On 09/15/09 06:31, Curtis Olson wrote: > I believe the original intent was to make the system function in away that > made it appear that whatever approach you were trying to fly was the one > that was turned on.
We agree that was the original intent. However it was doomed from the start, because navradio.cxx has never had any workable way of divining which approach "you were trying to fly". > So biasing the choice based on which approach you are > most likely to be flying seems to make some sense. You don't care about > aircraft heading because (I don't know) maybe you do a 180 because you get > lost or you want to fly back and start over again, or whatever. The active > glideslope & dme & ils transmitters should change when you turn away from > the airport. The important thing is which end of the runway you are off of. We agree that basing it on heading doesn't work, because you might be approaching the airport from upwind and need to make a 180 to get established on the final approach course. But basing it on position doesn't work either, and is arguably worse, because a) You might be approaching the airport from upwind, and b) more importantly, you might need to fly the missed approach segment. Missed approaches are a matter of life and death in the real world. As the saying goes, if you are not prepared for the miss, you are not prepared for the approach. > I think we can concede that we don't have real world controllers turning > approaches and lighting on and off for us on the ground. That's not the right question to be asking. There are ways of achieving acceptable verisimilitude without having to hire actual real-world certified tower controllers. FGFS already solves problems that are vastly more complicated than reversible ILSs. > So either we > create an elaborate system and force the user to make all these detailed > choices every time we start up the sim, or we create some functional > defaults that behave like people would expect, and allow people to easily > use the simulation to practice flying any published approach. No, those are not the only options. No, a workable system does not have to be elaborate. No, we do not need to force ordinary users to do anything at startup. > I think it's pretty important to be able to fire up FlightGear and practice > any published approach without needing to go through contortions or > elaborate setup proceedures, Agreed. Right now *none* of the reversible ILSs are flyable, because of the aforementioned unrealistic behavior when approaching from upwind, and wildly unrealistic behavior on the missed approach segment. > or having to repeatedly restart the sim until > the particular approach we are interested randomly is enabled. Flying an ILS with a tailwind and then following the published circle-to-land procedure is not unreasonable. Indeed it is a good thing to practice. In the real world you cannot just show up at KJFK and demand that they turn on the ILS "you are interested in". It is realistic to choose what airport you are interested in flying to. It is not realistic to dictate that the approach in use will be the one "you are interested in". Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? > FlightGear > is used as part of FAA certified flight training devices so this is an area > of the code where the basics need to work and be solid, and then if we want > to get fancy and add additional realism, that's great. There is a lot of room for compromise between "fancy" and "wrong". Right now it is wrong, as has been pointed out repeatedly over the years. It can be improved quite a bit without getting fancy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry® Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9-12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconf _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel