Norman Vine wrote:
> Your scrollable HUD is GREAT but can you make this a 'preferences'
> controled option so that we can keep the older HUD as there are many
> reasons for having a 'fixed' fullscreen HUD too.
Certainly this could be flipped on and off. Actually, there's a
vestigial "if(1) {...}" in the patch for exactly this purpose; it used
to be a test against the /sim/virtual-cockpit property. But I think
the problem is deeper.
What exactly is it that you want from the current HUD that you don't
want to be view-dependent? It's clearly not the horizon ladder or
velocity vector, as those are useless if specified only in screen
space. It's probably stuff like the frame rate counter, or maybe
airspeed and heading that you want to watch from tower view. Am I
right? The problem is, those features aren't rightfully part of a
real world heads up display. They're something else.
Right now we have one code base trying to do two things: provide a
simulation of an actual aircraft HUD, and provide useful information
to a simulator pilot in screen space. These just aren't the same
task, and the HUD suffers architecturally because of it. The biggest
pain in doing this patch was, in fact, extracting the brain damage
that results from trying to canonize "640x480" as the coordinate
system for drawing pilot symbology (I'm not kidding -- that's what it
does; the concept of "angle" doesn't exist in the HUD code. It gets
even worse when you note that the code is further hacked to make the
640x480 input coordinates really "mean" 1024x768 on the screen!).
I'd submit that we need to split this up instead of clinging to old
breakage. There is a need for a 3D view-dependent HUD that mimics
the behavior of HUDs in real aircraft. This patch is at least a
hacked-up start in that direction.
Users that need a 2D, screen space area to put simulation information
already have the existing 2D panel infrastructure to work with. The
panels can already do text output, and with a little work could be
augmented to handle alignment and other cool features. With a little
work, we could augment this to allow more than one screen-space panel
like the "windows" in MSFS. Picture a tiny "FPS counter" panel placed
in the corner of the screen, and a popup "navigation bar" for use from
tower mode, etc...
Andy
--
Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems
Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com
"Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one."
- Sting (misquoted)
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