Andy Ross writes: > This sounds elegant. I'm a little worried about ease of authoring, > though. Right now, everyone understands what a 2D panel means -- it's > just flat, and has obvious coordinate conventions. Making everything > 3D means that panel authors have to worry about a whole new set of > concerns, like whether their panel "fits" in the cockpit they're > working on.
Well, yes, but we can provide a scaling feature easily enough. I imagine that the 3D aircraft model would provide the panel background (as we do currently), and that the panel designer would worry only about instruments. You usually have to fiddle to get the instruments to fit anyway. > Since, in reality, all cockpits are composed of a bunch of flat > surfaces with instruments on them, I'd argue that the simplest way > to do this is what we have right now. One problem is that we end up with two ways of doing things. Items like the yoke, rudder pedals, trim wheel, throttle(s), propeller control(s), mixture control(s), carb heat (where appropriate), trim wheel(s), parking brake, magento control, and so on, possibly even down to some radio knobs, will need to be 3D models in any case. Right now, I have built these right into the C172 3D model, but I'd prefer to keep them separate and include them in the config file. > The addition of scene graph integration and the ability to map > multiple 2D panel descriptions into the 3D world sounds like the > simplest way to do things. It has the benefit of carrying over more of the work that people have done on the 2D panels, certainly, but in the long term, I don't know if two similar-but-not-identical ways of doing the same thing will be good for FlightGear. Note (to others) that I am not suggesting that we dump the 2D panel -- as Alex has mentioned, it's fine for IFR practice. All the best, David -- David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
