Not every xml-autopilot filter needs to run at the update rate
of the FDM. This only makes sense for the autpilot filters. Those,
who update instrument needles or environment properties for example
may run at frame rate.
This patch (thanks to ThorstenB, who is the author) forces those
filters defined in /sim/systems/autopilot into the FDM loop and those
defined in /sim/systems/property-rule into the default loop. They
show up as xml-autopilot and xml-proprules in the performance monitor
/sim/ATC/radius should be a nummeric estimate of the size of your aircraft. A small aircraft fits into a large parking, but a large aircraft does not fit into a small parking space. Because the AI part of radius is also used for slightly different purposes (prioritizing gate assignmments, the given valuem may deviate slightly from the real aircraft size. See http:/wiki.flightgear.org/Aircraft.radii for an overview of currently used values for the redius property.
/sim/ATC/flight-type can be any one of "ga", "cargo", "gate", "mil-fighter", "mil-cargo", or "vtol". See http://wiki.flightgear.org/Interactive_traffic#A_technical_perspective for more information.
optionally, the property /sim/ATC/airline can be set set to a three letter icao airline code. By way of illustration, I will commit a number of startup preset files setting these properties shortly.
Also did some more finetuning to the traffic mananger routing algorithm can be any one of "ga", "cargo", "gate", "mil-fighter", "mil-cargo", or "vtol". See http://wiki.flightgear.org/Interactive_traffic#A_technical_perspective for more information.
optionally, the property /sim/ATC/airline can be set set to a three letter icao airline code. By way of illustration, I will commit a number of startup preset files setting these properties shortly.
Also did some more finetuning to the traffic mananger routing algorithm.
This fixes at least the startup process.
If an ambigous fix name was presented with --vor=ID or --ndb=ID
present a list of matching records along with frequency and
position in the console to give the user the chance to pick
the correct one by adding the frequency with --vor-frequency=nnn.nn
It does not yes solve the issue when the user relocates using the
GUI dialog. This requires some GUI and Nasal hacking along with a
new Nasal helper function "navaidinfo".
New "auto-position" switch to always use closest tower for tower-view.
Exposes new "/sim/airport/closest-airport-id" property.
Display closest airport on groundradar by default.
Rename ATC/atis.[ch]xx to ATC/atis_mgr.[ch]xx, to avoid confusingly
having 2 atis.cxx and 2 atis.hxx in the source tree. Also fix a copy
and paste error in src/ATCDCL/CMakeLists.txt.
This patch removes the conditional compilation of ATCDCL, compiling both
the old and new ATC systems. The old system only provides ATIS, AWOS and
some dialog lookups, and hence should not conflict with the new system.
This is an ugly hack for automatic runway selection on startup based on
metar data. It's main intention is to make startup.nas obsolete and
to guarantee the same runway selection logic as used for AI traffic.
Calling presets-commit from startup.nas during the initialization
sequence caused occasional trouble and sometimes, the AI traffic
operated on the opposite runway.
The autopilot has grown beyond being just an autopilot. It's
components, filters and controllers could be used to set property
values based on complex rules and driven from other property values.
That's why I chose to give it the name "property-rule".
This patch allows to define an arbitrary number of property rules under
a/sim/property-rule[n]/path
using the same syntax as autopilot configurations.
- Point the homedir variable to %APPDATA%/flightgear.org. This
enables .fgfsrc in this path for windows users.
- Evaluate the returncode of gethostname() to not strdup() bogus
characters on failure. Also mainly on windows.
Add helper to look for an aircraft branch path in multiple candidate locations.
Update the main subsystems to use the helper, and hence load from any aircraft dir.
Split the former single-file-implementation in xmlauto.?xx into multiple
files and use some OO techniques. Started with documentation to be used
with doxygen.
* AI aircraft distance to user proximity detection works again (lat/lon were inverted).
* The parking uses by the user aircraft is marked as such to prevent it being reused by an AI aicraft
* AI aircraft won't receive permission for pushback until the user aircraft is at a fair distance.
* Add a new command line option: --sound-device=""
This makes OpenAL use the sepcified audio device instead of the default
output device. (Look for playback devices when calling openal-info of alcinfo)
- allow multiple <autopilot> elements within an aircraft. All autopilot live in an individual FGXMLAutopilot subsystem which run within a subsystem group now.
