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FlightGear Newsletter August 2009: Difference between revisions
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add Generic binary i/o protocol
(Update on the recent shader check-in) |
(add Generic binary i/o protocol) |
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==What's New in CVS== | ==What's New in CVS== | ||
===Configurable Shaders=== | |||
Tim Moore has committed a significant change to the graphics system that will allow much easier integration of OpenGL shaders within the simulator. | Tim Moore has committed a significant change to the graphics system that will allow much easier integration of OpenGL shaders within the simulator. | ||
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This change represented a lot of work on the infrastructure of the project for long-term benefit. While there aren't any significant graphics changes based on this yet, we can expect a lot in the future, including integration of some nice water effects. | This change represented a lot of work on the infrastructure of the project for long-term benefit. While there aren't any significant graphics changes based on this yet, we can expect a lot in the future, including integration of some nice water effects. | ||
===Generic Binary I/O protocol=== | |||
The input and output code of FlightGear has been very flexible for many years by allowing for communications to (and from) files, serial ports and network sockets just by altering a command-line option. | |||
In conjunction with that FlightGear has had support for a generic ASCII only input-output protocol handler for a number of years now. It is called 'generic' because it allows handling of just about any information in any form by altering a user modifiable xml configuration file. The functionality has been extended further by the possibility to define an offset and a multiplication factor. This approach might not cover every possible scenario but it will probably be good enough for most cases. | |||
With the help of Anders Gidenstam the generic protocol has recently been extended to also support binary input and output. The data will be tightly acked in a packet that contains the requested data described in the configuration file. Supported types are: boolean values (8-bit), integer values (32-bit), floating point values (32-bit) and double precision floating point values (64-bit). Andes also added the option to support network byte ordering (big-endian) or system native byte-ordering which will save some processing time when only one type of system is used. To make it easier to see how the packet will be handled by FlightGear a utility called generic-protocol-analyze has been created which can be found in FlightGear/utils/xmlgrep. It outputs the data offset and size along with it's description. | |||
==New Wiki Articles == | ==New Wiki Articles == | ||