I believe I have found the agl hud problems as well as the 'hole' in the
carrier's deck. I spent half the day to reproduce that problem, it did not
occure when you start on the carrier not does it occure with JSBSim and my
really often used testaircraft. So I really need to improove my helicopter
flying qualities.
I was under the impression that *all* FDM's call
FGInterface::updateGeo*Position(..)
so set the new position in the FDM interface. Therefore I had added at the
some code that updates the scenery elevation below the aircraft to *those*
functions.
Ok, not all FDM's do so :/
The attached patch factors out a function computing the scenery altitude at
the current FDM's position. This function is also used in those FDM's which
need to update this value themselves.
Also this patch restores the nearplane setting and uses the current views
altitude instead of the current aircrafts. I think that this should further
be changed to the eypoint's agl in the future.
The agl is again ok in YASim's hud.
Changes
=======
- acmodel.cxx :
we now have an optional new property (/sim/model/texture-path) that is used
as the first path in wich aircraft textures are searched. If textures are not
found there then the usual texture path or model path is used ;
This allows to replace only needed textures for liveries ;
- options.cxx :
added a new --livery=xxx option for the user pleasure ;
this will just set the /sim/model/texture-path property with /livery/xxxx
- od_gauge.cxx, og_gauge.hxx, cockpit.cxx, cockpit.hxx,
generic-instrumentation.xml :
added an helper class that contain a rendering context for glass instrument
or any other opengl drawn instrument ;
- wxradar.cxx, instrument_mgr.cxx, wxradar.hxx :
first experimentation of a weather radar ;
This adds a TACAN instrument to the inventory. Range and bearing are calculated
to the TACAN or VORTAC beacon selected by means of the Channel Selector in the E
quipment/Radio pull-down menu.
A TACAN beacon has also been added to the aircraft carrier Nimitz (channel #029Y
).
passing it along to FlightGear.) I notice that the serial port read only
seems to work correctly if I read one character at a time. Multicharacter
reads seem very unreliable.
I've prepared a patch as suggested by Hans-Georg Wunder and Jeff McBride.
In addition I've removed the ability to completely leave out the integral
action by setting Ti to zero. The velocity form of the PID algorithm _needs_
the integral action.
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 have prepared a new patch for multiplayer, which fixes endianess issues with
multiplayer code. It's basically identical to the patch I sent before my
vacation, but contains minor fixes.
Multiplayer should now be working under all unix-like environments and windows
native. The basic trick is to let configure check for endianess of the host
system.
It will not work on system not using configure in the build process (excluding
windows), ie. possibly MACOS. For those system we should provide #ifdefs in
tiny_xdr.hpp.
Erik:
I've updated the patch to use the Plib utils package for endian swapping an
used a preprocessor directive to detect endianess.
>> Hello List,
>>
>> I think there's a small bug in the moving-average filter in
>> xmlauto.cxx
>>
>> I noticed that the output from it was always out a bit and
>> checking with a calculator showed that it seemed to be dividing
>> by the number of samples + 1 instead of just the number of
>> samples.
>>
>> subtracting 1 from 'samples' in line 702 seems to fix the problem
>> and as 'samples' doesn't seem to be used elsewhere I think it's
>> safe. Possibly implies that the number of samples may be one
>> less than specified but I'm not familiar enough with c++ to spot
>> it.
Roy Ovesen:
You are right. I would suggest resizing input[] to (samples + 1) instead.
Change lines 654 and 661 to:
input.resize(samples + 1, 0.0);
That way we average over the number of samples as configured.
There was a patch from Manuel Masing a few months ago which cleaned up
SGLocation's way depending on input values. That means that with that patch
SGLocation does no longer have calls with unneeded input arguments.
I took his patch and integrated that into flightgear and made maximum use of
that changes.
Erik Hofman:
Remove some duplicate code that was moved to simgear/compiler.h
- replay.cxx :
corrected a bug, now reinitialize the recording data when replay is
deactivated
- fgclouds.cxx :
cloud layers and weather condition are saved when choosing a weather scenario,
added a new scenario 'none' so we can switch back to standard flightgear
weather
- navradio.cxx :
force a search() on init to initialize some variables, preventing a nearly
infinite loop when delta-time == 0 on the first update()
- electrical.cxx :
uninitialized variable in apply_load() for FG_EXTERNAL supplier
- panel.cxx, panelnode.cxx :
added a property "depth-test" for 2.5D panels so that they update the depth
buffer and are no more visible from the outside of the aircraft when the
aircraft uses textures without an alpha channel
- panel.cxx :
moved the computation of the instruments diffuse color outside the
texturelayer code since this is constant during a frame, this is a big speedup
for 2D panels
Some quite extensive changes to the AIModel code:
1. Mathias has made major changes to the AICarrier code to provide better
alignment of an aircraft on deck with the carrier - this feature is a major
improvement on the existing, but has a bug which might cause it to fail when
the computer carries out other tasks - changing window size is a known
example. This bug is outwith this code.
2. I have made significant changes to the AIShip code to enable a ship the
turn and roll smoothly.
3. I have added some simple AI which enables the carrier to remain within,
or return to, an operating box.
4. An automated turn into wind for flying operations.
5. A simplistic implementation of TACAN within AICarrier. I am in the course
of implementing this as a generic instrument, but this is some time off
completion.
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.
