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.
- Removed some old cruft.
- Removed some support for older versions of automake which technically was
correct, but caused the newer automakes to squawk warnings during an
initial sanity check (which isn't done very intelligently.)
NOTE: this fix is technically not correct for older version of automake.
These older version use the variable "INCLUDES" internally and could have
them already set to an important value. That is why we were appending
our values to them. However, newer versions of automake don't set this
value themselves so it is an error to append to a non-existant variable.
We seem to "get away" with overwriting the value on older versions of
automake, but if you have problems, consider upgrading to at least
automake-1.5.
This is a small patch that makes the autopilot work much better with big heavy
airliners as well as the small Cessnas. Of course this doesn't address the
way autopilots should be modeled.
But by making a couple changes the "George" is now capable of landing either a
C172 or a 747 very close to the center line of the runway with a moderate
cross breeze (15-20kt).
The changes:
- Added turn configurability so that things like Max Aileron and Roll can be
configured per aircraft.
- Enhanced localizer routine (NAV mode) to begin lining up the aircraft as soon
as the cone is entered. The former model is adopted for the last 5km of the
approach in order to ensure greater precision (makes a very slight difference).
[float cast added by David Megginson to keep G++ 3.0 happy]
This is a small patch that makes the autopilot work much better with big heavy
airliners as well as the small Cessnas. Of course this doesn't address the
way autopilots should be modeled.
But by making a couple changes the "George" is now capable of landing either a
C172 or a 747 very close to the center line of the runway with a moderate
cross breeze (15-20kt).
The changes:
- Added turn configurability so that things like Max Aileron and Roll can be
configured per aircraft.
- Enhanced localizer routine (NAV mode) to begin lining up the aircraft as soon
as the cone is entered. The former model is adopted for the last 5km of the
approach in order to ensure greater precision (makes a very slight difference).
[float cast added by David Megginson to keep G++ 3.0 happy]
- changed FGSubsystem::update(int) to
FGSubsystem::update(delta_time_sec); the argument is now delta time
in seconds rather than milliseconds
- added FGSubsystem::suspend(), FGSubsystem::suspend(bool),
FGSubsystem::resume(), and FGSubsystem::is_suspended(), all with
default implementations; is_suspended takes account of the master
freeze as well as the subsystem's individual suspended state
- the FDMs now use the delta time argument the same as the rest of
FlightGear; formerly, main.cxx made a special case and passed a
multiloop argument
- FDMs now calculate multiloop internally instead of relying on
main.cxx
There are probably some problems -- I've done basic testing with the
major FDMs and subsystems, but we'll probably need a few weeks to
sniff out bugs.
interface instead of string. This will result in a lot more
efficiency later, once I add in a simple hash table for caching
lookups, since it will avoid creating a lot of temporary string
objects. The major considerations for users will be that they cannot
use
node->getName() == "foo";
any more, and will have to use c_str() when setting a string value
from a C++ string.
separate header file. This change will help integrate properties into
JSBSim.
Also, I (David Megginson) removed most of the SimGear include
statements from globals.hxx, reducing the amount of recompilation
every time SimGear changes. This required making minor changes to a
lot of files that were depending on the side-effects of the inclusions
in globals.hxx.
- implement the standard FGSubsystem interface, for consistency
- eliminate current_autopilot and add get/set_autopilot to FGGlobals,
for consistency
- use private methods rather than static functions for tying
properties
There should be no change in functionality.
These changes add to the "Add Waypoint" dialog so that you can see the entire
list in the pui dialog that you are adding to. Also made some minor changes
so that the autopilot is now activated (toward first waypoint target heading)
when a waypoint is added.
newauto.cxx. Basically everything is the same functionally except for a
changed in the initial altitude setting to 3000ft instead of meters (the panel
is in feet).
the panel controls for the autopilot. The heading dialog would only show the
last setting you did through it, even if it was later tweaked with the bug on
the hsi. The altitude dialog did a similar thing. Now the values default to
the same that show on the panel displays.
- automake-1.4 sets default values for INCLUDES which we can't
overwrite.
- automake-1.5 renames this to DEFAULT_INCLUDES and leaves INCLUDES
open for the developer to use.
Thus for automake-1.4 we are forced to 'append' to INCLUDES and in
automake-1.5 we can just set the value to whatever we like.
Unfortunately, the behaviors of the two versions are mutually
incompatible.
The solution I am committing now works for both versions but
automake-1.5 generates a lot of spurious warning messages that are
annoying, but not fatal.
Here's an unusual patch for FlightGear -- I've created .cvsignore
files for every source directory, to make CVS output more informative.
This is especially nice when using cvs-examine from (X)Emacs to look
for changes.
fix startup sequence problems where we initialize the FDM before we know
the desired starting altitude.
These changes delay fdm initialization until the local tile has been loaded
and we can do a real intersection and find the true ground elevation.
In order to do this, I depend more on the property manager as glue, rather
than the FGInterface.
There are some glitches still when switching to a new airport or reseting
the sim. I will work on addressing these, but I need to commit the changes
so far to keep in sync with other developers.
Fixed a few glitches in the autopilot keys
Added a #define to be able to make a compile time decision to revert to
older GPS like autopiolt behavior this define SHOULD become a property
so that it is run time switchable.