These are the updates for the View manager properties. Removed the last of
items (within the viewer/viewmgr) hard coded to view number. Added support
for per view configuration of ground level nearplane value. Tower views look
very nice with little or no z-buffer problem in the models. Pilot offset
dialog can be used to move eye in all views.
Synced to CVS 19:36 EDT 2002-04-10 (after this evenings JSMsim and Base
package updates).
Description:
Added FGLocation class which is new home for calculating matrix rotations.
Viewer can now be configured to access rotations created by the model rather
than repeating the same calculations again.
Changed model initialization for the time being so that its location data is
available for the viewer (currently required by other subsystems). At some
point we can move this back to fg_init along with the viewer initialization.
Seperated the update from the draw function in the model code. The viewer
code needs the same matrix data, and moving the update portion at this time
does not increase the number of matrix math iterations.
Moved the model draw so that it always appears "in front" of lights and clouds.
Reogranized viewer update routine for using the FGLocation class and
simplified some more tasks. The routine is fairly easy to follow now, with
the steps ordered and spelled out in comments.
Viewmgr only updates the current (visible) view now, with the exception of an
old reference to "chase view" that will be corrected in forthcoming changes.
Also will be doing some work on the viewmgr outputs.
Model is now clears the z-buffer in all modes. This will be changed with the
next viewmgr update. The only side effect is that models always disappear
when over 5km distant from the eye point (can't really see them anyway:-)).
Other than a flag to indicate "internal" view I don't anticipate the
configuration interface for viewmgr/views will be changed a lot for now. It
is close to done. The next viewmgr update will however rework the outputs so
may change location.
This code will run with the previous version of preferences.xml, but will run
faster with the newer version. I am attaching a preferences.xml that should
not be commited before the code. All the changes are in the /sim/view section
and should show a simpler view configuration that references model locations.
Note that I've added a 2nd tower view in "lookfrom" mode for illustration
purposes. You can look around using the mouse. You may want to remove that or
comment it out.
Minor patches to initial tower view code. Added calculation for "tower" at
any airport, placed a couple fractions of a degree off the center. Moved the
farplane from 100m to 5km so that "lookfrom" mode can see the model. 5km is
still in a reasonable range for a depth buffer. Note that looking at a model
anything but a small distance will cause some problems on older cards.
Temporarily changed viewer to always report elevation/lon/lat of the aircraft
in order to avoid a problem with the ground trim getting recalculated when
tower and aircraft are on different tiles.
Tower View and viewer config is in place. Note that the interface is
still in a state of flux. A couple of the config items (namely the
offsets) are still using the old settings. The tower is hard coded
into the base package for a position off the starting runway at KSFO
and is probably not in the right place for there even. Looks pretty
cool though! Tower View is the third view. If you aren't at KSFO
you'll just see blank space in view 3. It's looking through the earth or
something like that :-). Important note: zoom in with a few
hits of the "x" key to see the plane better in tower view.
The matrix doesn't define some cells, which are actually used
in the multiplication. That makes the result unpredictable.
I have no idea if 0.0 is the correct value for these, but
garbage is hardly the correct value either. Should some of them
be set to 1.0?
Think my brain is getting clogged with matrices :-). Well I've got the funky
orientation offset bug out of the model code. In the process the model.cxx
got optimized a bit. At some point we'll need to liberate model.cxx from the
viewer class, but it is no longer hard coded to access the "pilot view" to
get it's data. Instead it uses whatever the "current" view happens to be. I
may try and do that final bit of having models rotate independant of the view
tomorrow night, or start right in on the viewmgr and get a tower view up and
running. You guys have any preference? My brother's family is coming to
visit for a few days so what I don't get done tomorrow night probably won't
get done until after the weekend.
Fix FGViewer::update so that pitch offset and goal pitch offset work
together nicely (the offset was snapping to 90/-90 when only one of
the two was changed).
Viewer improvements from Jim Wilson:
These files get the 3d cockpit working and fix a few issues in the viewer
code.
XYZ offsets are now defined as follows: X -left/right+ (along wing axis), Y
-up/down+ perpendicular to the aircraft, Z is -in/out+ the aircraft's body axis.
I've also done some cleaning up of unused and mostly unusable interfaces,
added commentary to the *.hxx, combined together some duplicate code and
eliminated a couple unecessary operations. I also moved what was left of the
"protected" zone to "private" since we aren't subclassing this anymore.
Description:
This update includes the new viewer interface as proposed by David M. and
a first pass at cleaning up the viewer/view manager code by Jim W.
Note that I have dropped Main/viewer_lookat.?xx and Main/viewer_rph.?xx and
modified the Makefile.am accordingly.
Detail of work:
Overall:
The code reads a little easier. There are still some unnecessary bits in
there and I'd like to supplement the comments in the viewer.hxx with a tiny
bit on each interface group and what the groupings mean (similar but briefer
than what you emailed me the other day). I tried not to mess up the style,
but there is an occasional inconsistency. In general I wouldn't call it done
(especially since there's no tower yet! :)), but I'd like to get this out
there so others can comment, and test.
In Viewer:
The interface as you suggested has been implemented. Basically everything
seems to work as it did visually. There is no difference that I can see in
performance, although some things might be a tiny bit faster.
