In the next couple weeks I'd like to start moving seriously towards our next release. There are probably many things that could stand to be tweaked and polished but two related items jump out at me tonight.
1. I'm growing less enthused with our aircraft alias naming system. I don't mind that we have the capability, but it becomes annoying to have 8 names for the same aircraft, even 2 names for the same aircraft. What would people say to nuking all the alias entries for the upcoming release? Now that we have the "fgrun" launcher, name length or complexity is not really an issue. Even for us hard core unix folks who refuse to give up the command line, we can learn to copy/paste to avoid unnecessary typing. I think getting rid of the aliases would make aircraft browsing and selection a lot less mystifying to new comers. We've got 20 (!) varients of the C172. Maybe for this release it would be nice to just have one or two???
What I think would be a good idea is to reverse the alias configuration. We now set the alias in the <aircraft>-set.xml file. What would be better is to make the <aircraft>-<jsb/uiuc/yasim>-set.xml file the alias (switch both files) and then we could include only the basic -set.xml file for a new release (using the EXTRA_DIST option).
2. We have a *lot* of aircraft in the base package. Some of these are really nice, some of these are not even close to basic functionality. Most are probalby best considered "works in progress." (Now this is perfectly fine, and is what CVS is for.) However, for the next release I would like to just include a subset of the available aircraft, picking and choosing the best or most interesting ones.
OV10-jsbsim North American OV-10A Bronco T37-jsbsim Cessna T-37 T38-jsbsim Northrop T-38 airwaveXtreme150-v1-nl-uiuc Airwave Xtreme 150 hang glider (UIUC) as350-yasim Ecureuil AS 350 Helicopter asw20-v1-nl-uiuc ASW-20 sailplane (UIUC) beech99-v1-uiuc Beech 99 (UIUC) bell206-yasim Bell 206 JetRanger Helicopter bo105-yasim Eurocopter Bo105 ch47-yasim CH-47 Chinook Helicopter f104-jsbsim Lockheed F-104 Starfighter f15-jsbsim McDonell Douglas F-15 Eagle fkdr1-v1-nl-uiuc fokker100-jsbsim Fokker 100 fokker50-jsbsim Fokker 50 harrier-yasim British Aerospace Harrier (YASim) marchetti-v1-uiuc Siai Marchetti S.211 (UIUC) paraglider-jsbsim paraglider sgs233-jsbsim Schweizer 2-33 shuttle-jsbsim Space Shuttle sopwithCamel-v1-nl-uiuc t6texan2-jsbsim T-6A Texan II x24b-jsbsim USAF/NACA X-24B reentry testbed
Are these the ones that wouldn't make it into the base package then?
Am I being too generous here? Should we draw the line a little tighter? Am I being too strict? Am I way off on my evaluation of what should go in or out?
In my personal opinion the following could be in the official release:
747 T38 dc3 f16 j22 A320 c172 c310 p51d yf23 an225 bo105 sopwithCamel Hunter t6texan2 sgs233 pa28-161 ornithopter j3cub wrightFlyer1903
The following aircraft didn't make it due to the following reason:
c182: We already have the c172
737 : There are already too many US aircraft. The A320 fills that gap.
asw20: There should be a glider model and the sgs233 comes default with
a thermal model. Besides there are plenty of UIUC aircraft.
b52: I prefer the civilian an225 over a military (US) bomber.
harrier: No 3d model, no cockpit.
seahawk: We have a hunter that's probably quite alike in handling.The remaining list is quite diverse, covers UIUC/Yasim and JSBSim, and contains at least the best model of most (all?) 3d/aircraft modelers.
Erik
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