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.
by frequency (which makes sense), and use the FGPositioned spatial data if
required. As a result, the marker beacon list is gone (since beacons are only
searched spatially). In the process, clean up various minor things - most
notably, all the 'airport-related' navaids (ILS, GS, LOC, and the beacons) now
store a FGRunway* instead of an airport id string. This is more precise, and
saves string allocations.
By way of example, here's a patch to make the position init code (in fg_init.cxx) cleaner, partly thanks to the FGPositioned changes. It reduces the file size by 200 lines - virtually all of which was copy-and-paste. Once the remaining class (FGAirport) is converted to inherit FGPositioned, all the future patches should be like this - touching one or a few files at most.
This factors the start-offset logic out into a helper, which also does the final property setting (which has to happen on both the /preset and 'real' values). Using the accessors in FGPositioned, and the offset helper, a couple of cases become trivial (fix and nav) and others become much simpler.
Convert FGNavRecord to inherit FGPositioned. This is much more self-contained than the FGRunway change, since FGNavRecord already had good encapsulation of its state. However, it's a large diff due to moving around two nasty pieces of code - the 'align navaid with extended runway centerline' logic and the 'penalise transmitters at the opposite runway end' logic.
In general things are more readable because I've replaced the Navaid type enum, and the use of Robin's integer type codes, with switches on the FGPositioned::Type code - no more trying to recall that '6' is an outer marker in Robin's data. The creation code path is also pushed down from navdb into navrecord itself.
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.
Here's part 2 - converting FGFix (the simplest one) to be both heap-based and inherit FGPositioned. One minor benefit from this is replacing some dangerous code in FGFixList which used to return the address of an iterator member ('&it->second'). To keep the diff a sensible size, I'm not updating the callers to use the richer FGPositioned types - i.e replacing separate lat/lon handling with SGGeod. I will make those cleanups, but in future patches.
- Runways are now part of an airport, instead of a separate list
- Runways are no longer represented as a boring struct, but as a class
of their own.
-Improved runway access to unify various runway access methods.
* experimental clean-up / reduction on two of the FG headers:
(I'm going to await feedback on the developers list before doing more of
these, to avoiding going over files multiple times, but in principle it
seems pretty straightforward.)
* final fixes for SG_USING_STD removal
- this exposed a bizarre issue on Mac where dragging in <AGL/agl.h> in
extensions.hxx was pulling in all of Carbon to the global namespace
- very scary. As a result, I now need to explicitly include CoreFoundation
in fg_init.cxx.
- change SG_USING_STD(x) to using std::x
SimGear change. It changes all the SG_xxxx to be the 'real' includes, and gets
rid of many #ifdef SG_HAVE_STD_INCLUDES. As an added bonus, rather than
replacing 'SG_USING_NAMESPACE(std)' with 'using namespace std', I just fixed
the small number of places to use std:: explicitly. So we're no longer polluting
the global namespace with the entire contents of std, in many cases.
There is one more 'mechanical' change to come - getting rid of SG_USING_STD(X),
but I want to keep that separate from everything else. (There's another
mechnical change, replacing <math.h> with <cmath> and so on *everywhere*, but
one step at a time)
PLETE_FUNCTIONAL from SimGear and FlightGear.
As a result, SG_HAVE_STD_INCLUDES is now *always* set, so I will get the boring
fixes for that done, but separately. I'm still auditing the other things in comp
ilers.h - there's a lot that can die now BORLAND is gone.
- remove the OSX_BUNDLE crap *I* introduced years ago - we're always a a bun
dle on Mac now.
- fix up the default fg-root on Mac to be FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/
data - i.e the location used by the macflightgear.org distro, and indeed the obv
ious 'correct' location. Not sure why I didn't use that in the first place, back
in the day.
- remove the CPSForegroundEnable hack. For one thing, we're a bundle and don
't need it, and for another, osgViewer on Mac does the same logic using a newer,
public API rather than a hack into the OS.
- remove the strange logic for doing fgOSInit 'early' (in bootstrap rather t
han main) when running from the command line on Mac; again this is obsolete, and
no one seems to know why it was ever necessary. I guess it was an interaction w
ith SDL when running without a bundle.
