RE: --aircraft=ufo in system.fgfsrc is ignored
To change a 'feature', one that has been mentioned here many
times, and again recently, place the following code block
into fgInitFGAircraft.
In its favour, I would argue this means FG can be run without
a command line, provided FG_ROOT has been set in the
environment, and that seems to me, as it should be ... ;=))
Perhaps the only counter, is that system.fgfsrc is read twice,
but so are others, like .fgfsrc, for other (local) options ...
or system.fgfsrc should .nt. be used for 'aircraft' ?
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.
Don't overwrite user settings from config files.
fgfs had in any case set bump-mapping to false, no matter if this
node did already exist (because it was defined in a config file).
A good elevation is critical for proper glide slope modeling. This patch
assigns the average field elevation to any ILS component that doesn't have
a valid elevation.
Also, for an ILS approach, use the GS transmitter elevation for glide slope
calculations rather than the localizer elevation, in some cases this can
make a big difference.
These change add some code that at initialization time will snap all
localizers into perfect alignment with their runways. It's my experience
that the DAFIF/FAA data reports runway and localizer headings to a level
of precision that is great for making charts, or adjusting your OBS, etc.
But the level of precision of this data can be far enough off to make you
visibly *un*aligned with the runway when the CDI needle is centered.
There are probably cases where the localizer isn't really perfectly
aligned with the runway, or intentionally misaligned to avoid obstacles
or terrain. So I have made this configurable for those that trust the
data more than I do. Just set "/sim/navdb/auto-align-localizers" to
true/false in the preferences file to turn this feature on or off in the
code.
- FG now directly supports Robin's native nav database file format.
- His latest data now separates out dme, gs, loc, and marker beacon
transmitters rather than lumping them all into a single "ILS" record.
- These new data structure changes prompted me to do some code restructuring
so that internally these different types of navaids are all kept as
separate lists and searched and handled separately.
- This structural change had a cascading affect on any code that
references or uses the nav databases. I've gone and "touched" a lot of
nav related code in a lot of places.
- As an added bonus, the new data (and code) adds DME bias so these will
all now read as they do in real life.
- Added Navaids/navdb.cxx and Navaids/navdb.hxx which provide a front
end loaders for the nav data.
- Added Navaids/navrecord.hxx which is a new "generic" nav data record.
- Removed Navaids/ils.hxx, Navaids/ilslist.cxx, Navaids/ilslist.hxx,
Navaids/mkrbeacons.cxx, and Navaids/mkrbeacons.hxx which are all now
depricated.
are many recognized limitations and inefficiencies with this entire approach,
however, it's a quick and dirty way to get something working, where before
we didn't.
Here's a patch to locate the base package inside the application bundle on OS-X. The patch also disables the CPSForeground hack in boostrap.cxx, which is unnecessary if the we're running as a proper bundle rather than a Unix command line program.
Both of these changes are only compiled if OSX_BUNDLE is defined (I'm doing this via a setting in ProjectBuilder), so if you're building on OS-X using configure + make, you shouldn't see any chance.
now read the config file out of the individual aircraft directory rather
than the collective Aircraft-yasim/ directory (which is now obsolete.)
This requires a corresponding update of the base package cvs.
$FGROOT/data/Aircraft hierarchy. There could be some long term performance
concerns if a person has a *huge* collection of aircraft or a really slow
file system, but I see zero performance blip here from recursing the default
CVS tree. We should also allow the user to specify the whole path to the
-set.xml file if they don't want to recurse ... this way we could eventually
come up with an aircraft selection dialog box on the front end so the user
could manually walk the tree to the desired aircraft. There also the system
wouldn't have to search for the aircraft.
functions (note to Norman: I looked at the web page you listed and that
looks like a good idea, but I don't have time right now to go through and
debug an entirely new routine. What we have works well enough for now I hope!)
immediate end to glut, only that I'm going through and cleaning up (and
taking inventory of the actual glut dependencies in case I want to investigate
SDL.)
I have added a fledgling replay system that records flight data and control
positions during the flight.
I have added an internal command called "replay" which will trigger a replay
of the entire saved flight data set. This could be bound to a keyboard or
menu command, in fact this entire module is screaming for someone to build
a gui to control playback speed, amount of playback, etc.
This is the initial version so there are kinks that still need to be worked
out, please be patient.
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).
requested parameters to determine if this should be an on-ground vs. in-air
start. The problem was that we never defaulted the value to anything so
if we didn't match an in-air condition, we simply inherited whatever value
was there from before.
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.
The one to fg_init.cxx initialises the AI subsystem regardless of whether it's enabled or not so that later enabling by the user doesn't crash it, and the one to main.cxx avoids running the ATC manager and ATC display system unless enabled.
I've fixed a bug in FGRunways::search(aptid, tgt_hdg) which wasn't working properly for airports with multiple parallel runways. I've also firmed up and pulled out into it's own function the GetReverseRunwayNo code, and done some input checking.
As a result of fixing the above in runways.cxx, I've pulled out the
parallel implementation in the functions that set position by airport and
heading/runway number in fg_init.cxx and called the runways functions
instead.
earlier, before fgInitSubsystems().
Modify fgInitPos() so that the plane is not automatically aligned with
a runway when an airport is the reference point unless (a) a runway
was explicitly requested, or (b) the plane is on the ground with no
offset distance specified. To set up the plane lined up on an
approach to a runway, use something like
fgfs --airport=CYOW --runway=32 --altitude=300 --offset-distance=0.5
This way, it's possible to specify a starting position relative to an
airport without getting snapped onto a runway approach (unless you
want to be).
04Feb. Actually been running since the beginning of January with these
patches. All changes work without crashing with the current base package cvs,
but there are some visual problems with the views (other than pilot view)
without changes to the base package.
As soon as you can build test and commit I can add in those base package
updates that will make it all work nicely. I will also go through all the 3D
Aircraft configs to make sure the change in the "pitch-offset" for cockpit
views (see below) are made to maintain current behavior.
Here are the files (changes listed below):
http://www.spiderbark.com/fgfs/viewerupdate.diffs.gzhttp://www.spiderbark.com/fgfs/viewerupdate.tar.gz
if the station is too far away. Instead, simply return the closest station.
All the code that searches navaids does it's own range checking anyway.
This will make the navlist query functions a bit more useful for other
types of functionality where you may need to lookup a station without
consideration of range (i.e. presetting your position relative to a navaid.)
input bindings. They will work only with the latest CVS; otherwise,
./configure will disable them. There is a new command, 'script',
which takes a single argument, also called 'script', containing PSL
code (currently PSL requires a main() function).
Erik Hofman has written some more elaborate code for triggering PSL
code from drop-down menus and scheduling events; I will look at
integrating that next.
option to specify a starting airport + specific runway. If you don't specify
a runway, you get the one that's closest to your specified (or default)
heading.
The general idea is to help clean up some aspects of the FDM init and be
able to provide startup conditions in a less ambiguous manner.
Previously, things like positions, orientations, and velocites were set on
"the bus". These had to be read by the FDMs which then were supposed to
initialized themselves to those values and turn write around and start
modifying those values. It was messy and cumbersome.
Now, all the initial fdm conditions are written to a sub-[property-]tree
under /sim/presets/
The values in /sim/presets/ always stay set to what the user has specified.
The user can change these at his/her liesure, and then request a "reset"
which will reset to the new conditions. I don't even want to say how this
worked before. :-)
Now, an script, or gui interface can stage a set of initial conditions while
the sim is running (without disrupting it), and then call "reset" to commit
the change.
People who should worry about all this are FDM writters, and a small few
others who care about over all program structure and flow.
