A plea for help: I 'm planning to remove the 'old' HUD code, and support for
it, ideally in the next week or two. The old code is truly ancient, is a third
thing to maintain (besides the 'new' HUD and 2D panel code) when making changes
in the area of cockpits - which I am about to!
(For those who care - it pre-dates properties - and assumes a fixed 640x480
screen resolution. Arrrrgh. There's a dreadful pre-property lookup table of
'function pointers that return a double' buried in cockpit.cxx - once v1 HUD is
gone, that can all die)
The catch is, aircraft that use a custom, version1 HUD, need to be adapted. The
good thing is, it's a small list:
===
AN-225, BAC-TSR2, B-52F, SU-37, TU-114, YF-23
- appears to be a copy of the default HUD, but needs to be audited
Canberra, ComperSwift
- appears to have very minor tweaks from the default HUD, but probably
easiest just to revert to default
(actually I think the differences are really that the HUD files were
copied from the default version a long time ago, and haven't been updated)
J22
ladder has been resized from default, and possibly some other small
changes, but otherwise a default HUD
F15, mirage2000, F18, RafaleB
all these aircraft have 'realistic' HUDs that need to be converted to
new syntax; in each case the HUDs are very simple, so could also be expanded,
if there's any real-world data to go on.
===
I.e four aircraft with 'real', but simple HUDs to be converted to the new
syntax - all fighters, predictably, and a bunch that for whatever reason copied
the default HUD into their tree. (In some cases this was evidently to
re-position some components, but often only the ladder, which seems strange to
me, since everything is absolutely positioned)
What I need is some volunteers to build new HUDs for the four fighters (using
the fighters with V2 HUDs as an example - ie the f16, the harrier, the f14,
eurofighter and A-10), and to test the aircraft with the 'cloned default' HUD,
to asses if the HUD can simply be switched back to the default, or if the
aircraft actually need a custom HUD.
As always with open-source, this is a tradeoff - I could just break the old
format, and when someone complains, then I've definitely found at least one
person who cares about that aircraft's HUD :) I'd rather fix the issue
upfront, if possible. There's an added benefit of ending the confusion for new
aircraft, about which style to use - it's unfortunate that new aircraft like
the Rafale were created using the V1 syntax.
(If one person wants to be come a temporary HUD expert, and do all four
fighters, terrific - since I suspect there will also be some work to make the
default V2 HUD closer to the default V1 HUD)
BTW, I did look at converting the old syntax at runtime, but it's not easy, due
to the use of the 'cockpit function' names, and coordinate/positioning scheme.
If we had hundreds of aircraft using the old scheme, it would be worth doing a
really complex translation, but the V2 syntax is so much better, I'm opting for
killing the format as well as the code - which also means a bunch of Nasal
logic in aircraft.nas can be simplified.
If you can help out with any part of the above, please let me know. One good
thing - the conversion work can be done on a 2.0 version of FG, or possibly
even earlier - both syntaxes have been around for a long time.
James
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