- (not Mac related) remove obsolete code bracketed by ENABLE_PLIB_JOYSTICK a
nd USE_GLIDE (neither of which are ever set, even from config.h that I can see)
in main.cxx
- drop unused parts (MouseQuat/GuiQuat)
- move "old-reinit-dialog" fgcommand to fg_command.cxx under new name
"reset" for now. (May later get merged with fgcommand "reinit".)
- move reInit() to fg_init.cxx: This was used by Shift-Esc and
Menu->File-Reset (via fgcommand "old-reinit-dialog"). We have already
a similar function fgReInitSubsystems() in fg_init.cxx, so these two
functions will probably get merged later.)
- don't allow to do that from any XML file. This is to prevent malign
code from writing a new fg-home in ~/.fgfs/autosave.xml or other files
in ~/.fgfs/.
Makes it possible to start at a parking location defined in the AI/Airports/*/parking.xml files, using the parkpos command line option.
Note that the name to pass is the concatenation of the "name" and "number" fields in the xml.
Make an OSG file reader for .stg files.
New class flightgear::SceneryPager, which is a subclass
osg::DatabasePager to handle explicit delete requests.
Modify FGNewCache, FGTileEntry, and FGTileManager to use
SceneryPager. Mostly this involved removing the queues that talked to
FGTileLoader.
Calculate accurate tile timestamps from the time they are traversed in
the cull stage (which means that they are visible) instead of updating
them periodically.
Replace tile entry transform and range node with one LOD node
"I have been investigating the Concorde IVSI problem. I came to the
conclusion that the trouble is that the environment altitude and thus
the pressure (which is calculated from that) is lagging by 1 frame.
Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but the IVSI calculates rate of
change and it will use the new dt with the old value difference,
thereby arriving at bad results if dt changes (and it does)."
them under /sim/presets/ but they aren't save there, and as fgInitPosition
and its subroutines overwrite them, we lose the information about what the
user really wanted. This is a temporary solution -- it really belongs into
options.cxx.
Why /sim/fg-current at all? Because we have a file selector dialog
(still unfinished), and one might like to start it from the current
directory, to find saved flights/screenshots/whatever.
because nasal's f_interpolate() may be called in Nasal at times when the
GENERAL subsystem group is being deconstructed; access it by addressing
the group directly, as using globals->get_subsystem() does then not
work any more then; yeah, it's all for a rare border case ... :-)
- loop up file name in the cache at startup. If it's found, check if the
file exists and use it, otherwise scan $FG_ROOT/Aircraft/ as usual,
and create a new cache while doing that. Rebuild cache on FG_ROOT change.
(including all subdirs and with max depth!), but only the outmost level.
There are no *-set.xml files in deeper nested dirs, and with an ever growing
number of aircraft the search just lasts too long.
in the case of fg_init.cxx we'll only see that if the log-level is set
in preferences.xml, because command line options weren't even processed
at that time. :-/
track and is a PITA for support staff. It's this message:
Error reading properties:
Failed to open file
at /home/newbie/.fgfs/autosave.xml
(reported by SimGear XML Parser)
and "latitude-offset" should not use a precalculated value of warp.
2) Since the values of cur_time and crrGMT are identical in the current
version of the SGTime class, the calculations of the "system", "gmt", and
"latitude" are re-evaluated and updated where necessary.
I attach 2 new files and a diff file for the associated changes to add a
“fluxgate compass” to the instrument inventory. Whist this outputs
essentially the same data as /orientation/heading-magnetic-deg, it has to
be powered, and can be made to fail. I also followed Roy’s suggestion to
generate the error properties for this instrument here rather than in
xmlauto.xml.
When this instrument is included in cvs, I intend to use it in the Hunter,
A4F Seahawk and KC135. After a bit more research, it might be appropriate
for the Spitfire and Hurricane as well. AJ would also like to use it for his
Lightning model.
This patch makes use of the vectors now available in simgear with that past
patch. And using that it simplyfies the carrier code somehow.
- Small additional factory's to the quaternion code are done in the simgear
part. Also more explicit unit names in the factory functions.
- The flightgear part makes use of them and simplyfies some computations
especially in the carrier code.
