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.
The quotes form is normally only used for headers with path relative
to the including file's path, though the standard doesn't strictly
mandate this. This is consistent with the rest of sg/fg, it makes the
code's intent clearer and helps to find headers. (And it's a few
milliseconds faster, too.)
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.
