaning up the accessors, but that will happen in single source files, or a group of related files at a time.
As a trivial note, this patch does fix a bug where the very last airport in apt.dat would get an invalid type. So for all you people who just love to fly to EHYB (Ypenburg, The Hague), things may work a little more sanely.
I'll intentionally let the dust settle after this patch, so any weird behaviour I may potentially have introduced shows up. Just to re-iterate, so far there should be absolutely no user-visible change in the behaviour of anything - navaids, position init, the route manager, AI flight plans, etc. If there is, please let me know and I'll fix it ASAP.
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.
- removes various members from FGRunway which no-one was using
- any of these can be trivially re-instated if and when someone
actually wants to use them - but right now they're simply bloating up
FGRunway, which we have lots of, because it currently includes all the
taxiways in Robin's data.
- that's it.
- 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.
SimGear change. It changes all the SG_xxxx to be the 'real' includes, and gets
rid of many #ifdef SG_HAVE_STD_INCLUDES. As an added bonus, rather than
replacing 'SG_USING_NAMESPACE(std)' with 'using namespace std', I just fixed
the small number of places to use std:: explicitly. So we're no longer polluting
the global namespace with the entire contents of std, in many cases.
There is one more 'mechanical' change to come - getting rid of SG_USING_STD(X),
but I want to keep that separate from everything else. (There's another
mechnical change, replacing <math.h> with <cmath> and so on *everywhere*, but
one step at a time)
- preserve information from apt.dat about whether an airport is a "normal"
airport, a seaport, or a heliport. Do it without wasting another byte
in the FGAirport structure (saves 50kB of memory). Yes, I know bitfields. :-)
Attached is a patch to the airport data storage that I would like committed
after review if acceptable. Currently the storage of airports mapped by ID
is by locally created objects - about 12 Meg or so created on the stack if
I am not mistaken. I've changed this to creating the airports on the heap,
and storing pointers to them - see FGAirportList.add(...) in
src/Airports/simple.cxx. I believe that this is probably better practice,
and it's certainly cured some strange problems I was seeing when accessing
the airport data with some gps unit code. Changes resulting from this have
cascaded through a few files which access the data - 11 files are modified
in all. Melchior and Durk - you might want to test this and shout if there
are problems since the metar and traffic code are probably the biggest
users of the airport data. I've also added a fuzzy search function that
returns the next matching airport code in ASCII sequence in order to
support gps units that have autocompletion of partially entered codes.
More generally, the simple airport class seems to have grown a lot with the
fairly recent addition of the parking, runway preference and schedule time
code. It is no longer just an encapsulation of the global airport data
file, and has grown to 552 bytes in size when unpopulated (about 1/2 a K!).
My personal opinion is that we should look to just store the basic data in
apt.dat for all global airports in a simple airport class, plus globally
needed data (metar available?), and then have the traffic, AI and ATC
subsystems create more advanced airports for themselves as needed in the
area of interest. Once a significant number of airports worldwide have
ground networks and parking defined, it will be impractical and unnecessary
to store them all in memory. That's just a thought for the future though.
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.
