Re: [Flightgear-devel] (no subject)

2013-08-05 Thread John Denker
On 08/05/2013 03:45 AM, Михаил Сойтанен wrote:
> I will send data about Russian VOR's to Robin, because
> I have found, that variations are outdated.

That's good ... but it would be even better to figure out
how to get /systematic/ updates from reliable sources, now
and in the future.  Is there perhaps a Russian government
web site that has this information?

Also note that in addition to VOR alignment data, there is
a need for other types of navaids and other details, including 
frequencies, ident codes, et cetera ... as well as the addition
and deletion of entire navaids.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] (no subject)

2013-08-05 Thread John Denker
On 08/05/2013 01:38 AM, Михаил Сойтанен wrote:
>  In nav.dat file VORs have slave variation. As
> I understand, slave variation of VOR depends on magnetic variation at he
> location. Does Flightgear use this slave variation, or it computes magnetic
> variation "on the fly"?
> Do we need to track magnetic variation change every year and manually edit
> nav.dat for it?

Executive summary:  VOR alignment in nav.dat should reflect the VOR
alignment as reported in the Airport/Facility Directory ... which is
generally *not* the same as the actual local magnetic variation.

I would expect Robin's xplane data files to track this properly in most
cases, since they are routinely rebuilt from official data.

=

In the real world, VOR alignment is controlled by whomever owns and 
operates the VOR.  It gets changed only on special occasions.

There are three things to consider:
  a) The path through space of the actual electromagnetic VOR radials;
  b) The airways as plotted on the charts, typically defined in terms
   of VOR radials;
  c) The actual local magnetic variation.

For obvious reasons, there needs to be very little discrepancy between (a)
and (b).

The discrepancy between (c) and (a), or between (c) and (b), is much less
tightly controlled.  Back in the days before GPS, pilots typically would
not notice a discrepancy of this kind, even if it was rather large.  If 
you decide to go looking for such discrepancies, they are easy enough to 
find, by finding the VOR's alignment (i.e. nominal magnetic variation) as
documented in the Airport/Facility Directory and cross-checking it against 
the current local magnetic variation.  As a less-precise version of the
same idea, you can look at the orientation of the charted compass rose 
and compare it against the local magnetic variation.

Nowadays, however, it is fairly easy for pilots to detect such a discrepancy,
even if they weren't looking for it, by cross-checking a VOR radial against 
the GPS bearing-to-station.  This is a predictable source of confusion for
pilots working toward their instrument rating.

Changing VOR alignment requires revising the charts, so they don't do 
it more often than necessary.  FAA standards say they are "supposed"
to re-align VORs to keep them within 1 degree of the actual magnetic
variation, but this effort is chronically underfunded and it is easy
to find VORs that are mis-aligned by more than a degree, sometimes 
quite a bit more.

Bottom line:  The VOR alignment in nav.dat should track the VOR alignment
as documented in the A/FD.  It should not track the actual local magnetic 
variation.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] git help request

2012-08-09 Thread John Denker
On 08/09/2012 07:45 AM, Curtis Olson wrote:
> It looks like every time you rebase you have to reapply the same set of
> patches over top the target branch. 

Not true in general.  I've never had a problem like that.

>  So even if I figure out a way through
> it once, I'll have to repeat the same conconction of craziness each time I
> rebase. 

Ditto.

> It complains about whitespace errors, then falls back to a 3-way merge,
> then reports conflicts with all the files in the 2 old directories,

If whitespace were the only problem, you could make the problem
go away using --no-verify.

Also, as others have suggested, when in doubt, doing "git status"
is always a good idea.

>  I think I'm going to create a new branch, untar my changes on top,
> lose all my history and forget about it. 

Creating new branches is cheap and often an excellent idea,
especially if you are uncertain about something and want to
experiment.

> untar my changes on top,
> lose all my history and forget about it. 

It's not possible to be sure exactly what the problem is without
further information, but it seems likely that there is a simpler
way to get a similar result without losing history, namely:

  git rebase -Xours

or

  git rebase -s 'recursive -Xours'

You can read the manpage and/or google for more information about
what these options do.

I believe these options require git version 1.7.3 or later.  If you 
need to install a newer git, that's easy and well worthwhile.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Mapping Airspace

2011-09-23 Thread John Denker
Here's another fun way of mapping airspace:  You can get sectional
charts in the form of .tif files from:
  
http://www.aeronav.faa.gov/index.asp?xml=aeronav/applications/VFR/chartlist_sect

You can then read them into QGIS ... and then overlay them with
whatever other information you want, perhaps from apt.dat and
nav.dat and/or elsewhere.

  (Reading the same .tif file into GRASS doesn't work.  GRASS
  tries and fails, with no error or warning messages.  The
  resulting map has no pixels at all, according to d.histogram.
  So this is another reason to use QGIS.)

On 09/21/2011 06:10 PM, J. Holden wrote:

> Admittedly I work with GRASS solely on the text-based side - rarely
> if ever touching the GUI 

Roger that.  I, too, rely almost exclusively on the command-line
interface to GRASS.  I occasionally use the GUI to give me hints
about what CLI commands I need to use.  The stuff I need to do 
involves so many GRASS commands that I could not possibly remember
them all, let alone do them reliably, so I use a script.

> I hope I didn't misinterpret what you're writing, and hopefully that
> was of some help.

You definitely understood the questions (even though I now
realize the questions were not entirely clear) ... and you
have been very helpful.


> 3. You CAN do raster reprojection on the fly. However, your results
> won't be anywhere near as "clean" as a vector reprojection as a
> result of the different format type. Also, there are some rules - I
> believe the projection has to be in the current region of the
> location you're reprojecting to, and also the resolution must be
> sufficient in order to handle the map.

Well, YMMV but I can't get the instance I'm running to do raster 
reprojection.  It tries and fails.  I have an example where there 
are two rasters in the same location, with slightly different 
projections, plus some vector data.  If I switch projections in 
my "project" workspace, one raster or the other goes to all-white. 
The "zoom to layer" button zooms to the right place, but the image
is still all-white.  The vector data stays where it belongs, so 
that is working.

This is a low priority for me, because I am content to 
reproject all rasters to a common SRS using gdalwarp.  That
does everything I need it to do.

> 1) it's probably easiest to continue to use d.his and
> then display the resulting map using the GRASS plugin - QGIS doesn't
> really have many (if any?) raster tools, while GRASS was created
> primarily to deal with raster features (and added vectors later).

That sounds good, but I haven't figured out how to get a map
/out/ of d.his.  I think of d.his as a display function, not 
a map-calculation function.  I don't know how to find the
"resulting map" produced by d.his, not in any useful form
anyway.

And here is a possibly-related question:  what colormap are
the Sectional Aeronautical Charts using, and how do I specify
it?  They show up in QGIS in beautiful natural color.  In 
particular, in QGIS, if I change the colormap on one of those 
charts, there does not appear to be any way to change it back
to the beautiful original colormap.  I assume there is some
clever colormap that the QGIS backend knows about but the GUI
does not.

I mention this because I reckon I could solve several
interesting problems by using this colormap, using r.mapcalc
if necessary to format the pixels.  This includes the "drape"
operation, which produces very nice-looking results by taking
the hue from one layer and the intensity from another.

Or maybe somebody can write a r.calc.drape module.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Mapping Airspace

2011-09-21 Thread John Denker
On 09/20/2011 07:08 PM, J. Holden wrote:
> This is somewhat off-topic to FlightGear, so I apologize - but I
> respond to John Denker: Having looked over what you are trying to do,
> I strongly recommend using QGIS with the GRASS plugin.
> 
> Very rarely do I use any of GRASS' built-in visualization programs -
> and very rarely do I use any of QGIS' built-in geospatial functions -
> but QGIS is the best program I've found to visualize GRASS data at
> the moment (with the possible, rare, exception of NVIZ).
> 
> In fact, I believe the whole GRASS d.mon was rewritten as of GRASS 7
> and now works differently (and hopefully better). I think most of the
> GRASS display functions were very, very old.

Yes, that helps.  Thanks for the clue.

One nice thing about GRASS is that it is very modular.  In
particular its backend computational features are independent 
of its frontend visualization features.

The QGIS frontend graphics are orders of magnitude faster than
the GRASS frontend graphics.

Also QGIS has a feature called "recompute CRS on the fly" that
simplifies a lot of things.  It's nice to see a little bit of
sanity in the world.

Here are some questions you might be able to help me with, if
you would be so kind.  Off-list answers would be fine, although 
I suspect I'm not the only person who is interested:

1) GRASS has a "drape" feature implemented by d.his that sets
 the intensity from one raster and the hue from from another,
 which is a very nice way of combining slope information and
 elevation information into one image.  It's not obvious how
 to achieve the "drape" effect in QGIS ... with or without 
 involving GRASS.  What's the trick?

2) GRASS has a "catlist" feature implemented by d.rast that
 makes it easy to display only a certain range of values,
 e.g. everything from 3000 feet on up.  This is particularly
 slick in conjunction with item (1) above.  I can always do
 this with r.mapcalc, but I was wondering if there might be
 a convenient way to do it on-the-fly.

3) I suspect that doing reprojections on the the fly only
 works for vector data.  I tried it with raster data, 
 expecting to see either a resulting image or an error 
 message, but saw neither.  Is there something I'm missing?

4) When defining a colormap, there does not appear to be
 any way of controlling transparency on a level-by-level
 basis.  Am I overlooking something, or is this an actual
 limitation?

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Mapping Airspace

2011-09-20 Thread John Denker
On 09/19/2011 04:07 PM, HB-GRAL wrote:

> To improve our map resources with further data I started an experiment 
> with free available airspace data. Actually this is far from being a 
> good map and finished design, it is just a start to implement 
> (unofficial!) airspace information:
> http://maptest.fgx.ch/navaid.html
> 
> I need probably some advice from real pilots around here for what is 
> useful to map for FlightGear airspace, and how this should be displayed. 
> I think I am aware of regular ICAO graphics definitions etc. But I dont 
> want to design well known (and also free available) maps, I just want to 
> develop a design as a "overview" and some really necessary items i.e. 
> for learning the basics or whatelse. There is no RFC for what I am doing 
> here, I am just playing around with data and an new Mapnik Server and 
> ask for discussion and contribution.
> 
> (Notice, my new signature since I send this links to the list and 
> elsewhere: Please do not use any of this material for real navigation! 
> NEVER. Do only use this to help developing and improving the design of 
> my maps ;-).

A few remarks:

1) Real pilots are concerned about airspace, but they are also
 concerned about terrain and obstructions.  Also weather and 
 winds aloft.  You don't want to follow the example of Cory Lidle 
 and his instructor.  Their flight path was compressed by airspace 
 and they ended up flying into the side of a high-rise apartment 
 building.  Violating the airspace would have been a better choice.

2) It is good to provide disclaimers, and people should take those
 seriously.  However:
 2a) Pilots are trained to cross-check everything, and never rely 
  on a single source of information.
 2b) People *are* going to use whatever maps they can get their hands
  on -- in conjunction with other information -- to help with real-world
  flight planning and training.

For example, I commonly use FlightGear to familiarize myself with the
IFR approach procedures and other details before flying into an unfamiliar 
airport.  Of course I crosscheck the apt.dat description of the airport 
against satellite photos et cetera.  Discrepancies abound, as previously 
described.

3) Interactive computerized maps offer some treeemendous advantages.  For
 one thing, the ability to turn layers on and off is very powerful.  The
 total amount of detail that is /sometimes/ useful is more than can be
 shown on any one map.

 Here's a rough scenario, aka "use case":

  1) Turn on airport names (not just 4-letter identifiers) because I have
   not memorized every identifier in the world.

  2) Sketch a rough route.

  3) Turn off the names, to declutter the map.

  4) Turn on navaids, intersections, and fixes, so as to facilitate defining
   the route in terms that can be used on an ATC flight plan.

  5) Turn off everything but the route and the terrain, to see what sort
   of obstructions there are.

  6) Apply safety margins required by regulations.  Apply additional personal
   margins.

  7) Revise the route to get around the worst of the obstructions.

  8) Cross-check against the VFR sectional, IFR enroute chart, et cetera.

  9) Go back to step 4 and iterate.

 10) Turn on weather and winds aloft.

  *) et cetera.

Note that I have a tool that not only highlights the route centerline, but
also the /corridor/ extending some distance on either side.  For example, a
half-width of 4 nm is relevant to FAR 91.177.
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/grass-intro.htm#fig-colored-fix-pass

These tools are painfully difficult to use.  The only thing that would be
worse would be not having them.  Flight planning is relatively easy if you
stick to IFR airways, but sometimes in mountainous regions (e.g. Alaska
among many others) this can lead to insanely high MEAs (minimum enroute
altitudes).  As soon as you start planning an off-airways flight, trying
to do it just by penciling in lines on a chart is exceedingly laborious 
and error-prone.

So, you have to decide what you want to do.  You could go for a map that
is merely pretty to look at ... or you could go for a map that is actually
useful.

One more thing:  You don't want to go too far with the disclaimers.  Lives
are at stake, and /not/ providing information can be just as much of a
problem as providing not-quite-perfect information.  CFIT i.e. controlled
flight into terrain makes a large contribution to the fatal accident rate.
Sometimes a contributing factor is compression between airspace or weather
above and terrain below ... but sometimes it just comes down to bad planning
and really bad luck.  Providing something that helps with this would be a
Good Thing.

Again:  It doesn't have to be perfect.  Note that the FAA provides (via
contractors) a service that will prepare a computerized flight plan for
you.  There are scenarios where you can file such a flight plan, get 
cleared "As Filed", and fly it as cleared ... and fly right into the side 
of a mountain.  Hence the need for cr

Re: [Flightgear-devel] various databases +- ground truth ; was: Openstreetmap ...

2011-09-17 Thread John Denker
On 09/16/2011 04:47 AM, HB-GRAL wrote:

> I provide a ESRI Shapefile on my server of the airports of 
> ourairports.com database
> http://maptest.fgx.ch/data/ourairports.zip
> 
> There is a column "type", and some airports have value "closed". All 
> this data is in public domain, if someone wants to play around with it 
> or want to check something.

Thanks, that's interesting.  For some purposes, the ESRI files may
or not be the most useful or transparent representation;  for some 
purposes it may be more useful to look at 
  http://www.ourairports.com/data/airports.csv
  http://www.ourairports.com/data/runways.csv
  http://www.ourairports.com/data/airport-frequencies.csv
and other files as described at
  http://www.ourairports.com/data/

The data from ourairports is in some ways more sophisticated than 
from apt.dat.  For example, it gives the elevation of *each end*
of each runway, rather than simply field elevation.  In some parts
of the world this is valuable information for pilots.  AFAICT the 
ourairports data could be used to provide useful information for 
airports that are missing from apt.dat ... maybe not ideal but 
way better than nothing.  Somebody could write a script to do the 
translation ... or we could just read the ourairports files directly.

OTOH apt.dat has taxiway information for some airports, whereas
I don't know of any such information at ourairports.com.  If I
have overlooked something, please let me know.

  FWIW I have a prog that reads apt.dat and writes kml, which
  can then be imported into your favorite GIS such as GRASS or
  google-earth.  The idea is to make it easy to compare apt.dat 
  to the ground truth.

  I haven't taught it how to read ourairports databases, but
  that wouldn't be hard.
 
Here is another way in which the ourairports database can be put to 
very good use:  It provides ISO region codes -- which apt.dat does 
not.  These codes provide the basis for a very good way of predicting 
which runway numbers will have a leading zero.  Compared to guessing 
"always leading zero" or "never leading zero" this reduces the error 
rate by at least two orders of magnitude.  Doing a join on the two 
databases is easy.

As for the reliability, comparing ourairports to apt.dat on fields 
that they both provide, it appears we have a Venn diagram with all 
five possibilities:
 -- Airports where they are both correct.
 -- Airports where apt.dat is right and ourairports is wrong.
 -- Vice versa.
 -- Airports where they are both wrong in different ways.
 -- Last but not best, airports where they are both wrong in
   the same way, so we don't learn anything by cross-checking.
   For example, there are some airports that were wiped out and
   replaced with condos many years ago, but still show up in
   both databases.



FWIW here are the fields in some of the ourairports files:

Airports:
"id","ident","type","name","latitude_deg","longitude_deg","elevation_ft","continent","iso_country","iso_region","municipality","scheduled_service","gps_code","iata_code","local_code","home_link","wikipedia_link","keywords"

Runways:
"id","airport_ref","airport_ident","length_ft","width_ft","surface","lighted","closed","le_ident","le_latitude_deg","le_longitude_deg","le_elevation_ft","le_head
ing_degT","le_displaced_threshold_ft","he_ident","he_latitude_deg","he_longitude_deg","he_elevation_ft","he_heading_degT","he_displaced_threshold_ft",

Frequencies:
"id","airport_ref","airport_ident","type","description","frequency_mhz"

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Openstreetmap vs. G**gl

2011-09-15 Thread John Denker
On 09/15/2011 05:15 PM, Martin Fenelon wrote:

> I like to think that the positional errors of many (most non US?) 
> aerodromes are due to mistakes made when changing from one datum to 
> another. 

Well, that's not what I think, based on looking at 
the data.

The very first non-US example I looked at was
  ES03 "Hova"

for which the apt.dat position is off by hundreds of meters, 
to  the southeast.  Nearby we have
  ESVF "Frolunda"

for which the apt.dat location is off in another direction,
and the relationship of its two runways to each other is
wrong.

It is hard to see how a change in datum could have a different
effect on two nearby airports ... and there is just no way it 
could have a different effect on two runways at the same airport.
There aren't that many different datums to play with.