- The data part fixes the coordinate frames I used for the park positions in
the carrier to match the usual ones. I believed that I had done so, but it
was definitly different. Also there are more parking positions avaliable now.
The new multiplayer patch with an extension to transmit some properties with
the base package. The properties are transmitted in a way that will not
immediately brake the packet format if we need new ones.
Even if the maxmimum number needs to be limited somehow, that format might
work well until we have an improoved packet format which is even more compact
and that does not require to retransmit redundant information with each
packet.
That part is relatively fresh and based on that what Oliver provides on his
multiplayer server web page.
The properties are transferred to the client and I have modified the seahawks
rudder animation property to use a relative property path to verify that it
works appart from the fact that you can see it changing in the property
browser.
The movement is still a bit jerky, but that can be fixed/tuned later without
again braking the packet format.
or write to the color properties in /sim/screen/. If this Nasal/GUI
implementation turns out to be too slow, we'll write a generic OpenGL/plib
version simliar to the ATCdisplay code. (OK'ed by Andy and Stuart)
scripts that load/write user specific data that shouldn't go to PWD, and
can't go to $FG_ROOT (due to permissions and clean separation of 'official'
data and local modifications)
problems because a lot of people already have their *real* preferences
set in ~/.fgfs/preferences.xml (and don't want fgfs to stomp over them),
because the name doesn't tell people that their data aren't save there
(comments!), and because this is inconsistent with the global preferences.xml
file, where user changes *are* respected.
- Feet to meter conversion mistake (in AI getGround elev)
- Improved ground following code (not yet perfect, but for now no one will
notice it within the marginal altitiude differences at the taxitrack or
runway)
- Exclusion of the "AI" directory witihin data/Aircraft in
main/init/fgSearchAircraft, to prevent AI aircraft to be picked up by the
aircraft search function
- Provide a Nasal interface to display simple text messages on the screen
like the ATC display. In fact, I copied the code from the ATCDisplay.cxx
and simply shifted it further down the screen.
Erik:
TODO: Integrate the two pieces of code.
to pop themselves down while the simulator is paused.
The problem was with the "real time" queue in the event manager,
causing the third argument of Nasal's settimer() (a flag for "sim
time") to be ignored. Inverts the default sense of the argument, as
there are lots of uses of settimer() in the current code, almost none
of which want to use real time.
Note this fix introduces a header file incompatibility in SimGear --
be sure to update.
there was the situation where four directories contained jst two files,
of which three directories were aircraft related, and one directory contained
test code from Curt that might be better of in SimGear anyhow.
This is just a patch to move a bunch of files to new locations. In case of
local changes to any of them you can do the following:
move replay.[ch]xx from src/Replay to src/Aircraft
move control.[ch]xx from src/Control to src/Aircraft
move ssgEntityArray.[ch]xx from src/Objects to simgear/screen
In addition it has been decided only to use .[ch]xx files in all directories
unless it's contained within an FDM specific directory, in which case the
author is free to do whatever (s)he wants.
In this repspect the following files have been renamed in src/Multiplayer:
tiny_xdr.[ch]pp has become tiny_xdr.[ch]xx
multiplaymgr.[ch]pp has become multiplaymgr.[ch]xx
I stumbled across two memory errors with two wrong const references to
std::string.
As I fixed that, I also moved aircraft_dir which is only used from UIUC into
UIUC. With that uiuc_aircraftdir.h is empty and can be removed.
This adds a TACAN instrument to the inventory. Range and bearing are calculated
to the TACAN or VORTAC beacon selected by means of the Channel Selector in the E
quipment/Radio pull-down menu.
A TACAN beacon has also been added to the aircraft carrier Nimitz (channel #029Y
).
Attached is a patch to the airport data storage that I would like committed
after review if acceptable. Currently the storage of airports mapped by ID
is by locally created objects - about 12 Meg or so created on the stack if
I am not mistaken. I've changed this to creating the airports on the heap,
and storing pointers to them - see FGAirportList.add(...) in
src/Airports/simple.cxx. I believe that this is probably better practice,
and it's certainly cured some strange problems I was seeing when accessing
the airport data with some gps unit code. Changes resulting from this have
cascaded through a few files which access the data - 11 files are modified
in all. Melchior and Durk - you might want to test this and shout if there
are problems since the metar and traffic code are probably the biggest
users of the airport data. I've also added a fuzzy search function that
returns the next matching airport code in ASCII sequence in order to
support gps units that have autocompletion of partially entered codes.
