I was reviewing the current menu structure and would like to propose a couple of changes. Partly because we have too many menus, all quite short, but also to remove some bad terminology.
Each of these changes is independent, comments explicitly requested: - merge 'Autopilot' into the Equipment menu, as a section (probably the first section) Autopilot is just another piece of equipment, and route-manager and GPS are really parallel features, since route-manger is basically the FMC. The combined menu is still a reasonable length. Aircraft without the default autopilot (including the C172) would need to disable just those menu items, but that's ok - potentially rename 'Environment' to 'World' This is less of an issue, but makes sense with the next one: - Move the AI items elsewhere -- Traffic / Scenarios move to 'World' menu -- ATC services mode to World or Equipment (opinions requested) -- All the 'controls' for tanker/carrier/wingman also move to world (or somewhere even smarter … unfortunately PUI doesn't support sub-menus) The rationale here is that 'AI' is a completely meaningless term for most users, and the way we use it in FlightGear has long since ceased to be accurate. 'AI objects' are really what is normally called a 'mobile' or 'actor' in most game engines. So the menu needs to either be removed or renamed, and I don't think there's a sane meaningful new name, compared to relocating the items. If most of the AI stuff moves to 'World', I think that name makes sense - it's about things outside your aircraft, which does include tankers, carriers and scenarios, as well as the weather and time/season. A separate step, much harder to make happen, would be to explicitly reserve the Ctrl (Command on Mac) keybinding space for menu/non-aircraft keyboard shortcuts. I would really like to do this so we can have user-friendly key-bindings for dialogs and standard items, such as Ctrl-Q to quit, Ctrl-A for autopilot dialog, Ctrl-P for pause, Ctrl-R for reply, etc. [And the entire normal key / key + shift / key+alt ranges available FOR aircraft functions, of course) The problem is right now we have aircraft using Ctrl- shortcuts for many things (usually because they're the only choice), and I can't decide a sane way to migrate to this split without lots of breakage and frustration. Any ideas welcome. Regards, James ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60133471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
