Folks, In case you haven't noticed, I'm back after a few weeks absence, mainly due to vacations, conferences, etc. I'm currently picking up some work on FlightGear and one issue that I would like to move to the top of my priority list is to make sure that FlightGear has the capability to read the airport geometry data from the world scenery repository.
The world scenery project provides essential geometry information that will enable us to make incremental scenery updates, without relying on having an up-to-date apt.dat file. My impression is that it is going to be a rather involved change to read the airport information from the scenery directory, instead of reading it from apt.dat, for the following reasons: - All airports need to be preloaded at program start, because we need the database for metar locations - We need to load all airports, because several navaids need to be linked to specific airports/runways. Currently, navaids are also preloaded at program start. - Taxiway information is currently only found in apt.dat Eventually, having a situation where airports are loaded only on a need know basis would be preferable over the current situation, but that it going to require quite a bit of change to the infrastructure. So, as an intermediate solution, I'm considering a smaller scale modification, where the apt->getRunway*() code could be configured to load the extended runway information from scenery/Airports/ I/C/A/ICAO.geometry.xml and from scenery/Airports/ I/C/A/ICAO.ils.xml. This information would then override the information stored in apt.dat Of course, everything would be configurable, so that we keep the default behavior, but can optionally configure FlightGear to use the updated geometry information. Thoughts/ Ideas/Objections? Cheers, Durk ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