I've merged the lookat and rph (pilot view) code into the recalc for the
viewer. There is still some redundancy between the two, but a lot has been
removed. In some cases I've taken some code that we'd likely want to inline
anyway and left it in there in duplicate. You'll see that the code for both
looks a little cleaner. I need to take a closer look at the rotations in
particular. I've cleaned up a little there, but I suspect more can be done
to streamline this.
The external declaration to the Quat_mat in mouse.cxx has been removed. IMHO
the quat doesn't serve any intrinsic purpose in mouse.cxx, but I'm not about
to rip it out. It would seem that there more conventional ways to get
spherical data that are just as fast. In any case all the viewer was pulling
from the quat matrix was the pitch value so I modified mouse.cxx to output to
our pitchOffset input and that works fine.
I've changed the native values to degrees from radians where appropriate.
This required a conversion from degrees to radians in a couple modules that
access the interface. Perhaps we should add interface calls that do the
conversion, e.g. a getHeadingOffset_rad() to go along with the
getHeadingOffset_deg().
On the view_offset (now headingOffset) thing there are two entry points
because of the ability to instantly switch views or to scroll to a new view
angle (by hitting the numeric keys for example). This leaves an anomaly in
the interface which should be resolved by adding "goal" settings to the
interface, e.g. a setGoalHeadingOffset_deg(), setGoalPitchOffset_deg(), etc.
Other than these two issues, the next step here will be to look at some
further optimizations, and to write support code for a tower view. That
should be fairly simple at this point. I was considering creating a
"simulated tower view" or "pedestrian view" that defaulted to a position off
to the right of whereever the plane is at the moment you switch to the tower
view. This could be a fall back when we don't have an actual tower location
at hand (as would be the case with rural airports).
ViewManager:
Basically all I did here was neaten things up by ripping out excess crap and
made it compatible as is with the new interface.
The result is that viewmanager is now ready to be developed. The two
preexisting views are still hardcoded into the view manager. The next step
would be to design configuration xml (eg /sim/view[x]/config/blahblah) that
could be used to set up as many views as we want. If we want to take the easy
way out, we might want to insist that view[0] be a pilot-view and have
viewmanager check for that.
fixed this when I made the mistake the first time.
The view code wasn't properly handling the transition across tile
boundaries so we'd get a 'flash' of the scene wrongly transformed for
one frame at every tile boundary crossing. This is what
scenery.get_next_center() is for.
created a new class, FGViewPoint (declared in viewer.hxx) that holds a
single position in FlightGear coordinates, and have used it to factor
a lot of the common code out of viewer_lookat.cxx and viewer_rph.cxx.
I don't know whether this new class will stay or not; it might just be
a temporary step, or it might end up taking over much of the current
viewer functionality. It would be a bad idea to code against it right
now.
was some confusion between degrees and radians which would lead to a huge
goal_view_offset value. The display would sit and spin for a *long* time
trying to wind it's way up to this large value.
max(width, height) by default (easily changeable) rather than just width.
(src/GUI/gui.cxx, src/Main/main.cxx, src/Main/viewer.cxx, src/Main/viewer.hxx)
1. Enable auto-configure on more versions of auto tools. (configure.in)
2. Warnings from auto-configure tools. (src/Time/Makefile.am)
3. Typo: "the it's" -> "its". (docs-mini/README.Joystick)
4. Remove definition of FGViewer::update() that now is (or can be) pure
virtual\
. (src/Main/viewer.cxx)
5. Preferred form of function name according to comments in plib:
"not_working"\
-> "notWorking". (src/Sound/soundmgr.hxx)
(i.e. multiloop). Most subsystems currently ignore the parameter, but
eventually, it will allow all subsystems to update by time rather than
by framerate.
derive specific viewer classes from it. Here's what I currently have in mind:
FGViewer
|
|-> FGViewerPRH (current system with orientation specified in
| LaRCsim Euler angle convention)
|
|-> FGViewerLookAt Feed in a position, view direction, and up vector
|
|-> FGViewerHPR (similar to PRH, but using ssg hpr euler angle
| convention)
|-> others?
ing features:
a) ADA Flight model - ADA.cxx, ADA.hxx, flight.hxx
b) Fighter a/c HUD - flight.hxx, hud.hxx, hud.cxx, cockpit.cxx, hud_ladr.c
xx, hud_card.cxx
c) 3-window display - options.hxx, options.cxx, viewer.cxx
d) Moving objects (ship) - main.cxx
e) Patches - main.cxx
ADA.cxx, ADA.hxx
--------------------------
Interface to the external ADA flight dynamics package.
flight.hxx
----------
Included prototypes for accepting additional data fron the External flight
model for fighter aircraft HUD
Hud.hxx
-------
Included prototypes for accepting additional data for fighter HUD from Exernal F
light model.
Defined FIGHTER_HUD pre-processor directive to enable compilation of fighter hud
code.
hud.cxx, cockpit.cxx, hud_ladr.cxx, hud_card.cxx
---------------------------------------
Included code to initialise additional reticles/text for fighter HUD which is co
nditionally
compiled if FIGHTER_HUD is defined.
options.hxx
-----------
Added window_offset, and function to retrieve its value for 3 windows
options.cxx
-----------
Changed few options to suit ADA/CEF projection system/screens and checks for win
dow offset.
views.cxx
---------
Added code to retrieve view offset for window.
Main.cxx
--------
Added code to load and move an aircraft carrier.
Patch to enable clouds from command line until Curtis fixes it. By default cloud
s are disabled.