>  Errors in runway orientation at unmodifed airfields (with 
> default layouts) appear to be caused by confusion between magnetic and 
> true bearings, with magnetic being used as true.

Uhh, in apt.dat the runway heading for ES03 is off by more 
than 35 degrees.  The local magnetic deviation is more like 
4 degrees.

Bottom line:  Many of the apt.dat entries are just wrong.

You don't need any ultra-sophisticated geodetic expertise
to understand what is going on.  The entries are just
wrong.

If you want something to be accurate to a few centimeters,
or even a few meters, then some expertise is required, but
that's not what we're talking about here.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Openstreetmap vs. G**gl

2011-09-15 Thread John Denker
On 09/15/2011 03:08 PM, HB-GRAL wrote:
> No, it looks like the mapping with apt.dat data is inaccurate, at least 
> outside the United States.

The following repeats an email I sent quite a while ago,
which somehow seems to have gotten lost:



On 09/10/2011 03:54 PM, HB-GRAL wrote:

> I am just curious why FlightGear and OSM have the same "accurate" 
> position, and Google map shows another one.
> 
> I am sure, there are different problems, but some enlightenment will be 
> greatly appreciated here.

Many of the entries in apt.dat are wrong.

Large errors are particularly prevalent in the entries for
small airports that don't have instrument approaches.

In some cases google maps makes the same mistakes.
I haven't checked whether openstreetmap makes the same
mistakes.  If so, the obvious explanation is that all
three have copied from each other, or from the same 
defective upstream source.

When I say entries in apt.dat are wrong, I am not 
comparing against one database of features against
another, but rather comparing it against satellite
photography and shuttle radar terrain mapping ... which 
are known to be quite accurate.  Indeed the accuracy of 
the imaging is confirmed by the fact that *some* of the
apt.dat entries are spot-on, especially for the major
airports.

On 09/12/2011 12:56 AM, Alan Teeder wrote:
>> Point positions of aeronautical navaids and airfields have mostly been well 
>> surveyed and their positions should therefore be accurate.

Well, maybe they "should" be accurate, but in fact many
of the entries in apt.dat are not.

Some of the errors are quite large.  For example, the
location of CO80 "USAF ACADEMY BULLSEYE AUX AIRSTRIP"
is off by several hundred meters.  As another example,
the runway heading for 57AZ "La Cholla Airpark" is wrong
by more that 20 degrees.  Furthermore, the location and 
runway heading are wrong for 2B3 "PARLIN FLD".

If you want a more-or-less endless supply of errors, look
at even smaller, private, and/or unpaved airfields.

The database also contains a goodly number of entries for
airports that ceased to exist many years ago.

These errors have got nothing to do with metaphysical questions
about the meaning of "where it is".  The entries are just wrong.
They've been wrong all along.  In most cases version 850 has 
the same errors as version 810.

The metaphysical issues are much, much smaller.  As it says at
  ftp://itrf.ensg.ign.fr/pub/itrf/WGS84.TXT

>>> In general the ITRS (and its realizations ITRFyy) are identical
>>> to WGS84 at one meter level.

Similarly, there are still some people who still use NAD83, 
which is not unreasonable.  It agrees with WGS84 within one
or two meters in North America ... and the offsets are well
known.

The apt.dat errors are hge compared to any such offsets.

=

I have a tool that reads apt.dat and writes kml.  Thereupon
the kml can be imported into a GIS system such as GRASS or
google-earth.  This making it easy to compare apt.dat with 
the satellite and shuttle images.

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[Flightgear-devel] JSBSIm, aeromatic, crosswind taxiiing, et cetera

2011-06-19 Thread John Denker
On 06/19/2011 06:46 AM, Jon S. Berndt wrote:

> Maybe I've gone wrong somewhere here, but something similar might work.
> Also, in situations like a flat spin or tail slide this probably falls
> apart!

Let's postpone discussion of exotic flight conditions such as flat
spins and tail slides.  There are much more prosaic situations that
need to be addressed.  Let's start by getting the aircraft to behave 
properly when 
   a) _taxiing_ with a crosswind and/or tailwind, and
   b) _landing_ and _taking off_ with a crosswind and/or tailwind,

These seem like basic and fundamental features.

As far as I can tell, none of the existing FG aircraft that use the 
JSBSim FDM behave properly under these conditions.  (FWIW the Pitts
and the Comanche use YASim).

The value of these features can hardly be exaggerated.  For example, 
according to page 4-3 of the POH the "maximum demonstrated crosswind" 
for a C-172 is 15 knots.  It is important for pilots to know what 
happens if they use soft-field takeoff procedure with a 15-knot 
crosswind.  We do not want them to discover this the hard way, in a 
real airplane.  It would be extremely valuable to have a simulator 
that faithfully models the real behavior.

Et cetera.  For more perspective and motivation, see appendix below.

Returning to the technical issues:  AFAICT the most fundamental issues
are not "JSBSim" issues strictly speaking, but rather aeromatic issues.
The aeromatic output I have seen is 100% predicated on the assumption 
of small alpha and small beta.  The entire strategy of the aeromatic-
based aircraft.xml file is predicated on this.  For example:
 -- The idea that there would be "lift due to alpha" and then some
  "delta lift due to flap extension" is absurd.  Near the stall,
  extending the flaps (at constant pitch attitude, and constant
  direction of flight) will make a /negative/ contribution to the
  lift in the real airplane.  
 -- Forsooth, the whole idea of "lift due to alpha" is absurd, since the 
  lift of the real airplane depends in a nonlinear way on alpha _and beta_.  
  Specifically, for an unswept wing we expect the lift of the wing to go 
  to zero when beta is 90 degrees.  Few if any of the existing FG aircraft
  model this beta-dependence.  A faithful model of this would require 
  a major reorganization of the aircraft.xml file AFAICT.  Small changes
  will not suffice.

That leads to an other rather fundamental issue:  Let's talk about lift.

Lift is a vector.  It is defined to be perpendicular to the wind, and
perpendicular to the Y axis.  Axes are defined here:
  http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/motion.html#fig-axes

Specifically, if W is the relative wind velocity (directed toward the 
airplane, not toward the wind-source) then lift is in the direction 
W × Y.  The component of lift along the W × Y direction is positive,
for not-too-large positive alpha.
  -- Minor point:  This can be confusing to non-experts there is a 
   tailwind, since W × Y is downward in that case.
  -- This is undefined when there is a direct crosswind, since in 
   that case W × Y is zero and does not define a direction.  For an
   unswept wing it doesn't matter, since the magnitude of the lift
   of the wing is zero ... but for a swept wing this is an utterly
   nontrivial issue.

Remark:  Here is an item that is *not* on the list of fundamental issues.
I mention it just for perspective.   The last time I checked, in all
the aeromatic aircraft, the lookup tables for coefficient-of-lift versus 
alpha were defined over a severely limited domain of alpha values.  This 
is not a fundamental issue, because it is so straightforward to fix.  It
will of course need to be fixed, but it will be nowhere near sufficient.

Constructive suggestion:  According to the JSBSim manual, the "wind
axis system" (LIFT, DRAG, and SIDElift) is not the only choice; the
body axis system (X, Y, and Z) is also supported.  Alas, the last
time I checked, precisely none of the FG aircraft used the XYZ axis
system in their JSBSim configuration (aircraft.xml).

I suggest that the first step toward getting an aircraft to behave
properly during crosswind taxiing would be to convert to the XYZ
axis system.

  I am quite aware that this conversion requires a large investment
  per aircraft.  However, AFAICT the investment will pay for itself
  very soon.  I for one am not interested in re-arranging the deck
  chairs on the Titanic, and I am not interested in making minor
  tweaks on an aircraft.xml file that is mathematically unsound.

Another constructive suggestion:  While we are reorganizing the
aircraft.xml file, we should get rid of the notion of "lift due to 
alpha" et cetera.  I suggest a more faithful model would work with 
things like "force due to wing" and "force due to elevator".  As a 
first step, compatible with the existing approach, we can treat the 
wing as a whole.  Then, later, as a second step we can model the 
wing in four parts:  port outboard (with aileron), port inboard 

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Coordinate conventions

2011-03-03 Thread John Denker
On 03/03/2011 02:16 PM, cas...@mminternet.com wrote:
> What are the coordinate conventions used for eye position offsets in 2.0?
> 
> standard right-hand rule or something else?  Messing with the camera
> offsets and not getting the results expected. OTOH, the documentation on
> the subject is VERY old (circa 2002!). Is it still valid?

What little I know about it is documented here:
  http://www.av8n.com/physics/coords.htm

See also
  http://www.jsbsim.org/JSBSimReferenceManual.pdf

There are multiple coordinate systems in use, and lots of
converting back and forth.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Sinking feeling - c172 on gravel runway

2011-02-10 Thread John Denker
On 02/10/2011 08:15 AM, Geoff McLane wrote:
> Also, it does not happen EVERY time, in each of 3
> machines, 3 OSes... but when I get the situation, it seems 
> very repeatable...

Is there any chance this depends on having a _tailwind_ 
or something like that?

Crosswinds and tailwinds can cause some mighty peculiar
behavior:
  http://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/issues/detail?id=250

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[Flightgear-devel] "bug" is a three-letter word

2011-01-28 Thread John Denker
It's spelled "ATI"

On 01/27/2011 08:01 PM, Csaba Halász wrote:
> I am now running the shiny new 11.1 fglrx driver on my integrated HD4200.
> The 737-100 has some silly landing lights, but other than that, it looks 
> normal.

I just how upgraded to the 11-1 fglrx driver.

Still no runway lights.

I would have posted a remark on the bug tracker
  http://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/issues/detail?id=232
but that doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Carrier Altitude

2011-01-25 Thread John Denker
On 01/25/2011 12:14 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:
> How about having carriers do a terrain height check and follow the polygon
> curvature of the FlightGear world?

Call it a feature.

The real ocean has swells.  They make carrier flight operations
considerably more interesting.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] New airport textures

2011-01-20 Thread John Denker
On 01/20/2011 07:14 PM, Ryan M wrote:
> For the past week I have been working on improved airport taxiway and
> grass textures.  They've gotten positive feedback on the forums but Gijs
> suggested I post about them on the core mailing list for a fair
> discussion.
> 
> Here are some screenshots of the textures in-sim:
> http://i54.tinypic.com/29povms.jpg
> 
> http://i56.tinypic.com/14tmrp.jpg


The screenshots look very nice.

If you want to have a serious discussion, perhaps you could start
the ball rolling by saying a few words about:
 *) What sort of approach / strategy / algorithm was used to
  generate these images?
 *) What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of
  this approach?
 *) Have you solved (or avoided) the various potential problems
  listed by Curt (01/18/2011 09:26 AM)?
 *) Does this do something sensible with the "runway polygon"
  information introduced into the "new" (2008) apt.dat?

Thanks!

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] modern X-Plane airport format; Was: Magnetic North

2011-01-18 Thread John Denker
Do we know how X-Plane itself deals with the "runway polygons"?

The very existence of such things in the apt.dat file suggests
that "some" sort of solution is possible.

Perhaps some experimenting with a X-Plane and a hacked-up copy 
of apt.dat would tell the tale.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Magnetic North

2011-01-16 Thread John Denker
On 01/16/2011 02:23 PM, Martin Spott wrote:
> John Denker wrote:
> 
>> FG is still using airport data that hasn't been updated since 2008.
> 
> Depends on your particular definition of "FG". To be precise, the file
> at:
> 
>   http://mapserver.flightgear.org/apt.dat.gz [1]
> 
> contains 213 airfield updates (currently) which have been merged over
> the time

That leads to a few follow-up questions:

a) What *do* we mean by FG?  Perhaps we should ask: What do the folks
 in the user community think FG is?  What fraction of the users are
 using the file [1] mentioned above, as opposed to the version that
 sits in the fgdata tree?

b) Is that version strictly more up-to-date than the fgdata version?
 If so, wouldn't it be a good idea to upgrade the fgdata version?

c) Doesn't 213 seem like a small number compared to the thousands of
 updates that have been applied to Robin's apt.dat since FG forked
 it in 2008?

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Magnetic North

2011-01-16 Thread John Denker
On 01/16/2011 01:25 PM, Barry Fawthrop wrote:
> There was a news article on  Magnetic North Change
> and How KTPA  had to change from 90  to 80
> 
> Are these changes being effected into FlightGear ???

No.

FG is still using airport data that hasn't been updated since 2008.

More than a few things have changed since 2008.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenemodels ground elevation update

2011-01-10 Thread John Denker
On 01/10/2011 08:26 AM, Curtis Olson wrote:
>   often, important tall objects
> have a known absolute height ... like a radio tower in an FAA database. For
> these objects it would be better to keep them at a fixed absolute height
> rather than float them up or down with different revisions of the terrain.

This feature is a Good Thing and is well worth preserving.

> Originally when I populated the world with all the FAA database objects I
> had the absolute heights in an external database and used that to compute
> the placement in the .stg files.

Is the original data still available?

Is more-current data available?

As always, it is nicer to track the authoritative data, rather
than forking it.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATIS upgrades

2011-01-04 Thread John Denker
On 01/04/2011 05:51 PM, Dave L wrote:

> I've reverted to the previous behaviour for that property, which means that
> inches are used globally by default, and if the user sets that property then
> millibars are used everywhere except US and Canada.  I realise that that
> means that the incorrect units are used in most countries by default,
> whereas your code used the correct units in most countries by default, but
> as far as I can tell FG's altimeter setting dialog and most (all?) of the
> knollsman windows only have inches, regardless of worldwide location of the
> airplane, so I didn't want to upset the current behaviour so close to a
> release.

I agree with all that.  I apologize for not thinking enough about 
the compatibility issues.

> I'll put it back after the release anyway, to encourage
> millibar/hectapascal support :-)

How about this for an idea:  We define a new property 
   /sim/atc/use-inhg
to exist alongside 
   /sim/atc/use-millibars
with the following specification: 
 -- You always get the "native" format for your locale.
 -- You always get the format called for by the properties
  mentioned above.
 -- If this means you get *both* the altimeter setting (inHg)
  *and* the QNH (millibars), so be it.  That's a feature.

I further suggest that if we make /sim/atc/use-inhg true by default,
at least for now, then we can code it this way before the release.  
There is an upside and no downside.

The idea of having ATIS speak *both* formats (when requested) means 
instrument designers are _able_ to switch without being _required_ 
to switch, which is the way I like to do things.

Or ... does somebody have a better suggestion?

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] git for dummies

2011-01-04 Thread John Denker
On 01/04/2011 10:20 AM, Curtis Olson wrote:
>   I'm in a situation now where I have local
> mods that "git diff" does not report and I'm not sure how to deal with that.
>   How can I find the differences between my local repository and the master
> ... especially those changes that I haven't committed or pushed yet?

1) Try this:
  git stash pop

It should undo the effect of the previous git stash.  See below for
more on this.


2) I generally don't bother with git stash.

3) Constructive suggestion:  Never edit stuff on a branch that is tracking
  a remote.  As a common example, if the local "master" branch is tracking
  a remote "master" branch, and if you are sitting on the "master" branch,
  do this
 git checkout mystuff
  or if necessary
 git checkout -b mystuff
  before editing anything.

4) Constructive suggestion:  In the all-too-common situation where you 
  forget what branch you are on and edit stuff on the wrong branch,
  do this:
checkout -m mystuff

  That will take the edits and merge them into where they belong.  In my
  experience, this is wy better than stashing.

5) I have a fancy "pre-commit hook" that prevents me from accidentally
  committing something to a branch that shouldn't be modified.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATIS upgrades

2011-01-03 Thread John Denker
I just now pushed a couple more ATIS upgrades to
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/atis

One of them will, alas, require rebuilding the voice snippet data.
  http://www.av8n.com/festival/

Mostly this is to improve the "internationalization".

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[Flightgear-devel] further enhanced active-runway selection

2011-01-03 Thread John Denker
I just pushed one more commit to
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/navaid-repairs

This provides IMHO a pleasing combination of simplicity, versatility,
consistency, and verisimilitude.

The main new feature is to allow the active runway to be chosen to
have a crosswind or tailwind.


>From the README file:

This describes the effect of /environment/runway-wind-skew.

Setting this variable affects the choice of runway.  This is
relevant in three ways:

  -- It affects the selection of the runway for placement of the
   aircraft during initialization, assuming an airport has been
   specified but no specific runway has been specified.  (This
   affects the code in two places, in fg_init.cxx and main.cxx.)

  -- It affects what ATIS says is the runway-in-use.

  -- It affects which end of a reversible ILS will be active.

The specific effect works like this: Suppose the wind at the airport
is coming from the direction WWW, and suppose the value of
runway-wind-skew is RWS.  Then we /pretend/ the wind is coming from
WWW+RWS and choose the runway accordingly.  A value of RWS that is
positive (but less than 180) mean the runway will be to the right of
the actual wind WWW, which increases the chance that you will have a
crosswind from your left when using the chosen runway.  Assuming
there is some nonzero wind, and the wind doesn't shift:
  ++ Setting RWS=90 guarantees a crosswind component from the left.
  ++ Setting RWS=-90 guarantees a crosswind component from the right.
  ++ Setting RWS=180 guarantees a tailwind component.

Some examples: Suppose the airport provides runways 4/22 and 16/34,
all of which are similar in length and width.  Suppose the actual wind
is coming straight out of the north.

