On 04/02/2007 09:43 AM, Nick Warne wrote: > Yes, as discussed in IRC today, this solution came up, but why on earth are > the throttle values measured with so much accuracy? Surely 1.5e -5 is way > over the top?
What's the alternative? If we're not going to use floating point, what are we supposed to use instead? I'm guessing that the implied alternative is to quantize the throttle settings using some fairly coarse step-size. That is a Bad Idea for numerous reasons. The most obvious is that it is unrealistic; on most real aircraft over most of the range, the throttle motion is smooth and unquantized. What's worse, in cases where the hardware throttle simulator happens to be quantized, there would be conflict between the HW quantization and the SW quantization, which would cause all sorts of weird behavior. If somebody has a better alternative, please explain. Furthermore, I haven't seen the slightest evidence that floating-point throttle positions cause a problem when modeling realistic or even quasi-realistic aircraft behavior. I am not aware of any carburetor, gear warning horn, or other appliance where the functionality depends on the position of anything being "equal" to the position of anything else. Such an equality check would be bad design. A floating-point representation of a bad design is still a bad design; no surprise there. So my suggestion is to figure out the /real/ throttle behavior of interest, and model that. If floating-point is even the slightest obstacle to building a realistic model, please explain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel

