On 12/30/2008 02:51 AM, Alasdair Campbell wrote: > I am currently engaged in trying to solve an annoying problem (bug) with > the ATIS/real-weather-fetch code. > > I find that if I have a comm radio tuned to an ATIS frequency > in .fgfsrc, fgfs will start up with a default (erroneous) weather > report. This can only be resolved by switching the comm radio to another > frequency and back again, at which point the atis annunciator will speak > truth. I am certain that RW radios do not behave like this. From my own > point of view, I would love fgfs to start up with all radios turned OFF, > until explicitly turned on. I can find no property to enable this > functionality, even if the radio is switched off via the hot-spot > control (or even disabled in preferences.xml). In essence, I don't want > radios booming out rubbish weather reports even if there is no electric > power switched on in the aircraft. > > I would welcome any suggestions to enable a proper control over radios.
I'm glad you're interested in this. ATIS is important and has been left to fester for far too long. There are dozens of different issues ... ranging from quite trivial to quite profound. 1a) If you just want the radio to shut up, you can tune it to a non-ATIS channel. All the radios in all the aircraft support this AFAICT. 1b) The tuning should be remembered from shutdown to the next startup. This should be easy to arrange, but presumably requires some per-aircraft work. 1c) Failing that, you can put the (de)tuning in your .fgfsrc file. 2) Each aircraft should have a master switch. This is required for realism. This requires quite a lot of per-aircraft work. 3) Many RW aircraft these days have an avionics master switch. The FG pa24-250 has a good implementation of this. 4) Each radio should have a front-panel on/off switch. This is required for realism. I patched some radios to make this work. 5) The switches should be wired up correctly, in series, so that the master and avionics master and front-panel switch have to be on before the display lights up. I had to patch some of the .xml files to make this behave properly. 6) The same goes for the backend software (.cxx as opposed to .xml). It should respect the electrical power state. 7a) The ATIS functions are not properly part of the radio. This becomes brutally obvious if you tune multiple radios to the same ATIS broadcast. 7b) The ATIS functions are not even properly part of the aircraft. This becomes brutally obvious in a multiplayer environment. 7c) Therefore, as has been previously discussed, it would be very worthwhile to extirpate the ATIS code from the radio module. At the very least it should be in its own module, with an eye toward eventually having it live in its own thread or indeed its own process. 8) There are more than a dozen bugs in the existing ATIS code. A couple of years ago I debugged most of this, but the patches were not even looked at, let alone committed. If you want to know more about this, let me know. 9) The last time I looked, the FG voice-synthesis capabilities were not adequate to support a decent ATIS broadcast. 10) As to debug messages, as others have pointed out, there is an existing log system, complete with various levels and categories of logging. It is vastly more expressive than a simple -v (--verbose) option. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