  *) RWS greater than -80 and less than 10
Runway 34, crosswind from the right

  *) RWS greater than 10 and less than 100
Runway 4, crosswind from the left

  *) RWS greater than 100 and less than 190
Runway 16, crosswind from the left

  *) RWS greater than -170 and less than -80
Runway 22, crosswind from the right

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] ATIS upgrades

2011-01-02 Thread John Denker
Hi --

On 01/02/2011 06:37 PM, you wrote:
> Can I just clarify whether you are happy to have your scripts committed to
> flightgear/utils in addition to being available from your website? 

Yes, happy.

Public domain, not GPL.

>  If so, I'll add them ASAP.

Thanks!

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[Flightgear-devel] ATIS upgrades (was: New release)

2011-01-02 Thread John Denker
On 01/02/2011 09:21 AM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:

> - "Romeo" is being pronounced "Romo". Might be a typo in the transcript?

It's not a typo, just lousy pronunciation by the synthesizer (festival).

Note that if you are worried about typos, you can check for yourself
by looking at the property tree
  http://localhost:5400/instrumentation/comm

> http://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/issues/detail?id=241

Some small fixes to the code are at
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/atis

On the data side of things, upgraded .vce and .wav files are
at
  http://www.av8n.com/festival/

> Finally, would it be worth checking the script into flightgear/utils ?

In order for things to be truly open, i.e. open in spirit and
open in practice (not just GPLed in some legalistic sense), I
support making the scripts available.  The various scripts for
building and testing the ATIS/voice stuff can be found at
  http://www.av8n.com/festival/

Note that there is a voice.pl script that allows you to test a lot 
of stuff with relative convenience and flexibility;  you don't even 
need to fire up FG.

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[Flightgear-devel] thanks, Tim

2010-12-29 Thread John Denker
> Comment #8 on issue 110 by timoore33: Pick animation do not hilight 
> transparent objects any more
> http://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/issues/detail?id=110
> 
> fixed with simgear c934b47f2e94fcefb719b9b6186abc4fd8562670

Wow.  That helps a lot.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re-enabling ATCDCL

2010-12-27 Thread John Denker
On 12/27/2010 03:59 PM, Dave L wrote:

> The ATIS/AWOS and nearby ATC frequency dialog are all useful, 

Yes!

> and would be a
> major regression if not working for the release. 

Yes indeed!

> I can't see any downside to removing the conditional compilation completely
> now, but I'll leave it 24 hours to let anyone object. 

FWIW I have been using the non-default --enable-atcdcl option
for a lot more than 24 hours, and I have no objections to
making this the default.

There are a couple of trivial patches to make compiler warnings
go away ... and a few almost-trivial enhancements at
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/atis

... which has been recently rebased, so it should apply cleanly 
to the current "next" branch.

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[Flightgear-devel] ATIS, AWOS, synthesis, runway -in-use, et cetera

2010-12-24 Thread John Denker
On 12/23/2010 04:58 PM, Dave L wrote:
> If you can email me the words and script that would be great.  It took quite
> a long time to index all the words when I did the original recording - this
> should be a lot quicker.

I put up a little care package at
  http://www.av8n.com/festival/

The scripts are not very Muggle-friendly ... but they're a lot 
easier than recording a few thousand snippets by hand.

Hint:
   ATIS_ONLY=yes  FG_ROOT=whatever  ./list-airports | ./words_per_line > 
atis.list 
   FG_ROOT=whatever  ./atis-lex >> atis.list
   ./synth.pl atis.list default.vce default.wav
   ./voice.pl - # to test it

Hint:
  ./synth.pl -h

Hint:
  I recently pushed some more upgrades to
http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/atis



This is way better than nothing, and is needed in the short run,
but in the medium-long run a reliable realtime synthesis system
is needed.

=

While we are on the subject, it would be great if somebody would
figure out how to integrate all the ATC stuff with the multiplayer
stuff, so that everybody on the same frequency would hear the
same transmissions.

As I see it, if there are N players, there need to be N+1 processes,
namely one for each player plus one for the "ambiance".  The ambiance
includes not just things controllers say but also ATIS/AWOS, pilot
controlled lighting, etc. etc. etc.

It would be super-cool to have one player turn on the pilot controlled
lighting and then have *all* the players see the lights come on.

ATIS and runway lighting are also tied up with the more general
concept of runway-in-use, which interacts with reversible ILS.
Right now FG allows simultaneous approaches to both ends of a
reversible ILS, which is just ludicrous from the radio-physics
viewpoint as well as the pilot's operational viewpoint.  The 
patch to do something sensible with reversible ILSs has been 
available for a couple of years.  !00% of the pilots who have 
commented on it consider it an improvement.
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/navaid-repairs/

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Text-to-Speech system, was: New release

2010-12-24 Thread John Denker
On 12/24/2010 01:53 PM, Mirko Stanisak wrote:
> I've used Flite to generate voices in ATC simulations (so that you can listen
> to the commands between simulated pilots and controllers). It worked quite
> well, the speech was understandable quite well, even if it sounded very
> artificial. On the other hand, one could certain do a better voice for ATC as
> the vocabulary is very limited in this case.

The voice quality of flite is 
 a) good enough for ATIS/AWOS (which in real life are often synthesized and
   artificial-sounding), and
 b) better than anything that is likely to be achieved anytime soon using 
  the current code that pastes together snippets, and
 c) infinitely better than what is in the git repo at the moment, which 
  is no ATIS at all.

Also:  The cpu workload of flite is pleasantly small.  On my machine it
 takes something like 60 milliseconds to render a typical ATIS message.
 Furthermore -- if properly implemented -- this could be done in a separate
 thread, so that in a modern multi-cpu machine no time at all would be
 taken away from the main simulation.

To say the same thing another way:  I have an investment in the existing
snippet-based system, but I would be well pleased to see it replaced by
something better.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] New release

2010-12-23 Thread John Denker
On 12/23/2010 05:33 AM, Dave L wrote:

> At the moment, the spoken ATIS makes little sense anyway since the 
> phaseology was corrected a while ago but the extra words were not
> recorded.

Well, actually the needed words are available.  Long ago I wrote a 
script to run the words through the festival synthesizer, all in a 
batch, to produce the .wav data and .vce index.

To work properly, atis.cxx needs not only the standard ATIS phraseology
but also the /names/ of the ATIS/AWOS sites (usually but not necessarily
airports).  If you include the names of all US airports, the .vce file
has more than 2300 entries and the .wav file is more than 30 megabytes.

One begins to wonder whether some of the place-names should be loaded
on a tile-by-tile basis (like scenery) rather than in one big chunk.

> Maybe if you have a text-to-speech system set up it works properly,
> but I assume most people downloading the new release will not have
> that setup by default.

Agreed.  Getting TTS to work "live" (as opposed to batch) is way more
trouble than ordinary users are willing to put up with.
 
> I am hoping to record the extra words next week during the holiday

I can send you the words and/or the script I used to synthesize them.

> and port the ATIS over to Durk's new ATC/AI system.

That would be a Good Thing.  Right now ATC/trafficcontrol.cxx contains
about 1000 lines of code, whereas ATC/atis.cxx contains only 1 line 
of code (and no real functionality).

There is a set of users for which the priorities are reversed, in
the sense that ATIS/AWOS is 1000 times more important than anything
trafficcontrol.cxx is going to say.

As you know, there are no currency requirements for listening to ATCT 
controllers ... whereas there are important currency requirements
for instrument approaches, and (with or without a Tower) it is hard
to shoot the approach without ATIS information such as weather, 
altimeter, approach-in-use, et cetera.

==

Constructive suggestion:  If you're going to port something, you 
might as well start from
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/atis

It contains some minor fixes (to get rid of warnings etc.) and
also splits the vocabulary words into a file of their own, to
make it easier on the guy who 

===

AFAICT ./configure --enable-atcdcl has never done anything useful.
If it is enabled, the code is compiled and linked in ... but not
called.

That means that in current versions of FGFS, the ATIS feature is
really quite broken (not just disabled).  Some sort of fix (or
port) would be a significant improvement.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] New release

2010-12-22 Thread John Denker
It may not be an entirely good idea to release a FlightGear version without
any usable ATIS.

It appears that ATC/atis.cxx is a stub.  It contains only one line of code.

Meanwhile there is ye olde ATCDCL/atis.cxx, which contains code but is 
"deprecated" and is not compiled in the standard configuration.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] message: Warning: TangentSpaceGenerator: unknown primitive mode 9 why?

2010-12-20 Thread John Denker
On 12/20/2010 05:42 AM, henri orange wrote:

>   At FG load, i get a lot of these warning messages:
> 
> TangentSpaceGenerator: unknown primitive mode 9
> 
> Is it just me ? is there any possibility to avoid it ?

It's not just you.

There are at least two or three bugs involved here.

1) It is a bug that one part of OSG would generate a primitive mode
that cannot be handled by other parts of OSG.  Indeed, a comparison of 
.../include/osg/PrimitiveSet with .../src/osgUtil/TangentSpaceGenerator.cpp 
suggests that there are several primitive modes that could be generated 
but not handled.

With very slightly cleverer coding, the OSG folks could have detected
this situation at compile time, and could have fixed it a long time ago.

2) It is a bug in OSG that the error message is remarkably uninformative.
The message doesn't say what caused the problem.  It doesn't say how
serious the problem is, or what might be the consequences of ignoring
the problem.  It gives no clue how to avoid the problem ... unless you
want to download the source and reverse-engineer a large, complex, and
virtually uncommented software system.

In particular, the message is presumably provoked by some object in
the scene, but the message gives no clue as to what the identity of
the offending object.

3) It's not clear to me whether this can be considered a bug in FG,
or whether changing FG so as to avoid provoking the OSG bug would
be worth the trouble.  Changing FG would be a royal pain, because
of item (2) above.

On 04/22/2010 03:12 PM, Tim Moore wrote:
>> It would be best to get the polygons out of the loaded geometry. The
>> INDEX_MESH optimizer that was recently added to OSG will do this.

How recently was it added?

How soon will it fix the problem?   

Installing the latest OSG SVN does not appear to be sufficient to 
fix the problem.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] flightgear ./configure apr-1-config

2010-12-13 Thread John Denker
On 07/23/2010 05:12 AM, Csaba Halász wrote:

>>> ./configure: line 10540: apr-1-config: command not found
>>> ./configure: line 10541: apr-1-config: command not found

> That configure test is broken.

I agree.

It has been broken for a long time ... since well before the 
previous release.

The fix is available at
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/minor
in particular
  
http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commit/fd10a6803f36c383cb9acf4882cbdd0c1a880d20

I recently rebased it so it applies to the current "next" 
branch.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] mpmap ILS data

2010-04-08 Thread John Denker
On 04/07/2010 07:06 PM, Peter Brown wrote:
> Perhaps this has been brought up before, but I see that the ILS
> "beam" data for each airport on the mpmap is derived from the runway
> alignment (as verified in taxidraw). 

That sounds like a problem.

>  This doesn't allow for magnetic
> deviation, and therefore all the course headings are incorrect.

That is the wrong way to think about the problem.

This is basically a geodesy problem.  It should be worked
using true headings, true lat/lon, et cetera.  The question
of magnetic variation should never come up in this context.

> I have not looked at the 850 airport format, but is there a way in
> any of the apt.dat or nav data to specify ILS approach data
> accurately?

The navaid data is accurate.  The 830 and 850 formats
are equivalently accurate.

> Or is this a question for Pigeon, to see about using a
> different data list?

There is no need for that.  The existing nav.dat data is
plenty good enough.

The existing FGFS code handles this correctly, except in
the case of "reversible ILS" installations.  Perhaps mpmap 
could just clone this code.

Also, the code to handle reversible ILSs in a reasonable
way exists in the sport model.  It has been available for
many months, as previously discussed.  Let me know if you
are interested.  Or take a look at
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/sport

This is an issue for more than 20% of all ILS installations
in the US and UK ... and more than 10% worldwide.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] link problem on new 64 bit system

2010-04-03 Thread John Denker
On 04/03/2010 10:21 AM, dave perry wrote:
> I get the following error compiling fgfs.
> 
> /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lopenal
> 
> But /usr/lib64/libopenal.so.0 => libopenal.so.1 => libopenal.so.1.11.753.

Note that "libopenal.so" (with no suffix) is not listed.
 
> My .bashrc has the line
> export 
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/usr/lib64:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/lib64:/usr/local/lib/osgPlugins
> 
> so I don't see why ld is not finding -lopenal?

As a test (and, probably, a workaround) try installing a symlink 
with the name "libopenal.so".



This of course leaves two unanswered questions:
 1) Why is libopenal.so missing from the out-of-the-box system?
 2) Why was its absence not detected during the autoconfigure step?

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Bug: nav[12] selected radial

2010-03-20 Thread John Denker
On 03/20/2010 03:09 PM, David Megginson wrote:
> There's a bug in the /instrumentation/nav/radials/selected-deg
> property: the code mistakenly assumes that the selected radial is in
> true degrees, but isn't a bearing -- it's just a number.  You could
> design a VOR where radial 180 was north of the VOR, if you wanted to
> (though usually it's close to a bearing in *magnetic* degrees).  The
> bug affects the --nav1 and --nav2 option in particular, since
> 
> --nav1=340:114.6
> 
> will no longer start FlightGear with the Nav1 indicator dialed to the
> 340 radial, unless the local magnetic variation happens to be 0.  At
> CYRO, for example, the actual radial ends up being closer to 326,
> which is counterintuitive.  Nav radios and indicators know nothing
> about magnetic variation.

I am unable to reproduce this issue in the default c172p.
I just did an in-flight VOR receiver check, using standard 
pilot procedures in accordance with FAR 91.171.  I went 
to SUTRO intersection, dialed up the 287 radial of the 
SFO VOR, and verified that the needle was (a) properly 
centered and (b) properly sensitive to OBS changes.
I used:
   --fix=STINS --nav1=287:115.8 --nav2=287:115.8
and I verified that the OBS cards did in fact get set
to 287.
 
> We used to have this right in FlightGear, but it's gotten messed up
> over the last 3-4 years.  

There was a bug reported under the Subject:
  [Flightgear-devel] Setting OBS on command line/.fgfsrc
a couple of weeks ago ... but it only affected nav1 IIRC.
And it had nothing to do with magnetic variation IIRC.

There are some creepy bugs associated with navradio.cxx
and with command-line processing ... but this magnetic
variation issue is not easily reproducible chez moi.  This 
is with freshly pulled and compiled sources from a few 
minutes ago.  The issue was equally non-observed using
sources from two weeks ago.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] News from FlightProSim!

2010-03-17 Thread John Denker
First, a parable:  

  The local supermarket sells shiitake mushrooms for 
  $5.00 per ounce.  About a mile down the road there 
  is an ethnic market that sells the same kind of 
  mushrooms for $5.00 per *pound*.

  You might have been told in high school that this 
  kind of thing can never happen in an efficient 
  market.  Well ... it turns out that the mushroom 
  market is not efficient.

  You might say wow, that's a huge markup.  I agree, 
  it's a huge markup.  On the other hand, huge markups 
  are perfectly legal.  There is nothing anybody can 
  do about it, except maybe to shop around.

Other examples abound.  Year after year, people buy
"breakfast cereal" despite the amazingly high markup.

In early 1976, a Mattel vice president compared a game 
I had written to a Pet Rock.  He meant it as the highest 
compliment, referring to something that millions of
people would gladly buy, even though there was obviously 
a high markup.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock

On 03/17/2010 08:07 AM, Patrice Poly wrote:

> I think what this person(s) do here is *almost* legal.

I am not a lawyer, and I will not opine as to 
whether any particular thing is legal, but we
certainly must consider the hypothesis that what
FPS is doing is legal.  It's a plausible hypothesis.

Is FPS making money off of GPL software?  Yes ...
but that is expressly permitted by the GPL subject 
to some not-very-onerous conditions.  We can insist 
that FPS strictly uphold the conditions, but that 
will not stop FPS from doing the things that list 
members find most distasteful.

Is FPS charging a huge markup?  Yes, definitely ...
but there is nothing illegal about that.  Some of
the suggestions offered in this forum for trying
to prevent that would violate the letter and spirit
of the GPL.  Loosely speaking, the point of the GPL
is to prevent people -- including us -- from modifying
GPL software so as to make it non-GPL.

Is FPS guilty of plagiarism?  Yes, definitely ...
but this is not illegal, either.  It is IMHO morally
reprehensible, but it is permitted by the GPL.  In
another context, if you want to disallow plagiarism, 
you should use a Creative Commons / attribution license 
or some such.  The GPL was designed by and for people 
who thought the anti-plagiarism provisions of the BSD 
license were too much trouble.  In the context of FG, 
short of starting over and rewriting FG from scratch, 
I cannot imagine any way of "porting" FG to a more-
restrictive license.

==

So, what *can* be done?

For starters, in this situation as in so many others,
sunlight is an excellent disinfectant.  If the FPS
guy is touting his wares in any open forum, you can
speak up in that forum, early and often, so that 
buyers know where to go for the cheapest and most 
up-to-date FG versions.  Don't get mad, just get 
the facts out.

You can even go so far as to write articles for the
various PC simulator magazines.  This includes
articles announcing the latest version of FG ...
and also perhaps articles doing a review, comparing
price and features, of the various offerings.  I
reckon somebody who increases the price without
increasing the features would not fare well in such
a comparison.

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[Flightgear-devel] lamp-post appearance depends on camera tilt angle

2010-03-14 Thread John Denker
1) I closed the bug-tracker issue concerning the taxiway
 signs.  That's all good.

2) Alas there are other scenery elements that still
 exhibit an improper dependence on camera tilt angle.

Example:
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/img48/pole-dark.png
in contrast to
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/img48/pole-red-white.png

In particular, look at the lamp post just to the right
of the tan building, directly above the aircraft compass.
Its appearance changes dramatically as a function of
camera tilt angle.

  Note that I have gone to some trouble to control for
  variables that might _properly_ affect the appearance.
  The illumination is not changing, and the point-of-view
  location is not changing.  Only the camera tilt angle
  is changing in the example screenshots cited above.
  Object appearance should not depend on this.

I don't have any first-hand understanding of what's going 
on, but it is easy to hypothesize that the lamp-posts are
afflicted by the same disease the afflicted the taxiway
signs.  Or not.  In any case, this is a definite opportunity
for improvement, since the unstable appearance is quite 
noticeable to pilots who are just taxiing along, minding 
their own business.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] scenery appearance depends on camera tilt angle

2010-03-12 Thread John Denker
On 03/12/2010 05:13 PM, Tim Moore wrote:

>> 262383395d78565 

OK!

Sign backs are all nice and gray now.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] scenery appearance depends on camera tilt angle

2010-03-12 Thread John Denker
On 03/12/2010 04:10 PM, Tim Moore wrote:

> There shouldn't be any black or white
> sign backs in the most recent code.

Please say what commits constitute the appropriately
recent code, so I don't need to grovel through the
logs ... or at least so that I know what I'm looking
for when I grovel through the logs.

Is the "most recent code" available on gitorious?
Which branch?  Or do I need to grovel through the
cvs repo too?

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] scenery appearance depends on camera tilt angle

2010-03-12 Thread John Denker
On 03/12/2010 12:05 PM, Tim Moore wrote:

>> I flew over there in the ufo and saw gray sign backs there...

FWIW, if I limit the flight to the default screensize and
default field of view, I find it difficult to reproduce
this bug.

On the other hand, if I expand the screen to HDTV size
and/or zoom in quite a bit, the bug is easily reproducible.



Tangentially related question:  Should the screen's x-size
and y-size be exposed in the property tree somewhere?  I 
looked in the obvious places and grepped for the obvious 
names without success.  I reckon it would only be a couple 
of lines of code to add the appropriate listeners.  Perhaps
somebody who is more familiar than I am with the graphics 
system could stick this in...


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] scenery appearance depends on camera tilt angle

2010-03-12 Thread John Denker
On 03/12/2010 06:54 AM, Tim Moore wrote:
> I've checked in a fix for the sign-back problem. The airport sign code is
> not fast graphics code and needs another look, but for the moment it works.

1) Thanks, the signs are much improved.

2) The problem is not entirely gone.  The window for
 observing the bug is much smaller, but not zero.

 The symptom is the same:  depending on camera tilt
 angle, the backside of certain signs switches from
 black to white.

   http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/img48/taxi-c-at-r-black.png
   http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/img48/taxi-c-at-r-white.png

 A cursory survey suggests that *all* the signs alongside
 taxiway charlie are affected one way or another.  Some 
 backsides are almost always black;  others are almost always 
 non-black.

===

Theoretical question: As I understand it, what's going on is:

>> The mesh representing the back of a sign is not complete; graphics state
>> from other parts of the scenery are leaking into it.

Is there some way to check for this at runtime?  Is there
some calculation that could be done that would detect 
leakage, or detect meshes that might lead to leakage?  
Such a check might make debugging easier.

Obviously debugging these signs is nontrivial ... and I
suspect the signs are not the only items that are vulnerable
to bugs of this ilk.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] scenery appearance depends on camera tilt angle

2010-03-11 Thread John Denker
On 03/11/2010 03:15 PM, Tim Moore wrote:

> The mesh representing the back of a sign is not complete; graphics state
> from other parts of the scenery are leaking into it. The particular effect
> depends on the global draw order, which does change as your viewing angle
> changes.

Thanks for the rapid and informative explanation.
 
> What color are the sign backs supposed to be?

Unless the back of the sign has something to say, it's
nondescript gray or black. Here are some examples:
  http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/photos/4/4/9/0777944.jpg

However, double-sided signs are common.  Every one of
the signs in this diagram is double-sided:
  http://www.aopa.org/images/asf/pubs/sa07/p4-9.gif

For the next level of detail on this, see the parent
page:
  http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/taxi/taxi_signage.html


Here's one that is partially blank/black because whatever
it says on the other side is longer:
 http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/456566291_270613d348.jpg

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[Flightgear-devel] scenery appearance depends on camera tilt angle

2010-03-11 Thread John Denker
What steps will reproduce the problem?

--lat=37.637855 --lon=-122.414915 --altitude=656 --heading=113 --fdm=ufo

aircraft is stopped.  zero airspeed, zero rate of turn, etc.

The choice of aircraft doesn't seem to matter;  this is 100%
reproducible chez moi using the default c172p, the pa24-250,
et cetera.

Zoom in the view;  FoV 15.5 will do; 12.5 is better; 7.7 is
even better, if you have good control of the pitch/tilt and 
view angle.

Change the view angle, either by pitching the entire aircraft
or by simply tilting the pilot's view angle relative to the
aircraft.

What is the expected output? 

Scenery should not change.  The ray from each object to the
camera image plane should stay the same, except to move to
a different point in the image plane, when the camera is
tilted.

What do you see instead?

For some tilt angles, the taxiway signs alongside taxiway
charlie are dark, while at other title angles they are
lit.
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/img48/taxi-signs-off.png
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/img48/taxi-signs-on.png

I cannot imagine what could be causing this.

==

The same phenomenon is seen during normal flight, but is
harder to reproduce and document.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] [PATCH] jsclient and jsserver 64 bit support and 6 axes

2010-03-10 Thread John Denker
On 03/10/2010 01:47 AM, Torsten Dreyer wrote:

> I did not commit the 6-axes fix for the following reason:

> If we change the protocol anyway, why not do it right an support the maximum 
> number of axes from plib (currently 16)?

The following idea is better:

> I'd suggest sending the number of axes in the first 32bit word followed by a 
> 32bit word for each used axes.

"Doing it right" means supporting an _arbitrary_ number of 
axes, not 6 or 16.  Also an arbitrary number of buttons.

Just because plib is currently limited to 16 does not mean
FG should make the same mistake.

Over the years FG has become progressively less vulnerable
to the limitations of plib.  It is easy to foresee a day 
when all plib dependencies have been removed from FG.


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[Flightgear-devel] network IO issues

2010-03-04 Thread John Denker
I observe the following.  Lots of irrelevant stuff snipped:

Setup:

  fgfs --httpd=5400  &
  lynx -source -head http://localhost:5400/sim/intl/locale/strings/

Result:

Making HTTP connection to localhost:5400
Alert!: Unexpected network read error; connection aborted.

WARNING: netBufferChannel: output buffer overflow!

=

This is 100% reproducible chez moi.  I looked at the code,
and this result is entirely predictable, given that the
page that should have been returned is larger than the
buffer the plib wants it to fit in.

There seems to be a deep-seated problem in the "design" of
plib.  I don't see any way of fixing this without making
substantial changes in multiple places.

Hypotheses that should be considered include
 a) rewriting httpd.cxx to use SGIOChannel::readline, or
 b) switching to something new, such as boost::asio tcp::acceptor

Hypotheses that should IMHO not be seriously considered
include:
 x) using the Berkeley sockets directly -- notoriously 
   non-portable
 y) fussing with plib.   This would be a lot of work, and
   would be a dead end anyway.  Any day that you can 
   remove a plib dependency is a good day.

The boost stuff seems a bit clumsy, but it should be 
portable, and it is cleaner than the simgear readline 
(which is what FGMetar uses) which is in turn much much 
cleaner than the plib stuff.

==

The question of asynchronous IO and thread safety must be 
dealt with.  FGMetar starts a thread of its own, so it
can deal with network IO without blocking the main loop
of FG.  I don't entirely understand what plib does, but 
whatever it is, it doesn't work right.

On 02/08/2010 09:18 AM, Erik Hofman wrote:

>> FlightGear is not thread safe, simply because it uses OpenGL. Parts of 
>> it can work with threads though, and some already do.

The question for today is:

  Is reading and writing the property tree one of the
  safe parts?  Is a process that does nothing except
  read and write the tree always/sometimes/never
  thread safe?

I can imagine getting into trouble if somebody sets a
listener on some property, and then calls opengl from
the listener, whereby writing to the property tree 
becomes thread-unsafe.  Or are all the listener callbacks
somehow carefully serialized?

There are lots of ways of serializing the network traffic,
but it would be a shame to do that if not necessary.  If
the property tree is thread safe, that makes everything
simpler and better.

==

Bottom line:  Does anybody know the right way to make
this work?

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Setting OBS on command line/.fgfsrc

2010-03-03 Thread John Denker
On 03/03/2010 06:13 AM, Alasdair wrote:
> I am using FG cvs and have recently noticed that commands such as:
> fgfs --prop:/instrumentation/nav/radials/selected-deg=63
> no longer have any effect.
> 
> --prop:/instrumentation/nav/frequencies/selected-mhz=108.90
> works fine.

I observe the same bug here.  Only nav[0] is affected.

It's a bug in gps.cxx.  Or maybe multiple bugs.

Why the gps.cxx code has a compiled-in reference to
/instrumentation/nav[0]/radials/selected-deg is a
mystery to me.

Why the gps.cxx code thinks it can reach over and set 
the OBS on a KI-209 or similar indicator head is a 
mystery to me.

Why the gps.cxx code runs at all in aircraft that don't 
have a gps receiver installed is also a mystery to me.

The following workaround is something Mr. Spock would 
describe as "crude but effective":

diff --git a/src/Instrumentation/gps.cxx b/src/Instrumentation/gps.cxx
index 2f7455b..9bca740 100644
--- a/src/Instrumentation/gps.cxx
+++ b/src/Instrumentation/gps.cxx
@@ -250,6 +250,7 @@ GPS::Config::getExternalCourse() const
 void
 GPS::Config::setExternalCourse(double aCourseDeg)
 {
+  return;
   if (!_extCourseSource) {
 return;
   }

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Recording and playback

2010-03-02 Thread John Denker
On 03/02/2010 12:39 PM, luca nastro wrote:

> I need an information.
> The recording and playback generates a file flight.out,

I assume you used a command similar to
 
  --generic=file,out,20,flight.out,playback

If this assumption is not correct, please ask a more
specific question.

>  what are the values of the columns of this file? 

The format is controlled by Protocol/playback.xml
under the "FGDATA" directory on your system. 

There is a glimmer of documentation on the 
recording/playback system in Docs/README.IO

> I make charts about a session of flight.

Be warned that there are multiple bugs in the
recording/playback system, including FG code,
simgear code, and FG data.  Some of the bugs
have been found and fixed.  Others have not.

The code fixes that exist are available from
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-simgear/commits/sport
and
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/sport

The data tree is not hosted on gitorious;  the
easiest place to get the patch to playback.xml
is from this list, under the heading
  multiple --generic record/playback errors


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] SGFile::readline

2010-03-02 Thread John Denker
On 03/02/2010 01:08 AM, Tim Moore wrote:

> Furthermore, I can't parse the "suspend development" comment. It is coming
> from some alternate reality of git usage. 

We are definitely talking about two different realities.

>  First off, I did identify the
> commit id where you made changes to use getline:  d5e6aa6235f7.

That's a commit to the "FG source tree".  Until that hex
number was mentioned, I thought we were talking about the 
code over in the simgear tree.

> There aren't
> any more yet. You could have just told me that!

You could have asked!

If "not any more yet" is the answer, I still don't know 
what the question is (or was).

> At the start of this very thread
> you sent us the commit id of a change you wished to share and have committed
> to the sources. In the specific case of getline changes to flightgear, you
> have so far only made one commit which uses getline. How hard is it to send
> us that?

It's not hard.  If you want me to send it, all you have to 
do is ask.  But I'm pretty sure that's not what you want ... 
and I still don't know what you do want.

I don't routinely send patches to this list, for multiple
reasons.  One reason is the fact that most list-members are 
not interested in the details.  I assume anybody who wants 
the details will ask ... or look at the git-logs ... or 
whatever.

Another reason is the fact that at the time of the first 
announcement it is quite impossible to know what further 
developments will take place.  As of today I can answer a
specific question by saying "not any more yet" or some such,
but it is impossible in principle to answer such questions 
in advance.

Also, when I am told "the code looks OK" followed by
suggestions for further developments, it is hard for
me to translate that into a question that could be
answered by saying "not any more yet" or into a wish 
that could be granted by emailing a patch.

>  If you're saying that you might make several commits
> in implementing a change and can't identify a specific commit that contains
> it, then you need to reconsider how you're working in light of git workflow.

That's not even remotely what I'm saying.  I know how to
make git branches.  I grow a lot more branches than I 
push to gitorious.  I suspect you do too.

> I'm not going to look at the global state of your repo at a
> point in time and tease out the changes related to some feature you'd like
> merged.

I understand that.  Really I do.

Now, it's your turn.  You need to understand that I cannot
continually rebase eleventeen different bits of work so that
"X" is sitting on top of the tree, on the off-chance that
somebody will want to look at "X" today ... without any way
for me to know what "X" is.

If you want cooperation, all you need to do is ask.  For
example, if you want me to put "X" into a special branch and 
push it somewhere, let me know what "X" is and I'll see what 
I can do.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] SGFile::readline

2010-03-01 Thread John Denker
On 03/01/2010 04:13 PM, Tim Moore wrote:

> I'm looking at io/sg_file.cxx in the sport branch. I see the old
> implementation of readline inside an
> "execrable_readline" #ifdef. I don't see any other implementation of
> readline.

> Perhaps my question would go away if I fetched your sport flightgear repo
> too; 

You could fetch it into a branch of whatever you're
already using.  Gitorious makes this easy and efficient.

> since I don't have a commit id for the patch where you presumably
> changed "readline" to "getline", I haven't. 

In such a branch, you could do this:
  git log --oneline --author=jsd sg_file.cxx

It will tell you all three commit-ids.  There is no need
to "grovel through logs".

There will in general not be any such thing as "the"
commit-id because I cannot suspend development while 
waiting for somebody to get interested in this-or-that 
bit of work I did.

The track record indicates that most of the FG code I 
write eventually gets incorporated into the "official"
repository, but it is delayed months or years.

> But it seems to me that you
> could easily implement the old "execrable" readline interface in terms of
> your spiffy getline and save yourself the trouble of changing "readline"
> calls to "getline."

I don't see an easy way of reimplementing readline _per se_
in terms of ::getline or SGFile::getline.  The semantics
are too different, especially for small buffers;  getline
might hang in cases where readline would not, and dealing
with that would be more work than I'm being paid to do.

It is probably true that any code that uses readline 
would be improved by switching to the getline semantics,
but again, finding all uses of readline, understanding
them, and switching them over is more work than I'm
being paid to do.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] SGFile::readline

2010-03-01 Thread John Denker
On 03/01/2010 03:56 PM, Tim Moore wrote:

> getline looks fine. 

:-)

> Instead of getting steamed about readline, why not
> implement it in terms of getline?

I did.

If this is really a question, please clarify the question.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] A Question about External FDM and different viewpoints

2010-02-28 Thread John Denker
On 02/25/2010 02:26 PM, Grimes, John R Mr CTR USAF AFMC AFRL/RWGG wrote:
> I am currently running FlightGear 2.0.0 (snagged from the ibiblio ftp
> site) that I compiled on my Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit system.  Compiled up no
> problem, but I have noticed that when I attempt to setup a master/slave
> scenario that I get some odd artifacts on slave display.  The scene on
> the slave looks as if the position of the aircraft is lagged behind, and
> then it suddenly tries to jump to the correct location. 

It's a bug.  Actually at least five bugs.

> These artifacts
> don't seem to appear in cockpit view or tower view, but they make all
> the other views almost unusable.  

Yes.

> I have checked the developers lists,
> and I have seen people mention problems similar to this, but nobody
> seems to have a good solution. 

I assume you found the threads on 
 --[Flightgear-devel] multiple --generic record/playback errors
 --[Flightgear-devel] null-FDM and UFO-FDM instrument outages

Note that the "external" FDM is a synonym for "null" FDM.

>  It could be a double precision problem,

There are at leaast two such double precision / float / roundoff 
bugs, although perhaps only one is biting you at the moment since
you are using the "udp" protocol.  So far I have
 -- patched the "playback" protocol,
 -- patched io/sg_file.cxx,
 -- patched generic.cxx, and
 -- patched some of the aircraft's nasal files...

... which solves some of the shudder and jitter problems but not all, 
especially not in the non-cockpit views.

  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/sport
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-simgear/commits/sport

> or it could be the FG is propagating the view forward by a certain
> amount of time and correcting the view when a new frame of data comes
> in.

Something like that wouldn't surprise me.

> Here is the master system's command line I am using.



Thanks for the detailed, professional bug report


=

If you want to pursue it, please go ahead.  You won't be
duplicating any effort of mine, because I'm kinda busy at the 
moment.  I doubt I will have large amounts of time to devote 
to this set of bugs in the next week or so ... but feel free
to ask questions.

Suggestion:  A majority of the jitter / shudder in non-cockpit
views is readily observable with the ascii "playback" protocol,
not just with the binary "udp" protocol.  And I got as far as
fixing gs_file.cxx so that it can read from a named pipe (FIFO)
which I reckon might make the debugging faster and easier.

Suggestion:  Scrutinize the console log for Nasal error messages.
If you see something about "nil used in numeric context" then
some .nas file somewhere is referencing a variable that is not
being set by the FDM.  Bear in mind that this is treated as a
serious error, and defeats all the functionality in that .nas
file.  Such things are easy to fix;  in particular, for the
default c172p, the following patch helps a lot:

diff --git a/Aircraft/c172p/Nasal/action-sim.nas 
b/Aircraft/c172p/Nasal/action-sim.nas
index 7e79f51..d5defe3 100644
--- a/Aircraft/c172p/Nasal/action-sim.nas
+++ b/Aircraft/c172p/Nasal/action-sim.nas
@@ -26,6 +26,11 @@ var panelLights = 
props.globals.getNode("controls/lighting/panel-norm", 1);
 var dhN_ft = props.globals.getNode("gear/gear[0]/compression-ft", 1);
 var dhR_ft = props.globals.getNode("gear/gear[2]/compression-ft", 1);
 var dhL_ft = props.globals.getNode("gear/gear[1]/compression-ft", 1);
+
+dhN_ft.setDoubleValue(dhN_ft.getValue() or 0);
+dhR_ft.setDoubleValue(dhR_ft.getValue() or 0);
+dhL_ft.setDoubleValue(dhL_ft.getValue() or 0);
+
 var propGear0 = props.globals.getNode("gear/gear[0]", 1);
 var propGear1 = props.globals.getNode("gear/gear[1]", 1);
 var propGear2 = props.globals.getNode("gear/gear[2]", 1);


... or you could patch the protocol to set a fuller set of
variables ... or both.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] SGFile::readline

2010-02-23 Thread John Denker
On 02/15/2010 03:19 AM, Tim Moore in part wrote:

> readline() is pretty gross;

The best way to remove the grossness is to extirpate
readline and replace it with something that has a 
nicer interface ... such as returning a std::string.

I wrote a getline function to do this.  Much cleaner.
No need for 16kbyte buffers all over the place.  (*)

The patch can be found in the usual place:
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-simgear/commits/sport

Over on the FG side, this requires some minor upgrades:
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/sport

I tried asking for suggestions and/or review off-list, 
but it appears that mail to timoor...@gmail.com never 
goes through.  Is it a list-mail address only?



*) Note: Also, I have dreams of implementing a non-blocking
version of this some day ... something that would have been
a nightmare given the readline-style interface.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] variant FDM

2010-02-22 Thread John Denker
On 02/21/2010 01:25 PM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:

> I think you may be looking at an out-of-date version of
> the getstart manual.

I don't think so.  "cvs up" says my copy is already up to 
date.  The log includes updates through 28 Jan 2010.  The
passages I quoted earlier were quoted from this version.

In order to compile getstart.pdf from sources required 16
patches, and even after that it compiles with 96 errors and 
32 warnings, but it does compile and I do look at it.  
 
> A while ago I went through and re-documented the command-line
> options. 

Yes, thanks for that.

> for the --fdm option, we now have the following text:
> 
> "Select the core flight model. Options are jsb, larcsim, yasim,
> magic, balloon, external, pipe, ada, null. This option can normally 
> be ignored, as the -aircraft option will set the FDM correctly."
> 
> I think that is sufficient for most users.

That is unlikely to be sufficient for any user who wants to
actually _use_ those options.

Just because something is allowed by the command-line syntax 
checker doesn't mean it actually works.  Most of the FDM 
sub-options don't actually work, and were probably never intended 
to work.

The users would be better off if we either
 a) change the code to conform to the documentation, which seems
  unlikely, or
 b) change the documentation to conform to what the code actually
  does.

===

I checked what happens when the aforementioned FDMs are applied
to the default c172p:

ada = aircraft, as initialized, is sunk into the ground up to 
  the top of the cowling;  none of the primary flight
  controls work.

balloon = not expected to be very useful;  in fact the aircraft, 
  as initialized, is sunk into the ground completely, and
  none of the primary flight controls work.

external = synonym for null

jsb = the default, so the option is a no-op

larcsim = segfault

magic = works the way its author intended.  Not as useful as fdm=ufo

null = works, useful, especially after I patched the FDM code and
   patched the aircraft configuration and patched the playback
   protocol.

pipe = binary protocol;  semantics not documented in getstart.pdf or
   anywhere in Docs/*

yasim = error exit:
"Unexpected tag 'fdm_config' found in YASim aircraft description"
"Program exited with code 01."


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] null-FDM and UFO-FDM instrument outages

2010-02-20 Thread John Denker
On 02/20/2010 07:01 AM, I wrote:

>  -- Replaying /engines/engine[0]/rpm has no effect ... even though
>   setting the same property via the property browser has the
>   expected effect: causing the engine to spin at the specified
>   rate.
...
> It's one thing to say more properties need to be set ... but
> when the properties are being set and the instruments still
> don't work, I have no idea how to get them to work.
> 
> If the FDM should do more ... what more should it do?


Progress report:  I found out one important thing that the FDM
(or the playback mechanism) should be doing:  calling listeners!

In particular, I attached a listener to /engines/engine[0]/rpm.
 *) Setting this property via the property browser causes the
  listener to be called, and everything is hunky-dory.
 *) During ordinary non-playback JSBSim operation, the listener
  apparently gets called after every FDM iteration, as it should.
 *) During playback, the listener does not get called by the
  FDM.

This needs to get fixed.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] null-FDM and UFO-FDM instrument outages

2010-02-20 Thread John Denker
On 02/20/2010 02:23 AM, Erik Hofman wrote:

> Well, The Null-FDM does what is say, nothing. It's expected that an 
> external application fill in the gaps. I did once create a support FDM 
> for ACMS (black-box) data but I don't think it touches anything but 
> position and velocity data.
> I guess that to get the cockpit fully working in playback a new support 
> FDM has to be written that fills in the missing gaps.

That's all true.  For instance, the playback.xml protocol should
not bother to replay the state of the starter, since the process
whereby the starter starts the engine is under control of the
FDM, and the null FDM doesn't do this at all.  It works better
for the protocol to just replay the engine RPM.  Similarly if you
want the rate-of-turn needle to work, the protocol should replay
/instrumentation/turn-indicator/indicated-turn-rate

However ... that doesn't solve the mystery.  I have already made
those changes to my copy of playback.xml, and things are still
messed up:
 -- The rate-of-turn needle flickers between correct (replayed)
  rate and zero.  (This may be related to the longstanding
  flicker/shudder problems with external views during playback.)
 -- Replaying /engines/engine[0]/rpm has no effect ... even though
  setting the same property via the property browser has the
  expected effect: causing the engine to spin at the specified
  rate.
 -- As previously mentioned, the LOC and GS needles are frozen,
  even though the properties used by the animations in vor.xml
  are being set.

It's one thing to say more properties need to be set ... but
when the properties are being set and the instruments still
don't work, I have no idea how to get them to work.

If the FDM should do more ... what more should it do?

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] null-FDM and UFO-FDM instrument outages

2010-02-19 Thread John Denker
On 02/19/2010 05:59 PM, S Andreason wrote:

> I ran into the same problem with using generic instruments when 
> developing the bluebird over 2 years ago. Some instruments rely on 
> properties that are only updated by the FDM, and the ufo doesn't.

That's valuable information. Can you be more specific?

> So I wrote my own nasal to fill in those gaps, and/or I made my own 
> instruments by modifying a line or two from the generic version.

Can you be more specific?  What nasal are we talking about?
Which instruments?

> In another case, the instrument(s) look to the property
> systems/electrical/outputs
> and so does not work because the ufo does not have an electrical bus. :)

That's an interesting hypothesis.  However, I see nothing in
vor.xml to support this hypothesis.

There are lots of aircraft with no electrical bus.  I would
consider it a bug in the instrument for it to demand an
electrical bus and not implement a reasonable default.  This
should be easy to fix.  Which instruments are you referring 
to?  

> Another property the ufo fdm does not update is
> altitude-agl
> 
> etc. etc. 

Can you be more specific?  I'm pretty sure the LOC and GS
needles don't depend on altitude-agl.  As far as I can tell,
the only variables the OBS head depends on are being set.
That's why I put up a screen shot including a property
browser window.

> So you can't change the FDM and expect everything that rely on 
> a specific FDM, to keep working.

I'm pretty sure I don't expect that.  See my note on the
subject from a couple of hours ago.

However, given that the null fdm is documented to work
(according to README.io and according to getstart.pdf) I 
think we should discuss it when it doesn't work, especially 
given that it comes so very close to working.

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[Flightgear-devel] null-FDM and UFO-FDM instrument outages

2010-02-19 Thread John Denker
Here's a mystery for you: Please take a look at
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/img48/null-fdm-instruments.png

Most of the instruments are working, but the rate-of-turn 
indicator and the Nav 1 CDI/GS needles are frozen.  You 
can see from the property browser that the Nav receiver is
properly tuned up and is trying to drive the needles.

This is observed during playback using the null FDM.  The
same sort of frozen instruments are observed using the UFO
FDM.

The mystery gets deeper because I also observed that clicking
on the OBS setting knob does successfully rotate the OBS card
on Nav 1.

I have debugged this as far as I can.  I'm stuck.  I don't
have any good hypotheses as to why some instruments are
working while some parts of other instruments are not 
working.

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[Flightgear-devel] variant FDM

2010-02-19 Thread John Denker
I recently discovered that it is possible to fly the C172p
(and presumably lots of other aircraft) using --fdm=ufo.

This has the potential to be very useful, for instance if
you want to pose the aircraft for pictures, and for navaid
"flight check" missions.

This really ought to be documented.

Conversely the getstart manual ought to document the fact
that in most other cases, a given aircraft cannot be
switched from one FDM to another.  The manual says the
FDM is "to be chosen at runtime" but most combinations
don't work, and most users will give up before they
discover any non-default working combinations.

See also next message.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Proposed new set of splash screens

2010-02-19 Thread John Denker
On 02/19/2010 01:48 AM, Erik Hofman wrote:
> I've created a new set of splash screens based on the images Durk 
> created about two weeks ago.
> Does anyone have any objections to committing them or does anybody have 
> other possible splash screens to choose from?
> 
> http://home.telfort.nl/sp004798/emh/Splash1.png
> http://home.telfort.nl/sp004798/emh/Splash2.png
> http://home.telfort.nl/sp004798/emh/Splash3.png
> http://home.telfort.nl/sp004798/emh/Splash4.png
> http://home.telfort.nl/sp004798/emh/Splash5.png


1) This is important.  It is always nice to make a good first
 impression.  The splash screen is the first thing a new user
 sees.

2) The composition of the pictures is nice and artistic.

3) The resolution is not sufficient to survive zooming to
 fit a large HD screen.  Jaggies appear in the image.  The
 jaggies are particularly noticeable along sharp edges, 
 such as the leading edge of aircraft, and on the lettering.

 Obvious options include
 -- Shipping hi-res and low-res versions of each image.
 -- Shipping some images hi-res and other images low-res.
 -- Shipping only hi-res images and scaling them down 
  "on the fly" when running on a screen with fewer pixels.
 -- Over a *small* range of sizes, don't zoom at all, but
  rather show a less-than-fullscreen image in the middle
  of the screen, surrounded by tasteful wallpaper.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] http://wiki.flightgear.org/robots.txt

2010-02-18 Thread John Denker
On 02/18/2010 04:07 AM, Rob / EViLSLuT wrote:

> Is the syntax of the robots.txt correct? Could be wrong.

Well, technically, it should say "Googlebot" instead of just
"Google".  But this is such a common mistake that Googlebot
answers to the name Google, and no harm is done.
 
> To my knowledge this is what google likes,
> 
> User-agent: *
> Disallow: /
> 
> User-agent: Googlebot
> Allow: /

That's not the recommended form.  According to
  http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

there is no "Allow:" directive.  Certainly there is no advantage 
to saying "Allow: /" ... and no disadvantage to using the canonical
form "Disallow: " which disallows nothing.

There are situations where an "Allow:" directive would be helpful,
but this is not one of them.

Also, due to differences in opinion as to the interpretation of 
the robots.txt non-standard, it is a bit unpredictable whether 
bots will respond to the "first match" or "best match" ... so 
it is good practice to put more-specific directives ahead of 
less-specific ones.  In particular, the "*" wildcard should be
last, as it is currently on the site.

In any case, the larger point remains:  There are plenty of
perfectly reasonable, desirable bots that are being excluded by 
the current file.  Conversely there are plenty of truly horrible 
bots that will never be excluded by any robots.txt file.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] http://wiki.flightgear.org/robots.txt

2010-02-17 Thread John Denker
On 02/17/2010 04:54 PM, Jon Stockill wrote:

> Presumably because there are some truly awful bots out there, and google 
> at least is known to be well behaved.

But the truly awful bots don't look at robots.txt.

In fact one of the easiest ways to catch rogue bots
is to disallow a small part of the site and then
blacklist anybody who goes there.

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[Flightgear-devel] http://wiki.flightgear.org/robots.txt

2010-02-17 Thread John Denker
http://wiki.flightgear.org/robots.txt

User-agent: Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

#User-agent: Slurp
#Crawl-delay: 5
#Disallow:

=

Really?  A collective, open-source project that doesn't
allow anybody other than google to index the documentation?

Is there a reason for this?



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Re: [Flightgear-devel] SGFile::readline

2010-02-17 Thread John Denker
On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 5:43 PM, I wrote:

>> 2) It would be even less of a problem to do the following
>> the specified number of times:
>>  -- detect the EoF
>>  -- close the file
>>  -- reopen the file and start reading again.
>>
>> This has the advantage that it works the same as lseek
>> for regular disk files, and works a whole lot better
>> for FIFO files.
>>
>> It also removes the need for the "sleep" and simplifies
>> the scenario in item (1) above.

On 02/15/2010 10:36 AM, Tim Moore wrote:

> That would work too.

This is done.

The patches for this can be found at
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-simgear/commits/sport

Note that libsgio.a now uses boost to provide thread-safe
user-friendly error messages.  This requires a couple of
changes to Makefile.am files over on the FG side.  The
patches for this are available separately:
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/sport

===

Bottom line:  I believe this fixes all the long-standing
bugs in SGFile::readline ... and implements the entire 
feature set, including repeat.

  I have not checked the corresponding code in other files
  such as sg_socket.cxx.  I would not be surprised to learn
  that there exist other bugs similar to the longstanding 
  sg_file.cxx bugs.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-16 Thread John Denker
On 02/12/2010 01:34 AM, I wrote:

>  I haven't yet made the corresponding
> fixes to the FG side of things.

Well, I finally got around to it.

The patch can be found in the usual place:
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/sport

The commit message says:
Fix bug:  substrings in LDFLAGS
Fix bug:  substrings in CPPFLAGS
Fix bug:  now check libraries (not just headers) for plib.
Fix it so that configuration works (mostly) as easily on
 64-bit machines as on 32-bit machines, even for users who
have compiled OSG from source and need to specify --with-osg=/some/dir.
Check for working CXX compiler.

More informative error messages.
Spelling.
Slightly more informative logging.
More parallel to SimGear version.


==

I also ported some of the better ideas from the FG side
back to the SG side:
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-simgear/commits/sport

=

For today, the headline is that I've finally got it to 
the point where I can do "make distclean ; make" for SG 
and FG and the whole thing compiles without so much as 
a warning ... and without requiring 64-bit users to say 
any weird incantations over the compile scripts.  The
same procedures that have always worked on 32-bit
machines now work on 64-bit machines, AFAICT.

  There are still major weaknesses in the configure/build 
  system.  Some things that never worked right (on 32-bit
  machines or otherwise) still don't work.  I will discuss 
  those in a separate thread.  And I'll wait a while before 
  discussing them, so nobody will get confused about which 
  bug is which.

There sure was a big nest of bugs in acinclude.m4.  It's 
funny how when those get fixed, the issues that some people 
tried to call "a bug between keyboard and chair" and "an 
unfortunate mistake" aren't problems anymore.  And there's
much less need for new, arcane documentation.

As soon as these fixes get committed, I will consider
the 64-bit configuration snafu a closed issue.  Things
are definitely moving in the right direction.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Modifying OSG lib checks in FG configure.ac

2010-02-16 Thread John Denker
On 02/16/2010 01:45 PM, John Denker wrote:

OK, I think we can put this sub-issue to bed.

I fixed it so that compiling and installing simgear
no longer requires the OSG or OpenThreads runtime
libraries.  The *.h header files are still required.

This turned out to be easier than I thought it would
be.  It took hours, not days.

The patch can be found at:
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-simgear/commits/sport

=

I still haven't fixed any of the issues over on the
FG side of things, and this little patch actually
makes that *more* necessary.  *Somebody* needs to be
doing the OSG checks.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Web Site

2010-02-16 Thread John Denker
On 02/16/2010 11:27 AM, Curtis Olson wrote:

> Here's one possible idea.  Why not whip together a replacement front page
> and maybe a sample sub-page, put it in a temporary location, and we can take
> a look.  


That's a great idea.

Taking the next step along that road, it would be
nice to bring up an alpha-test version of the entire
FG web site.  We are currently alpha-testing the
executables and the data tree;  why not alpha-test
the web site?  There are dozens, maybe hundreds of
changes that need to be made, to make the web site
conform to the 2.0.0 release.

Specific suggestion: as a starting point, how about 
copying the whole tree to a subdirectory such as 
  http://www.flightgear.org/2.0.0/

and then updating the files on that branch one by
one.

Also cvs.flightgear.org needs some TLC.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Modifying OSG lib checks in FG configure.ac

2010-02-16 Thread John Denker
On 02/08/2010 08:34 AM, Geoff McLane wrote:

> you seem to be yelling something. 

On 02/16/2010 11:47 AM, Geoff McLane wrote:

> It seems WHATEVER the reason is, IF it involves
> a SimGear AC_CHECK_LIB() then _REMOVE_ the
> AC_CHECK_LIB() from SG configure.ac ;=))
> 
> There is no reason to check 'libraries' on a
> 'library' build, point blank! SG is a set of
> libraries, and need have _NO_ library checks
> to build them!

-- Using exclamation points does not make incorrect 
   statements more correct.  
-- Using all caps does not make incorrect statements
   more correct.  
-- Using underlined all caps seems to be going a bit 
   far.
-- Accusing other people of yelling is, ummm, 
   inconsistent to say the least.  Try setting a good 
   example.

We need to distinguish 
 *) what the actual dependencies of simgear are
 *) what the dependencies should be
 *) what dependencies are checked by ./configure

As previously explained more than once, the fact is, 
at the moment, several parts of simgear do depend on 
OpenThreads.  It is therefore entirely appropriate 
for ./configure to check for this, so that if needed, 
an informative error message can be given to the user.

Several people have suggested re-arranging simgear
to remove this dependency.  If somebody wants to
do that, great, please go ahead.  After the actual
dependency is removed, then it would be appropriate
to remove the dependency-check from ./configure.
Then and not sooner.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Modifying OSG lib checks in FG configure.ac

2010-02-15 Thread John Denker
On 02/15/2010 11:53 AM, Geoff McLane wrote:

> Just did a full SG cvs update, and this
> acinclude.m4 patch _BREAKS_ the SG build for me! 

OK.  It's a bug.

Thanks for testing.  

Here's the patch.  Please try again.



The reason for fussing with SG first is simple:  this
is where Joe User is going to get into trouble.  It
doesn't matter how good the FG configuration is if
Joe cannot get to that stage.  And trust me, SG
will not build if it cannot find the OpenThreads
libraries, which are bundled in with OSG these days,
and located in lib64/ by default.

A lot of stuff I do makes more sense if you look
at it from the Joe User point of view.

I will fix up the FG side of things eventually.  




commit 5764d1b7da5cb25947f6ada47aa45fe6b2272cec
Author: John Denker 
Date:   Mon Feb 15 14:50:29 2010 -0700

Fix sneaky bug: 'mylibdir' variable getting trampled.

diff --git a/acinclude.m4 b/acinclude.m4
index 889cbf4..0059bbf 100644
--- a/acinclude.m4
+++ b/acinclude.m4
@@ -113,14 +113,14 @@ for subexdir in $subexdirs ; do
 dnl On 64-bit machines, if lib64/ exists and is not identical to lib/
 dnl then it should be listed here, listed ahead of lib/.
 mylibdir64="${exdir}/lib64${subexdir}"
-mylibdir="${exdir}/lib${subexdir}"
+mylibdir32="${exdir}/lib${subexdir}"
 
 if test "x86_64" = $(uname -m) \
-  -a ! ${mylibdir64} -ef ${mylibdir} ; then
+  -a ! ${mylibdir64} -ef ${mylibdir32} ; then
 wi_EXTRA_LDIR($mylibdir64)
 fi
 
-wi_EXTRA_LDIR($mylibdir)
+wi_EXTRA_LDIR($mylibdir32)
 
 progdir="${exdir}/bin${subexdir}"
 wi_EXTRA_PDIR($progdir)


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[Flightgear-devel] sub-option documentation : repeat

2010-02-15 Thread John Denker
On 02/15/2010 09:22 AM, Tim Moore wrote:

>  a useful command-line option. 

The "repeat" sub-option would be even more useful if
it were more widely known.  It is not mentioned in
--help --verbose and not mentioned in getstart.pdf.

It would be nice if somebody would 
 a) At least mention README.IO in getstart.pdf and
  also in --help --verbose.

 b) Also perhaps expand the discussion of --generic 
  in getstart.pdf to include the full range of 
  sub-options, perhaps by incorporating the relevant 
  passage from README.IO.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] SGFile::readline

2010-02-15 Thread John Denker
On 02/15/2010 09:22 AM, Tim Moore wrote:

>> Hint:  The sleep statement ensures that the reader (fgfs)
>> will not see an EoF at the point where one cat of bytes
>> ends and the next begins.

> I'd probably do without the "sleep" and write while true; do cat bytes;
> done >/tmp/pipe.flog & instead.

1) That doesn't work at the moment (but see below!).
The problem is that when the first cat completes,
the reader (fgfs) gets and EoF, and that's the end 
of the show.



> It's good that you've removed the lseek from the usual path through
> readline. 

:-)

> But, as I said, your patch breaks a useful command-line option. It
> would be no big deal to insert an lseek to the beginning of the file in your
> new readline; if the file descriptor doesn't support lseek, then no harm
> done.


2) It would be even less of a problem to do the following
the specified number of times:
  -- detect the EoF
  -- close the file
  -- reopen the file and start reading again.

This has the advantage that it works the same as lseek
for regular disk files, and works a whole lot better
for FIFO files.

It also removes the need for the "sleep" and simplifies
scenario in item (1) above.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] SGFile::readline

2010-02-15 Thread John Denker
On 02/15/2010 03:19 AM, Tim Moore wrote:

> Some of
> the grossness is due to a hack which lets a file be treated as an infinitely
> repeating stream of bytes, very convenient for demos at SIGGRAPH. Your patch
> breaks that hack. I won't argue too strongly that the hack belongs in
> SGFile, but I want to have some story for replacing it, possibly in
> FGGeneric::process(), before we blow it away.

Please try this story:

   mkfifo /tmp/pipe.flog
   sleep 100 > /tmp/pipe.flog &
   while true ; do cat bytes > /tmp/pipe.flog ; done & 
   fgfs --generic=file,in,$rate,/tmp/pipe.flog,$protocol

Now that readline does not do seeks, it can read named
pipes (FIFOs) just fine, and this opens up all sorts of
non-hackish way of solving the SIGGRAPH problem ... and
a host of previously-unsolved problems as well.  For
example, it allows you to switch from one stream of
bytes to another without restarting fgfs.

Seems like a win/win to me.

If this story is not good enough, please clarify the
question.



Hint:  The sleep statement ensures that the reader (fgfs)
will not see an EoF at the point where one cat of bytes
ends and the next begins.

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[Flightgear-devel] SGFile::readline

2010-02-14 Thread John Denker
The following commit message should be self-explanatory:

commit 224ce694fa8ba7dede0e413b81e5dd52e5e65f15
Author: John Denker 
Date:   Thu Feb 11 21:13:19 2010 -0700

Problem was: readline writes out-of-bounds, corrupts memory.
Problem was: readline seeks on files that don't support seek.
Problem was: readline fails to detect seek errors, returns garbage.
Problem was: readline wildly inefficient, re-reading same data
  again and again.

Add utility to test for read/write bugs.
Replace readline with a version that is more compact, more
maintainable, more extensible, more correct, more efficient, and
able to read from named FIFOs and other things that don't seek.


For details (476 lines worth) see:
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/readline.patch

==

The code in sg_file.cxx appears to run parallel to code 
in other places such as sg_socket.cxx  I wouldn't be 
surprised if the other places needed fixing, too ... 
but I haven't looked.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Modifying OSG lib checks in FG configure.ac

2010-02-12 Thread John Denker
On 02/12/2010 10:00 AM, Geoff McLane wrote:

> 
> RE: README.OSG UPDATE
> 
> I have now beefed up the FG README.OSG
> information 
> 
> I think I have tried to cover everything,
> very carefully!

Thank you for your constructive contributions to the
configuration system, both in terms of debugging the
code and debugging the documentation.  I know this is
both tricky and laborious.

As a rule, whenever I see a piece of code that requires
a long stretch of tricky documentation, I have to
suspect that it would be easier and better to upgrade
the code than to upgrade the documentation.

In this case it appears that adding about five lines
of code to acinclude.m4 will remove the need for at
least five paragraphs of documentation.  It turns 
out to be quite possible to each the configuration 
system to search lib64.

I think I've got it to the point where somebody
who wants to compile OSG from source can do so on
a 64-bit machine using the same simple procedures
that have always worked on 32-bit machines.  In
simple cases specifying --with-osg=/some/dir will
now suffice.

The attached patch applies on top of the big patch
I submitted about 12 hours ago.

The attached patch contains only a few lines of
"interesting" code.  The patch looks bigger than
that because I tried to normalize some of the
indentation and other trivial issues.



commit 237265e977cf775c5adbff813517381a2d4abe3c
Author: John Denker 
Date:   Fri Feb 12 13:20:13 2010 -0700

Fix it so that configuration works (mostly) as easily on
64-bit machines as on 32-bit machines, even for users who
have compiled OSG from source and need to specify --with-osg=/some/dir.

Also minor cleanup of the source.
Also minor improvements to the logging.

diff --git a/acinclude.m4 b/acinclude.m4
index 851e120..0d645d9 100644
--- a/acinclude.m4
+++ b/acinclude.m4
@@ -23,6 +23,8 @@ if test -r $incdir ; then
 fi
 echo "   + added -I$incdir" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
 fi
+else 
+echo "   + IDIR is not accessible: '$myincdir'" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
 fi
 ])
 dnl
@@ -49,6 +51,8 @@ if test -r $mylibdir ; then
 fi
 echo "   + added -L$mylibdir" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
 fi
+else 
+echo "   + LDIR is not accessible: '$mylibdir'" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
 fi
 ])
 dnl
@@ -71,6 +75,8 @@ if test -r $progdir ; then
echo "   + appended $progdir to \$PATH" 
1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
;;
esac
+else 
+   echo "   + PDIR is not accessible: '$progdir'" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
 fi
 ])
 dnl
@@ -94,23 +100,32 @@ if test "$subexdirs" = "" ; then
subexdirs="-"
 fi
 for subexdir in $subexdirs ; do
-if test "$subexdir" = "-" ; then
-   subexdir=""
-else
-   subexdir="/$subexdir"
-fi
-for exdir in $exdirs ; do
-   if test "$exdir" != "/usr" || test "$subexdir" != ""; then
-   incdir="${exdir}/include${subexdir}"
-   wi_EXTRA_IDIR($incdir)
+if test "$subexdir" = "-" ; then
+subexdir=""
+else
+subexdir="/$subexdir"
+fi
+for exdir in $exdirs ; do
+if test "$exdir" != "/usr" || test "$subexdir" != ""; then
+incdir="${exdir}/include${subexdir}"
+wi_EXTRA_IDIR($incdir)
+
+dnl On 64-bit machines, if lib64/ exists and is not identical to lib/
+dnl then it should be listed here, listed ahead of lib/.
+mylibdir64="${exdir}/lib64${subexdir}"
+mylibdir="${exdir}/lib${subexdir}"
+
+if test "x86_64" = $(uname -m) \
+  -a ! ${mylibdir64} -ef ${mylibdir} ; then
+wi_EXTRA_LDIR($mylibdir64)
+fi
 
-   mylibdir="${exdir}/lib${subexdir}"
-   wi_EXTRA_LDIR($mylibdir)
+wi_EXTRA_LDIR($mylibdir)
 
-   progdir="${exdir}/bin${subexdir}"
-   wi_EXTRA_PDIR($progdir)
-   fi
-done
+progdir="${exdir}/bin${subexdir}"
+wi_EXTRA_PDIR($progdir)
+fi
+done
 done
 ])
 dnl

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-12 Thread John Denker
On 02/09/2010 03:08 AM, Erik Hofman wrote:

> I've updated configure of both FlightGear and SimGear to bail out if the 
> OpenScenegraph libraries are not found. 

Thanks!  That is a significant improvement.

That helped directly ... and also helped indirectly,
by giving me a valuable clue about how to fix some 
of the other bugs in the autoconfiguration setup.

The commit message should be self-explanatory.

This deals with the SG side of things, which is
where Joe User will usually first encounter
problems.  I haven't yet made the corresponding
fixes to the FG side of things.

commit 4eb51bb90f4e8c2ca9842ad248b5e0eb57e400f7
Author: John Denker 
Date:   Fri Feb 12 01:25:25 2010 -0700

Fix bug:  substrings in LDFLAGS
Fix bug:  substrings in CPPFLAGS
Fix bug:  now check libraries (not just headers) for plib.
More informative error messages.
Spelling.
Slightly more informative logging.

diff --git a/acinclude.m4 b/acinclude.m4
index 9e46179..851e120 100644
--- a/acinclude.m4
+++ b/acinclude.m4
@@ -6,19 +6,23 @@ dnl
 AC_DEFUN([wi_EXTRA_IDIR], [
 incdir="$1"
 if test -r $incdir ; then
-   case "$CPPFLAGS" in
-   *-I${incdir}*)
-   # echo "   + already had $incdir" 1>&6
-   ;;
-   *)
-   if test "$CPPFLAGS" = "" ; then
-   CPPFLAGS="-I$incdir"
-   else
-   CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I$incdir"
-   fi
-   echo "   + found $incdir" 1>&6
-   ;;
-   esac
+already=""
+for CPPflag in $CPPFLAGS ; do
+   if test  "_$CPPflag" = "_-I${incdir}" ; then 
+already=yes
+break
+fi
+done
+if test -n "$already" ; then
+echo "   + already had -I$incdir" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
+else
+if test "$CPPFLAGS" = "" ; then
+CPPFLAGS="-I$incdir"
+else
+CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I$incdir"
+fi
+echo "   + added -I$incdir" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
+fi
 fi
 ])
 dnl
@@ -28,19 +32,23 @@ dnl
 AC_DEFUN([wi_EXTRA_LDIR], [
 mylibdir="$1"
 if test -r $mylibdir ; then
-   case "$LDFLAGS" in
-   *-L${mylibdir}*)
-   # echo "   + already had $mylibdir" 1>&6
-   ;;
-   *)
-   if test "$LDFLAGS" = "" ; then
-   LDFLAGS="-L$mylibdir"
-   else
-   LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L$mylibdir"
-   fi
-   echo "   + found $mylibdir" 1>&6
-   ;;
-   esac
+already=""
+for LDflag in $LDFLAGS ; do
+   if test  "_$LDflag" = "_-L${mylibdir}" ; then 
+already=yes
+break
+fi
+done
+if test -n "$already" ; then
+echo "   + already had -L$mylibdir" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
+else
+if test "$LDFLAGS" = "" ; then
+LDFLAGS="-L$mylibdir"
+else
+LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L$mylibdir"
+fi
+echo "   + added -L$mylibdir" 1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
+fi
 fi
 ])
 dnl
@@ -50,12 +58,9 @@ dnl
 AC_DEFUN([wi_EXTRA_PDIR], [
 progdir="$1"
 if test -r $progdir ; then
-   case "$PATH" in
-   *:${progdir}*)
-   # echo "   + already had $progdir" 1>&6
-   ;;
-   *${progdir}:*)
-   # echo "   + already had $progdir" 1>&6
+   case ":$PATH:" in
+   *:${progdir}:*)
+   echo "   + already had $progdir in \$PATH" 
1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
;;
*)
if test "$PATH" = "" ; then
@@ -63,7 +68,7 @@ if test -r $progdir ; then
else
PATH="$PATH:$progdir"
fi
-   echo "   + found $progdir" 1>&6
+   echo "   + appended $progdir to \$PATH" 
1>&AS_MESSAGE_LOG_FD
;;
esac
 fi
diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 710a42f..38ae49f 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -437,11 +437,18 @@ esac
 AM_CONDITIONAL(HAVE_FRAMEWORK_PLIB, test "x$ac_cv_framework_PLIB" != "x")
 
 AC_CHECK_HEADER(plib/ul.h)
-if tes

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Shader issue on ATI cards

2010-02-11 Thread John Denker
On 02/11/2010 04:14 PM, jean pellotier wrote:

> a temporary fix is to remove the "gl_FrontMaterial.ambient" part in 3
> files,

Wow!  Direct hit!  

> here's the diff:

That makes a huge improvement.  I'm running with shader-effects
turned on now, for the first time in months.

Thanks!

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Nasal/*.nas ... order of loading, #include <...>, require(...)

2010-02-11 Thread John Denker
On 02/11/2010 04:11 PM, Csaba Halász wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 10:59 PM, John Denker  wrote:
>> On my machine I observe that the various scripts in
>> the Nasal/ directory get loaded in some hard-to-predict
>> order.
>>
>> That means that if you write a script called foo.nas,
>> it's hard to know whether it will get processed before
>> or after math.nas and/or props.nas.
>>
>> So the question is, what to do if foo.nas wants to make
>> use of the features provided by the other scripts?
>>
>> I know about the trick of using settimer(stuff, 0).
> 
> The usual trick is to attach a listener to /sim/signals/nasal-dir-initialized.

That is similar to the settimer trick.  Either one will
bisect the problem.  That is, if you have simple pairwise
interactions, you can split each pair and thereby control
the ordering.  But what if the interactions are more 
complicated, e.g. a depends on b which depends on c which 
depends on d?

How hard would it be to handle the general case?  There
are standard techniques ...


> Also, you can load nasal modules dynamically, such as:
> 
> if (!contains(globals, "MPCarriersNW")) {
>   io.load_nasal(getprop("/sim/fg-root") ~
> "/Aircraft/MPCarrier/Systems/mp-network.nas",
> "MPCarriersNW");

That's a powerful procedure, but it only works _after_ 
io.nas has been loaded ... so AFAICT it doesn't really 
answer the question I was asking.

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[Flightgear-devel] Nasal/*.nas ... order of loading, #include <...>, require(...)