More generally, the simple airport class seems to have grown a lot with the
fairly recent addition of the parking, runway preference and schedule time
code. It is no longer just an encapsulation of the global airport data
file, and has grown to 552 bytes in size when unpopulated (about 1/2 a K!).
My personal opinion is that we should look to just store the basic data in
apt.dat for all global airports in a simple airport class, plus globally
needed data (metar available?), and then have the traffic, AI and ATC
subsystems create more advanced airports for themselves as needed in the
area of interest. Once a significant number of airports worldwide have
ground networks and parking defined, it will be impractical and unnecessary
to store them all in memory. That's just a thought for the future though.
I have prepared a patch that:
- Introduces a FGTileMgr::scenery_available method which asks the tilemanager
if scenery for a given range around a lat/lon pair is already loaded and make
use of that method at some -9999 meter checks.
- Introduces a FGScenery::get_elevation_m method which queries the altitude at
a given position. In constrast to the groundcache functions this is the best
choice if you ask for one *single* altitude value. Make use of that thing in
AI/ATC classes and for the current views ground level. At the current views
part the groundcache is reused if possible.
- The computation of the 'current groundlevel' is no longer done on the
tilemanagers update since the required functions are now better seperated.
Alltogether it eliminates somehow redundant terrain level computations which
are now superseeded by that more finegrained functions and the existence of
the groundcache. Additionally it introduces an api to commonly required
functions which was very complex to do prevously.
I have traced that reset on carrier problem down to several problems. One of
them is the fact that on reset the carrier is updated while the aircraft is
not. That made the aircraft drop down an elevator sometimes. Depending on the
passed realtime while loading some parts of the scenery.
I have introduced the posibility to start directly on the carrier.
With that patch you will have a --carrrier=id argument where id can either be
the pennant number configured in the nimitz scenario or the carriers name
also configured in the carriers scenario.
Additionaly you can use --parkpos=id to select different positions on the
carrier. They are also configured in the scenario file.
That includes the switch of the whole FGInterface class to make use of the
groundcache.
That means that an aircraft no longer uses the current elevation value from
the scenery class. It rather has its own local cache of the aircrafts
environment which is setup in the common_init method of FGInterface and
updated either manually by calling
FGInterface::get_groundlevel_m(lat, lon, alt_m);
or implicitly by calling the above method in the
FGInterface::_updateGeo*Position(lat, lon, alt);
methods.
A call get_groundlevel_m rebuilds the groundcache if the request is outside
the range of the cache.
Note that for the real usage of the groundcache including the correct
information about the movement of objects and the velocity information, you
still need to set up the groundcache in the usual way like YASim and JSBSim
currently does.
If you use the native interface, you will get only static objects correctly.
But for FDM's only using one single ground level for a whole step this is IMO
sufficient.
The AIManager gets a way to return the location of a object which is placed
wrt an AI Object. At the moment it only honours AICarriers for that.
That method is a static one, which loads the scenario file for that reason and
throws it away afterwards. This looked like the aprioriate way, because the
AIManager is initialized much later in flightgears bootstrap, and I did not
find an easy way to reorder that for my needs. Since this additional load is
very small and does only happen if such a relative location is required, I
think that this is ok.
Note that moving on the carrier will only work correctly for JSBSim and YASim,
but you should now be able to start and move on every not itself moving
object with any FDM.
/sim/startup/splash-progress)
- a string in /sim/startup/splash-title is displayed on top of the screen
and by default empty
- the splash image is scaled down if 512x512 is too big
- code cleanup
have a "property" mode as well as the original "binary" mode. The property mode
will allow the remote module to request any set of properties, and it will send
those properties each frame. The remote module can reply with a list of arbitrary
property name/value pairs to update on the FlightGear side.
This is a first stab, so it's not the cleanest, most well concieved code, but it
allows an external module (communicating via a pipe) to have a huge amount of
flexibility in the data in can access and update.
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.
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.
