8:: AWOS is available at AWOS locations. (Previously only ATIS was
implemented.)
9:: ATIS phraseology now more nearly conforms to international
standard METAR pattern, and therefore to usual FAA practice.(*)
Items marked with a (*) are fully implemented in the /text/ of the
ATIS message, but the voiced version of the message is degraded by
limitations of the FGFS built-in text-to-speech system.
10:: ATIS now reports sky condition.(*)
11:: ATIS now reports multiple layers of clouds, not just the lowest
layer.(*)
12:: ATIS now takes field elevation into account when calculating
sky condition and ceiling.
13:: ATIS now reports dewpoint.(*)
14:: ATIS now can handle negative quantities (temperature and dewpoint).(*)
15:: ATIS can now report report fractional-mile visibility.(*)
16:: ATIS now uses magnetic (not true) wind directions, as it should.
17:: ATIS generates correct runway number and suffix (nine right,
one one left).
18:: ATIS can be received on nav frequencies, not just comm.
19:: Nothing bad happens if the same ATIS is tuned up on more than
one receiver.
20:: ATIS can be updated at times other than at the top of the hour.
21:: ATIS listens for an "attention" signal, and responds to changes
in the weather by issuing a new ATIS message (somewhat like a
"special observation").
22:: ATIS volume now responds to radio volume setting.
23:: Area-related services (i.e. approach radar) are handled
more-nearly consistently with radio-frequency related services.
24:: ATIS sequence-letter generation has been fixed.
25:: ATIS messages are now in the property tree, so they can be read
e.g. via the http interface.
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.
Convert FGRunway to be heap-based, and inherit FGPositioned. This is a large, ugly change, since FGRunway was essentially a plain struct, with no accessors or abstraction. This change adds various helpers and accessors to FGRunway, but doesn't change many places to use them - that will be a follow up series of patches. It's still a large patch, but outside of FGAirport and FGRunway, mostly mechanical search-and-replace.
An interesting part of this change is that reciprocal runways now exist as independent objects, rather than being created on the fly by the search methods. This simplifies some pieces of code that search for and iterate runways. For users who only want one 'end' of a runway, the new 'isReciprocal' predicate allows them to ignore the 'other' end. Current the only user of this is the 'ground-radar' ATC feature. If we had data on which runways are truly 'single-ended', it would now be trivial to use this in the airport loader to *not* create the reciprocal.