I just heard from John Wojnaroski that you and he are going to work on getting
a flightgear demo machine up for the linux expo thursday and Friday. John
indicated that he would very much like to get a CVS version with the new
traffic code up and running before the expo.
I've added some features to the PID controller:
Ability to set desired sampling interval in seconds. Use <Ts> under <config>
to set the desired sampling interval of the PID controller.
Example:
<config>
<Ts>0.1</Ts> <!-- desired sampling interval -->
<Kp>-0.05</Kp> <!-- proportional gain -->
<beta>1.0</beta> <!-- input value weighing factor -->
...
...
</config>
Ts defaults to 0.0, so if you don't set it it samples at the highest possible
frequency.
Add an offset to the input variables (input and reference).
Example:
<reference>
<prop>/controls/flight/elevator</prop>
<scale>-1.5</scale>
<offset>1.0</offset>
</reference>
Note that <scale> has higher precedence than <offset>, regardless of the order
that they appear in the config file.
Yesterday night it occurred to me that the current handling of missing METAR
strings isn't good enough:
- in case of missing METAR strings, don't re-send the last successful string,
but the last successful string sent to *this* client. (If one client is
running in virtual December, it won't be happy about dropped in summer
weather.)
- fix a bug that allowed -vc notation (options -v and -c), but broke a lot of
other notations (-b/var/tmp). Only -v can now be accumulated again, as
in -vvvv.
I have made the
'Select Airport from List' option in FlightGear work
(I think) properly. I have some concerns about the
solution, which could be broken by changes to plib (if
they re-use the value I have assigned to
PUCLASS_LIST), but for the moment it seems to work OK.
Erik Hofman:
A request has been sent to John Fay to include the puList
code in the puAux subdirectory of plib so expect some
changes for future version of FlightGear.
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' ?
Here's a Perl implementation of a METAR proxy server. Tested on Linux only, but
should work on all Unices, and possibly on Windows, too. Its purpose is to:
- provide METAR data for machines without internet connection
- centralize METAR fetching: one machine in a network runs the proxy, all
other connect to the proxy
- deliver defined and reproducible weather for educational purposes
- save weather situations for later use in fgfs
Quick instructions to download the world weather for the last 3 hours
and run proxy and fgfs with it (~ 2MB download; for less bandwidth
consumption see the --record mode):
$ metarproxy --download 3h
$ metarproxy -v -c &
$ fgfs --proxy=localhost:5509 --time-offset=-2 --enable-real-weather-fetch
Here's again one of the more obscure bugs that valgrind complains about: somehow
the STL container classes manage to read out values before they were ever set.
This patch fixes that. This may not cause any harm in this case, but valgrind
seems to *always* be right about them.
The following patches to SimGear & FlightGear ...
- create an FGMetar abstraction layer, whose purpose is:
* provide defaults for unset values
* interpolate/randomize data (GREATER_THAN)
* derive additional values (time, age, snow cover)
* consider minimum identifier (CAVOK, mil. color codes)
- add rain/hail/snow/snowcover support on the METAR side
- add max age of METAR data handling (currently set to
- add support for an external METAR cache proxy server
- add CAVOK handling
- set missing year/month in regular METAR messages
- fix a small bug in metar.cxx (wrong return value)
rather than /instrumentation/comm ... we need to be a little careful here
because typically, a single knob controls power to both matched com/nav pairs.
explicit calls to shutdown_all() which was causing this to be called twice.
This could cause problems with some IO modules (such as attempting to close
an invalid file descriptor the second time.)
