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FlightGear Newsletter December 2013: Difference between revisions
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FlightGear Newsletter December 2013 (view source)
Revision as of 02:40, 11 December 2013
, 11 December 2013→Wizard-based Aircraft Creation
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During the discussion on the forum, we came up with the ideas that we could have a template aircraft and parametrize it dynamically inside FlightGear - after all, it's 95% PropertyList-encoded XML, i.e. can be read/manipulated and written via standard FlightGear/Nasal means - in other words, you could take an existing PUI dialog and turn it into an "aircraft wizard", where the user could specify things like 1) filename, 2) description, 3) FDM type, 4) status, 5) thumbnail and so on - this is all straightforward to do, it just involves setprop() stuff after having read the template into the property tree via io.read_properties(), at which point a simple GUI dialog could be shown to streamline the aircraft development process in a step-by-step manner. Many building blocks exist already, including a file picker dialog - missing stuff can be implemented via Canvas extensions. | During the discussion on the forum, we came up with the ideas that we could have a template aircraft and parametrize it dynamically inside FlightGear - after all, it's 95% PropertyList-encoded XML, i.e. can be read/manipulated and written via standard FlightGear/Nasal means - in other words, you could take an existing PUI dialog and turn it into an "aircraft wizard", where the user could specify things like 1) filename, 2) description, 3) FDM type, 4) status, 5) thumbnail and so on - this is all straightforward to do, it just involves setprop() stuff after having read the template into the property tree via io.read_properties(), at which point a simple GUI dialog could be shown to streamline the aircraft development process in a step-by-step manner. Many building blocks exist already, including a file picker dialog - missing stuff can be implemented via Canvas extensions. | ||
Such a wizard woud ideally not be implemented as a "hardcoded" XML dialog, but rather as a Nasal submodule that dynamically creates "pages" for each step in the wizard. None of this is difficult, it really just involves 1) property tree, 2) read/write properties via io.nas and 3) basic Nasal (setprop/props.nas) for modifying the template aircraft. | |||
Such a wizard could also be easily made aware of difference between FG versions, and users could be asked to target a certain version, i.e. to omit certain stuff, like for example Canvas support, or effects etc | |||
A first, very basic, prototype of this is now available, and waiting to be adopted by fellow contributors to help grow this "wizard", i.e. by adding features to it, but also by adding new templates to it, for different aircraft features, such as [[Aircraft Checklists]], [[Tutorials]], [[Walk View]] etc. | A first, very basic, prototype of this is now available, and waiting to be adopted by fellow contributors to help grow this "wizard", i.e. by adding features to it, but also by adding new templates to it, for different aircraft features, such as [[Aircraft Checklists]], [[Tutorials]], [[Walk View]] etc. | ||