James, while I'm pretty much in favour of spatial indices, note that a lot of work in that direction has been done already. As far as I know, Mathias Fröhlich has written a general templated spatial index for simgear. I've the code with me, but haven't found time to look at it yet (Sorry Mathias, PhD becomes more and more demanding).
Using that, it is not necessary to create a new base class (and new intermodule dependencies, where would FGPositioned be placed?). It suffices to implement the required interface (i.e. a few methods) in a class to make it usable with that template based index. The static methods can be placed in the index too. The signature will be only slightly bigger with one additional argument (the "FGPositioned"s position!!!) Note that it is not possible with your interface to find the nearest "FGPositioned" to an arbitrary geodetic position yet. This is somewhat critical (e.g. finding things based on the user aircraft). Additional methods I'd like to see is an extension of the nearest neighbor query to N-nearest neighbors. Examples might be finding the 3(or 5) nearest metar stations for weather interpolation, 5 nearest fixes to an airport for rough route planning... Thomas ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