2010-02-11 Thread John Denker

On my machine I observe that the various scripts in
the Nasal/ directory get loaded in some hard-to-predict
order.

That means that if you write a script called foo.nas,
it's hard to know whether it will get processed before
or after math.nas and/or props.nas.

So the question is, what to do if foo.nas wants to make
use of the features provided by the other scripts?

I know about the trick of using settimer(stuff, 0).

But what if we wanted to use math functions in the
code that actually runs at the time the scripts are
loaded?

In particular, does nasal have any sort of "#include"
directive (as in c++) or "require" or "use" directive 
(as in perl)?  If so, is it documented somewhere?  If 
not, has anybody thought about how to implement it?


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Shader issue on ATI cards

2010-02-11 Thread John Denker
On 02/11/2010 01:41 AM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:

> A number of people with ATI cards are having problems with the
> default shaders on the current windows v2.0.0 RC:

I'm not surprised.  The "weird dark pall" has been #1 
on my list of FG bugs for months.  The bug is known to 
be shader-related.

The bug is quite serious;  the sim is unbearable to
look at with shader-effects turned on.

I have observed this equally with Debian Squeeze and
Ubuntu Karmic.

> Does anyone on the -dev list have an ATI card that is working (or
> not) with the shader options?

I have a Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of 256-bit GDDR5.
It uses the RV770 chipset.

I've run a sampling of tests from the phoronix test
suite and never noticed any problems.  FG is the
only application that suffers from either the
pathetically low frame rate or the shader-related
pall.

> Are you seeing any error messages in the console at all?

No messages.

> Usually if there is a shader issue, then some error messages are displayed 
> there.
> However the colour problems you are seeing are quite strange.

Strange indeed.

The details of the pall seem to depend on time of 
day (angle of sun?).

The pall depends very stronly on direction of view.
For some directions, the pall is not noticeable, but
panning the view a tiny amount brings the pall back
in full force.

===

As a tangentially-unrelated remark:  no matter whether 
shader-effects are turned on or not, I observe that the
/sim/rendering/random-vegetation property has no effect.

Is it obsolete?  What is/was it supposed to do?


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] multiple --generic record/playback errors

2010-02-09 Thread John Denker
On 02/09/2010 01:14 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:
> Right, I wouldn't consider playback.xml to be the most well conceived
> generic protocol configuration file, ...

Is there some other protocol file that should be 
used instead?

None of the other Protocol/*.xml files seem 
particularly suited to the record/playback
task.  Or am I overlooking something?


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] multiple --generic record/playback errors

2010-02-09 Thread John Denker
On 02/09/2010 01:14 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:

> lon/lat are being written out as a float.  This should be switched to
> double.  The format specifier is %f but it might be better to specify a
> fixed number of decimal places appropriate for the required visual
> precision.  I don't have my calculator handy, but maybe try 8 or 10 decimal
> places (%.8f)

OK!  Thanks for the clue.  Two patches attached.

At the next level of detail:
  -- I think that needs to be %.8lf with an "L"
  -- The code in generic.cxx needed repair

That makes the cockpit view muuuch better.  Cockpit
view is usable now.

=

Now for the not-so-good news.

The chase views are still messed up.

Do we think the cause will be another float versus
double issue?  I checked the s in playback.xml
and didn't find any obvious problem children beyond
latitude and longitude.  What am I missing?




commit 21f8a5cb05b7f3cc054e1821380c2dcc2322add8
Author: John Denker 
Date:   Tue Feb 9 15:17:30 2010 -0700

latitude and longitude need to be handled as DOUBLE precision

diff --git a/Protocol/playback.xml b/Protocol/playback.xml
index 1b4b3ab..ff09489 100644
--- a/Protocol/playback.xml
+++ b/Protocol/playback.xml
@@ -341,15 +341,15 @@


 latitude-deg
-float
-%f
+double
+%.10lf
 /position/latitude-deg

 

 longitude-deg
-float
-%f
+double
+%.10lf
 /position/longitude-deg

 
@@ -837,13 +837,13 @@


 latitude-deg
-float
+double
 /position/latitude-deg

 

 longitude-deg
-float
+double
 /position/longitude-deg

 
commit 3fc163be23aa69f1fe7fecb0c3e8a7f6e236c431
Author: John Denker 
Date:   Tue Feb 9 15:12:19 2010 -0700

Improve handling of type DOUBLE in generic i/o protocol.

diff --git a/src/Network/generic.cxx b/src/Network/generic.cxx
index a91f783..31b007a 100644
--- a/src/Network/generic.cxx
+++ b/src/Network/generic.cxx
@@ -240,8 +240,8 @@ bool FGGeneric::gen_message_ascii() {
 
 case FG_DOUBLE:
 val = _out_message[i].offset +
-_out_message[i].prop->getFloatValue() * _out_message[i].factor;
-snprintf(tmp, 255, _out_message[i].format.c_str(), (float)val);
+_out_message[i].prop->getDoubleValue() * 
_out_message[i].factor;
+snprintf(tmp, 255, _out_message[i].format.c_str(), (double)val);
 break;
 
 default: // SG_STRING

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] multiple --generic record/playback errors

2010-02-09 Thread John Denker
On 02/09/2010 12:43 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:

> The first thought that comes to mind is to double check the precision
> (significant digits) of the data you are writing out.  If you are writing
> out heading for instance with 0 or 1 decimal digits or position with 4
> decimal digits, that could account for this sort of thing.

Well, if so, it is a bug in the "record" part of the
record/playback system.  All I did was

 --generic=file,out,20,flight-16756.flog,playback

in accordance with the instructions on page 79 of
getstart.pdf

The other three bugs I reported are pretty clearly
playback bugs, but I logged the "shudder" problem 
as a bug in the "record/playback system" precisely 
because I have not yet figured out how much of the
problem is associated with the record part and how
much is associated with the playback part.

Here are a few lines from the start of the .flog file.
Maybe you can tell us whether the precision of 
representation is part of the problem:

0.00,0.027000,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,3.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,37.628723,-122.393280,-.00,0.00,0.424000,117.92,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,-32.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00
-0.002625,0.027000,-0.003876,0.00,-0.142857,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,3.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,37.628723,-122.393288,6.002851,-0.022103,2.858213,117.899147,0.00,0.00,-0.040693,0.21,0.000850,0.007724,0.019386,-0.002601,-0.024386,0.000784,-0.000850,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.606968,0.012416,-32.186577,-0.003875,0.00,0.024371,0.024371,-0.142830
-0.002625,0.027000,-0.003876,0.00,-0.142857,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,3.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,37.628723,-122.393288,6.002861,-0.254527,2.863728,117.890442,0.00,0.00,-0.000928,0.23,0.24,-0.020869,0.015593,-0.025827,-0.003966,-0.001286,-0.24,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.610066,0.142982,-32.186104,-0.003875,0.00,0.024371,0.024371,-0.142830
-0.002625,0.027000,-0.003876,0.00,-0.142857,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,3.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,37.628723,-122.393288,6.002876,-0.256716,2.865460,117.891769,0.00,0.00,-0.000438,0.26,0.13,-0.024178,0.016417,-0.029108,-0.003181,-0.001458,-0.13,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.611039,0.144212,-32.186050,-0.003875,0.00,0.024371,0.024371,-0.142830
-0.002625,0.027000,-0.003876,0.00,-0.142857,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,3.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,37.628723,-122.393288,6.002889,-0.257374,2.867039,117.893646,0.00,0.00,-0.000528,0.29,0.17,-0.026744,0.017575,-0.031892,-0.003013,-0.001593,-0.17,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.611926,0.144581,-32.186005,-0.003875,0.00,0.024371,0.024371,-0.142830
-0.002625,0.027000,-0.003876,0.00,-0.142857,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,3.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,256717856,25

[Flightgear-devel] multiple --generic record/playback errors

2010-02-09 Thread John Denker
Has anybody used the --generic record/playback feature
recently?

It seems to have some very noticeable bugs:


When using the --generic record/playback feature, I 
observe numerous view-related problems:

 * Helicopter view: the size of the aircraft throbs 
  at a high rate, getting bigger and smaller many 
  times per second. This makes this view unusable.

 * Chase view: similar throbbing. This makes this 
  view unusable.

 * Chase view without yaw: the azimuthal direction 
  of view shudders, shifting left and right by a 
  large amount many times per second. Both the 
  aircraft and the scenery shudder. This makes this 
  view unusable.

 * Cockpit view: small but distracting weird changes 
  in heading, especially at low speed, as when taxiing.


--

When using the --generic record/playback feature, the 
engine starter does not engage when the “s” key is pressed.

FWIW I was able to start the engine by using the property 
browser, setting its running property and then giving it 
some rpm.

-

When using the --generic record/playback feature, the hud is 
visible in the helicopter view, the chase views, and the 
tower views, which looks quite silly.

When using the --generic record/playback feature, when 
playback reaches end of file, it prints on the console at 
a high rate an endless stream of errors:
Error reading data.
Error reading data.
Error reading data.
Error reading data.
Error reading data.

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[Flightgear-devel] scenery bug: KSQL stray building

2010-02-08 Thread John Denker
At KSQL there is reproducibly a building sitting
partially on a taxiway and even extending onto 
the runway a little bit.

  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/img48/ksql-building-on-rwy.png


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-08 Thread John Denker
On 02/08/2010 10:58 AM, Geoff McLane wrote:

> But John, what IS the _BUG_ you refer to?

Thank you for asking.
 
> Your bug list page only points out osgFX
> library could not be found. This is NOT a BUG!!!
> Definitely a user OSG installation problem, but
> _NOT_ a SG/FG BUG!

Are you asking me or telling me?
 
> If you had read the screen during the
> ./configure ... step you would have seen
> something like :-
> Checking for osgGetVersion in -losg: no
> That 'no' is a 'clear indication' of trouble
> pending...

I'm telling you, again, that statement is completely 
false.  No such indication, clear or otherwise, is 
observed chez moi when reproducing the bug I am 
talking about.  A detailed typescript of the 
configuration step can be found at
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/bad-configure.logg

The log file written by ./configure itself is at:
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/config.log

The corresponding typescript of the make step is 
at:
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/bad-make.logg

Unless grep is lying to me, no failed check for osg 
can be seen during the configuration step.

grep -i osg bad-configure.logg 
  + ./configure --with-osg=/games/orig/usr --with-plib=/games/orig/usr 
--prefix=/games/orig/usr
  osg prefix is /games/orig/usr
  checking osg/Version usability... yes
  checking osg/Version presence... yes
  checking for osg/Version... yes

> And after the fact, in the config.log, like -
> ...
> configure:13918: checking for osgGetVersion in -losg
> configure:13953: g++ -o conftest -g ... blah blah...
> configure:13959: $? = 0
> configure:13977: result: no

Again, completely untrue.

grep -i osg config.log
  $ ./configure --with-osg=/games/orig/usr --with-plib=/games/orig/usr 
--prefix=/games/orig/usr
  configure:8397: checking osg/Version usability
  configure:8397: checking osg/Version presence
  configure:8397: checking for osg/Version
  ac_cv_header_osg_Version=yes
  HAVE_FRAMEWORK_OSG_FALSE=''
  HAVE_FRAMEWORK_OSG_TRUE='#'
  osg_FRAMEWORKS=''

> That "result: 'no'" is a 'clear indication' that a
> libosg, containing an exported function osgGetVersion,
> can NOT be found, using the 'standard' and -L/paths/...
> given to g++, ...

Still completely false.

>> But that seems beside the point. The configure
>> script _DID_ tell you it could _NOT_ find the
>> OSG libraries - you just ignore it. You did not
>> heed its clear indication that you were headed
>> into trouble...

This is getting kinda repetitious.  They say a word
to the wise suffices.  There's more I could say,
but I'll stop here.



Maybe I have overlooked something ... but IMHO 
whatever it is, Joe User is likely to overlook it
also.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-08 Thread John Denker
On 02/08/2010 08:34 AM, Geoff McLane wrote:

> But that seems beside the point. The configure
> script _DID_ tell you it could _NOT_ find the
> OSG libraries - you just ignore it. You did not
> heed its clear indication that you were headed
> into trouble...

That statement is completely false.

There was no indication from ./configure that
there was any impending trouble.  The first
and only sign of trouble was when the "make"
step failed in a surprising way.

> Here we are TRYING hard to help you, and
> you seem to be yelling something. Before your
> long rant I was going to say ---

I spoke softly for a long time and was ignored.

When people announce that the bug is "closed",
based on completely false assumptions, I feel
I should explain why the assumptions are false.
When the number of false assumptions becomes
large, the explanation becomes lengthy.

I also point out, again, that I am not asking
anybody to "help" me.  I have workarounds for
this bug.  Have had for years.  I am just
trying to help Joe User.  I was slapped for
pointing this out previously, but it remains
true.


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[Flightgear-devel] scheduling and threading

2010-02-08 Thread John Denker
First, a specific question:  Is there any reason why, 
when the simulator is paused, the http property browser 
should be stalled?  I would have expected the network 
interface to be completely asynchronous.

This is an important question, because one of the big
reasons for pausing the simulator is for looking at
the properties.

A similar question applies to the jpg-httpd imaging
system.  Is there any reason why that should not be
asynchronous?

Indeed it would be nice if the JPEG stuff ran in its 
own thread.  Some people have very powerful multi-
processor systems, and it's embarrassing for the
display to freeze every time a snapshot is taken.

  In particular, imagine a student/instructor situation,
  where the instructor has his own screen and keyboard.
  The instructor wants to take a snapshot for postflight
  discussion.  The student really doesn't like it when
  the sim freezes in the middle of a maneuver.

The non-http image snapshot system (the "F3" key) has 
issues, too.  I observe that it freezes the system so 
badly that the airplane makes "engine restarting" noises 
after every snapshot.

More generally:  Have there been any design decisions
made as to what functions should continue to work
during pause, and which should not?  Obviously flight
dynamics should be paused ... but I notice that during
pause I can still wiggle the joystick and see the yoke
respond, and I can switch views using the v / V / ^V
keys, and I can tilt/pan/zoom the view at least at 
first ... but on the other hand, when I wiggle the 
yoke the flight control surface do not respond, and 
after a few seconds I lose the ability to tilt and 
pan the view.  Zoom continues to work.

I observe that I can use the pop-up menus including
the property browser during pause, but I cannot use
the http property browser.

Can somebody explain how this is supposed to work?

Even more generally:  To what extent is FG thread-safe?
At one extreme, is this merely an aspiration for the
distant future?  At the other extreme, is this an
established fact and requirement?  Are there perhaps
bits that are known to be thread-safe, and can be 
threaded, so long as we stay away from the naughty
bits?  Is the answer different for MSVC versus Linux?


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-08 Thread John Denker
One thing I'd like to clarify:

I wish people wouldn't be so quick to assume that
Joe User is a non-programmer and/or an idiot.

I never said that, and I never meant to imply that.
Let's suppose Joe has a PhD in biochemistry, and
has written 100,000 lines of code in the last few
years.

There are *lots* of scenarios where Joe and other
non-idiots might want to compile OSG from source.
  -- For starters, Joe might have access but *not*
   root access to a super-high-end graphics system.
  -- Maybe Joe has root access but doesn't want to
   use it for this purpose, for security reasons.
  -- Maybe Joe wants to install multiple versions,
   for comparison purposes.
  -- Maybe Joe's distro provides a slightly elderly
   version of OSG, not advanced enough for use with
   FG, and Joe doesn't want to upgrade his entire
   software base just so he can try out some game.

One of the things I like about Linux is that it 
allows users to do things without requiring every
user to be superuser.

I emphasize yet again that messing with ld.so.conf
is nowhere near being a solution (let alone a
documented solution, much less an out-of-the-box 
solution) in use-case scenarios of this sort.

  The inappropriateness of messing with ld.so.conf
  is particularly obvious in scenarios where there
  are multiple installed versions.  In such scenarios,
  appropriate solutions include passing LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  in the environment at runtime, or passing "rpath"
  options to the linker at link-time.

I remain quite aware that there are ways of getting
things to work in Joe's scenarios -- quite a few ways 
actually -- but they all involve doing something
that the average biochemist will find non-obvious.
The LIB_POSTFIX flag, for example, is a fine idea,
but it is not mentioned anywhere in the OSG *or* FG 
documentation so far as I can tell.

The claim that Joe User can install OSG and FG from 
source "out of the box" is untenable.

===

The claim that I wrongly specified putting OSG into
lib64 is entirely baseless.  None of my configuration
options specify anything of the sort.  The configuration
flags specify a higher-level directory;  OSG creates
the lib64 directory all by itself.  This is the OSG
default behavior.

More generally, I must disagree with the claims that 
the problems arise because OSG has been installed in 
a "wrong" place.

The crux of the argument is that ./configure has two
phases, one where it finds stuff to make sure all 
needed components have been installed, and another
where it emits makefiles.

Common sense suggests that the first phase and the
second phase should play by the same rules.

In particular, the first phase of ./configure operates 
by compiling tiny test programs.  

I'm still waiting for somebody to explain why the
./configure script knows how to compile these test 
programs just fine, but doesn't know how to compile 
SG and FG.


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[Flightgear-devel] property browsing

2010-02-07 Thread John Denker
Hi --

I made multiple improvements to the http property browser.
 -- much easier to navigate up the tree
 -- clearer indication of property type
 -- possible to re-examine property that has just been set

See
  http://gitorious.org/~jsd/fg/sport-model/commits/sport



=


Some minor mysteries I encountered while testing the property browser:

 *) What is the difference between /rendering and /sim/rendering?
Is there any available guidance about which should be used
for what?

 *) What is /models ?

 *) What is /orientation/yaw-deg ?
Is it supposed to be related to heading, or to slip angle, or 

 *) It appears VEC3D and VEC4D property types are defined, but
   -- they are not fully supported
   -- there are no examples of them in the main property tree 
("globals")
   -- there is some code in simgear/scene/material/mat.cxx and
./Effect.cxx that does a few things with them.
   -- There is no nasal support at all.

   Is that about right?  Are there plans to promote these types
   to fully-supported status?


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[Flightgear-devel] triplicate code

2010-02-07 Thread John Denker
Do we really need three pieces of code that try to do the
same thing?



simgear/props/props_io.cxx: static const char * getTypeName 
(simgear::props::Type type)

src/Network/props.cxx:  static string getValueTypeString(const 
SGPropertyNode *node)

src/GUI/property_list.cxx:  static string getValueTypeString( const 
SGPropertyNode *node )


==


commit 92b369deb2654351ce4e385a773ccbe01113ce14
Author: John Denker 
Date:   Sun Feb 7 02:37:55 2010 -0700

Export the code that translates the _type_ of a property node
to a human-readable string.

diff --git a/simgear/props/props_io.cxx b/simgear/props/props_io.cxx
index 48244c7..214d73f 100644
--- a/simgear/props/props_io.cxx
+++ b/simgear/props/props_io.cxx
@@ -410,9 +410,10 @@ void readProperties (const char *buf, const int size,
 #define INDENT_STEP 2
 
 /**
- * Return the type name.
+ * Convert the _type_ of a property node
+ * to a human-readable string.
  */
-static const char *
+const char *
 getTypeName (simgear::props::Type type)
 {
   using namespace simgear;
diff --git a/simgear/props/props_io.hxx b/simgear/props/props_io.hxx
index b619c04..22c0cfb 100644
--- a/simgear/props/props_io.hxx
+++ b/simgear/props/props_io.hxx
@@ -68,6 +68,13 @@ void writeProperties (const std::string &file,
 bool copyProperties (const SGPropertyNode *in, SGPropertyNode *out);
 
 
+/**
+ * Convert the _type_ of a property node
+ * to a human-readable string.
+ */
+const char *
+getTypeName (simgear::props::Type type);
+
 #endif // __PROPS_IO_HXX
 
 // end of props_io.hxx


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configurator plebis

2010-02-06 Thread John Denker
On 02/06/2010 08:06 AM, Erik Hofman wrote:

>> That does not fix the main problem.  It does not fix
>> the bug that I am reporting.
> 
> The problem you reported is that the linker can't locate the library.
> If it's location is defined in ld.so.conf (and after running ldconfig) 
> it can.

No, that is not the bug I am reporting.

Beware that the word "linker" is ambiguous.  ld is 
different from ld.so.  More precisely, /usr/bin/ld 
is different from /lib/libdl.so* ... different 
program, different purpose, different specifications.

For example, I can change the behavior of ld.so by
setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  That cannot and should 
not affect ld.


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-06 Thread John Denker
On 02/06/2010 07:54 AM, Csaba Halász wrote:

> On 64 bit systems /lib64 should really be a symlink to /lib (similarly
> for /usr/lib64) as that is the native architecture.
> I say copy the stuff from lib64 to lib and create the symlink.

That is one way of doing it.

By my count there are at least four different workarounds
for the configuration snafu:
 -- LIB_POSTFIX during OSG compilation
 -- moving or copying the OSG libraries
 -- symlink
 -- LDFLAGS during SG and FG compilation/linkage

The fact that workarounds exist for this bug seems to 
be rather strong evidence that the bug exists.

The claim that everything just works "out of the box"
is untenable.

One option would be to document one or more of these
workarounds.  A better option would be to fix things
like acinclude.m4 so that workarounds are no longer
necessary, so that things really do work "out of the
box".

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configurator plebis

2010-02-06 Thread John Denker
On 02/06/2010 02:32 AM, Erik Hofman wrote:

> As I see it this might actually be a problem for the Linux vendor. They 
> should have added /usr/lib64 to /etc/ld.so.conf

That does not fix the main problem.  It does not fix
the bug that I am reporting.

ld.so.conf is meaningful at runtime.  The problem is
that the program never gets to runtime, because "make"
fails at link-time.

Also ./configure is documented to allow the libraries 
to be in places other than /usr/anything.  It says 
the configuration is correct, but then emits buggy 
makefiles.

> Another thing that has bugged me about osg though is that is places it's 
> plugins in /usr/(local/)lib/osgPlugins-
> This is very hard to catch in a configure script and is only solved by 
> adding that directory to ld.so.conf

Messing with the system-wide /etc/ld.so.conf is not 
the "only" way of dealing with the libraries at runtime.

In particular, it should be -- and is -- possible to
compile, link, and run FG without having root access
to the machine.  See also important note below.

Chez moi it suffices to add 

  CXXFLAGS="$CXXFLAGS -Wl,-rpath=$parent/usr/lib64"

to the environment of every ./configure invocation.
Another way would be to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH in the
runtime environment.  This is all fine *provided*
the user can get past the buggy "./configure ; make"
step.  In any case, these runtime problems (and 
solutions) are irrelevant to the bug I am reporting.


==

Note:

It is actually very important for me, and for other
people I support, to have various versions of the
libraries installed in various places other than 
default, global, system locations such as /usr/lib/.

One reason is that I often need to run multiple different
versions of FG.
 -- I need to run the _sport model_.  Experience shows
  that most of the features of the sport model eventually
  get incorporated into the main line ... but it often
  takes months or years for this to happen.
 -- I need to run the stock version whenever I want
  to report a bug, to guard against the extremely
  remote possibility that there are bugs in the sport
  version that are not in the stock version.



On 02/06/2010 04:15 AM, Jon Stockill wrote:
>> Curtis Olson wrote:
>>> I don't doubt that there could be some lib vs. lib64 inconsistencies, 
>>> but FilghtGear builds right out of the box for me on 64bit Fedora 12 ... 
>>> no hitches at all that I recall and it has done so for quite some time.
>> 
>> Same for me on slackware64.

Does that include downloading OSG from the OSG site and
compiling it according to the instructions, on a machine
where the "distro-package" version of OSG has not been 
installed?

It would be odd if people were required to compile FG
from source but forbidden to compile OSG from source.

I would remind people that for much of the time in
recent years, the required-for-FG version of OSG has
been ahead of the distro-package version.  So being
able to compile OSG from OSG source (not distro source)
is not a trivial or wacky idea.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configurator plebis

2010-02-05 Thread John Denker
On 02/05/2010 06:43 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:
> This simply isn't the case as I have observed it.  Everything compiles out
> of the box here.  I have access to two 64 bit Linux machines.  I run Fedora
> if that makes a difference.  OSG, FlightGear, Simgear, plib go together
> without expert magic using the default configure paths.  We could work to
> try to figure out what the difference is between your experience and others
> who have also been successful with 64 bit machines.  There's probably a
> difference in methodology, or paths or something.  Or we could stand on our
> soapboxes and make grand proclamations.  I was hoping we were doing the
> former.  I did share my "configure" options.  

And I have shared mine.

> Please understand I'm not
> trying to claim you are doing something stupid which it appears is how you
> interpreted my message.  I was hoping to drill down to what we were doing
> that was different.  I'd prefer to make configure script changes with a full
> understanding of the issues rather than hacking and slashing everything up
> ... especially in consideration that the current configure scripts do work
> on 64bit machines for a lot of people.

Did you try downloading the OSG 2.8.2 source from
  http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg/wiki/Downloads
and compiling it, as mentioned in the use-case example 
I posted?

All evidence suggests that this is the sticking point.

AFAICT all the major distributions install OSG in .../lib/.
That presumably applies to source RPMs as well as binaries.  
In contrast, downloading it from openscengraph.org and 
compiling it, without any undocumented expert incantations, 
installs it in .../lib64/ -- unless they have changed
something very recently without telling anybody.

If you're going to do the experiment, you need to 
temporarily de-install the distro's version, or 
otherwise take pains to make sure it doesn't muddy
the waters.

If this is not sufficient understanding, please re-ask 
the question.



The note from Martin Spott on 02/05/2010 03:33 PM indicates
that he understands the issues.

>>   -D LIB_POSTFIX=""

Actually I suspect that should have said

  -DLIB_POSTFIX:STRING=""

since OSG is using cmake these days.  

Another workaround -- the one I actually prefer -- is to
let OSG live under .../lib64/ but add

   LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L$parent/usr/lib64"  \
   LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L$parent/usr/lib"  \
   ./configure

to the SG and FG ./configure invocations.

Both of these workarounds fall into the category of 
undocumented expert incantations.  Neither is a good
substitute for actually fixing the autoconf setup.

=

Please consider this line of argument:  

Whenever the OSG libraries are truly missing or truly
misplaced, the FG ./configure script behaves as it should.
It prints a user-friendly error message

  You *must* have the OpenSceneGraph support library installed on your system
  to build this version of SimGear!

and then exists without writing any makefiles.

It is interesting that when OSG is installed under lib64/,
./configure can find the libraries long enough to decide 
*not* to throw any errors.  I take this as quite strong
evidence that the OSG libraries are not missing and are
not misplaced.  Alas, ./configure blissfully proceeds to
write makefiles that cannot find those libraries.

This is a bug.  The bug is not hard to reproduce.  The
bug is almost certainly a problem for anybody who compiles 
OSG from source downloaded from the OSG site.


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[Flightgear-devel] configurator plebis

2010-02-05 Thread John Denker
Let summarize a few obvious points:

1) Everybody who is participating in this conversation
is doing so in order to help ordinary non-expert users.
None of use will directly benefit from any cleanup
in the autoconfiguration scripts.

Everybody on this list is an expert.  We all figured 
out years ago how to configure, compile, and link FG.
We do not need to explain to each other how to do it.

As a related point, the whole effort toward making 
a new "release" depends on people who want to help
ordinary non-expert users.  Almost everybody on this 
list could happily use the development version forever.

2) Consider the following use-case scenario.  Think
about it from the viewpoint of Joe Schmoe, somebody 
who does not have as much skill or as much luck as 
the people on this list.
 -- Joe has a fairly standard 64-bit Linux box.
 -- Joe configures, compiles, and installs OSG from
  source, "straight out of the box" according to the 
  directions.  So far so good.
 -- Joe configures, compiles, and installs plib 
  "straight out of the box" according to the directions.  
  So far so good.
 -- Joe configures simgear "straight out of the box"
  according to the instructions.  The ./configure
  script says the configuration is correct.  However 
  the configuration is not correct.  The makefiles 
  generated by ./configure produce link errors.

This is a bug.  This is so obviously a bug that I am
embarrassed to discuss it.

Yes, you can get FG to compile "out of the box" if 
you compile OSG using a completely undocumented
non-obvious option.  This is entirely true but it 
entirely misses the point.  On the other side of the
same coin, you can configure OSG "out of the box" 
if you are willing to configure FG with completely 
undocumented non-obvious options.  This, too, is
entirely true but entirely misses the point.

Instead the point should be that Joe Schmoe is going 
to have a bad experience.  When the simgear "make" 
fails at a late step, Joe is going to have little 
idea what went wrong, and less idea how to fix it.  
The fact that *I* know how to fix it is not the 
point.  The fact that ten other people on this list 
know how to fix it is not the point.

The ./configure script is supposed to check that all
the right libraries are found.  If they are not found
it is supposed to print an informative, user-friendly
message.  If they are found, it is supposed to remember
where they were found and then build a makefile that
knows about them.  The current ./configure script
does not meet specifications.  This is a bug.  It is 
not a problem for me, but it is a problem for Joe.

3) See item 1.  The only reason we are having this
conversation is because we want to be unselfish.  We
want to make things better for Joe.

4) There's a lot more I could say about this, but I'll
stop here for now.  If anybody has further questions, 
please ask.

===

If you are wondering about the Subject line:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribunus_plebis

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-05 Thread John Denker
On 02/05/2010 03:17 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:

> Do you have details of the configure or make error you are seeing posted
> somewhere?

Yes.  Please take a look at
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/htm/bug-list.htm#bug-64bit

As it says there:

make[1]: Entering directory `/mnt/games/orig/fgs/tests'
g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I../src/Include   -I/games/orig/usr/include 
-I/usr/local/include  -g -O2 -I/games/orig/usr -D_REENTRANT -MT est-epsilon.o 
-MD -MP -MF .deps/est-epsilon.Tpo -c -o est-epsilon.o est-epsilon.cxx
mv -f .deps/est-epsilon.Tpo .deps/est-epsilon.Po
g++  -g -O2 -I/games/orig/usr -D_REENTRANT  -L/games/orig/usr/lib 
-L/usr/X11R6/lib -L/usr/local/lib -o est-epsilon est-epsilon.o -lglut -lGLU 
-lGL -lXmu -lXt -lSM -lICE -lXi -lXext -lX11 -lrt -ldl -lm  -losgFX -lglut 
-lGLU -lGL -lXmu -lXt -lSM -lICE -lXi -lXext -lX11 -lrt -ldl -lm 
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -losgFX
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

The problem is not confined to the tests/ directory. 
If I let the make continue, there will be numerous errors. 
Basically every "ld" step fails.

Additional root-cause analysis can be found on the 
aforementioned web page.

If you need more details than that, please let me know.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-05 Thread John Denker
On 02/05/2010 02:38 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:
> I don't doubt that there could be some lib vs. lib64 inconsistencies, but
> FilghtGear builds right out of the box for me on 64bit Fedora 12 ... no
> hitches at all that I recall and it has done so for quite some time.

Chez moi plib and simgear install into lib/
while osg installs into lib64/

How do you get around that?  How do recommend I get
around that?

Obviously there are ways, but the only ways I know are 
complicated and devious ... not exactly out-of-the-box.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] severe erosion of the terrain

2010-02-05 Thread John Denker
On 02/05/2010 11:26 AM, leee wrote:

> Are those clouds on the horizon or is it distant scenery?  

Scenery.  Mountainous terrain.  Clearly recognizable as such.  

No clouds anywhere:
  METAR  012345Z 0KT 99SM CLR 15/M01 A2992

> If it's 
> scenery then funnily enough, back in Feb2008, I reported a bug 
> where exactly the opposite seemed to be happening i.e. the scenery 
> was ok up to a radius of about 12nm around the aircraft but was 
> invisible beyond that.

Was that ever reproducible?  Was a fix ever devised?

Has anybody tried to reproduce the erosion issue?  It
remains 100% reproducible chez moi.


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[Flightgear-devel] [patch] Write pid into property tree and optionally into a file.

2010-02-05 Thread John Denker
Two closely-related new features:
  property: /sim/pid
  option:   --pid=/pathto/some/file.pid

Having the pid available is useful for many purposes,
including sending a signal for debugging.

Somebody should please check that this works under MSVC.
It looks to me like pretty standard c++ but it's still
good to check.


commit cc188f7499c03417b1d4a3cb296702ba7b4d67fa
Author: John Denker 
Date:   Fri Feb 5 10:12:15 2010 -0700

Write pid into property tree and optionally into a file.

diff --git a/src/Main/main.cxx b/src/Main/main.cxx
index d5ac553..38202e4 100644
--- a/src/Main/main.cxx
+++ b/src/Main/main.cxx
@@ -885,6 +885,7 @@ bool fgMainInit( int argc, char **argv ) {
 upper_case_property("/sim/presets/runway");
 upper_case_property("/sim/tower/airport-id");
 upper_case_property("/autopilot/route-manager/input");
+fgSetInt ("/sim/pid", getpid() );
 
 // Scan the config file(s) and command line options to see if
 // fg_root was specified (ignore all other options for now)
diff --git a/src/Main/options.cxx b/src/Main/options.cxx
index 3b4354f..9eb41b5 100644
--- a/src/Main/options.cxx
+++ b/src/Main/options.cxx
@@ -39,6 +39,7 @@
 #include // strcmp()
 #include 
 
+#include   /* ofstream */
 #include 
 #include 
 
@@ -1234,7 +1235,20 @@ fgOptFgviewer(const char* arg)
 return FG_OPTIONS_OK;
 }
 
-
+static int
+fgOptPid(const char* arg)
+{
+pid_t pid = getpid();
+ofstream out;
+out.open(arg, ofstream::out);
+out << pid << endl;
+out.close();
+if (!out.good()) {
+   SG_LOG(SG_GENERAL, SG_ALERT,
+  "Unable to write pid (" << pid 
+  << ") to file '" << arg << "'");
+}
+}
 
 static map fgOptionMap;
 
@@ -1449,6 +1463,7 @@ struct OptionDesc {
 {"version",  false, OPTION_FUNC,   "", false, "", 
fgOptVersion },
 {"enable-fpe",  false, OPTION_FUNC,   "", false, "", 
fgOptFpe},
 {"fgviewer",false, OPTION_FUNC,   "", false, "", 
fgOptFgviewer},
+{"pid",  true, OPTION_FUNC,   "", false, "", 
fgOptPid },
 {0}
 };
 

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[Flightgear-devel] configuration snafu

2010-02-05 Thread John Denker
I'm glad to see people are cleaning up the autoconf stuff.

Here's yet another area that needs some TLC:  There appears 
to be little or no chance that the autoconf system will do 
the right thing on 64-bit machines.

I'm hoping this will be easy for some autoconf guru to fix.
I would imagine there are well-known standard techniques
for coping with lib/lib64 issues.

This is currently item #45 on this list of bugs:
  http://www.av8n.com/fly/fgfs/htm/bug-list.htm#bug-64bit


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