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FlightGear Newsletter June 2014: Difference between revisions
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=== GUI Launcher === | |||
{{FGCquote | |||
|The "built-in" GUI/launcher is one of the longest-standing feature requests - but it's not just about the GUI (which is rather straightforward in comparison), but about the simulator never having been developed with this requirement, i.e. run-time reinitialization, in mind - thus, things like "fgrun" (and a plethora of other external launchers) were developed, which acted as a front-end on top of FG, so that FG itself wouldn't need to be changed - i.e. kind of a "remote control" using command line arguments. So it's there for a reason - fgrun uses the FLTK GUI library, which while relatively simple, is much more powerful than our legacy GUI engine, PUI.<br/> | |||
<br/> | |||
Still, people have been asking for this for years, and it's thanks to pretty much a single person, Zakalawe, that switching aircraft is going to become possible pretty soon - he handled all the ugly work of cleaning up the simulator internals to make this happen - it's not exactly glamorous work, you gotta touch a ton of places, and you inevitably introduce a ton of regressions along the way. | |||
|{{cite web |url=http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?p=213461#p213461 | |||
|title=<nowiki>Re: About FlightGear being user-friendly or not</nowiki> | |||
|author=<nowiki>Hooray</nowiki> | |||
|date=<nowiki>Thu Jun 26</nowiki> | |||
}} | |||
}} | |||
{{FGCquote | |||
|And yes, even the legacy FG GUI is entirely based on XML and configurable through just editiing XML files - but the collection of "widgets" (GUI controls like buttons, checkboxes, labels etc) is extremely small and very inflexible.<br/> | |||
<br/> | |||
This is something that is currently being addressed by TheTom and Zakalawe, who've both been working on a new Canvas GUI, and a new Canvas GUI dialog called "Aircraft Center", which -while still experimental- is intended to eventually allow end-users to easily download/install aircraft right within the simulator, and also switch between aircraft at run-time without having to exit/restart the simulator.<br/> | |||
<br/> | |||
Thus, adopting Canvas is going to address a number of long-standing issues, but it's obviously a process that only just got started, and it will not happen overnight - 2-3 release cycles are not far-fetched, that's how long the whole migration could very well take, unless there are more people interested in helping. | |||
|{{cite web |url=http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?p=213461#p213461 | |||
|title=<nowiki>Re: About FlightGear being user-friendly or not</nowiki> | |||
|author=<nowiki>Hooray</nowiki> | |||
|date=<nowiki>Thu Jun 26</nowiki> | |||
}} | |||
}} | |||
[[File:Aircraft-center-prototype.png|500px|thumb|Canvas dialog showing the prototype for an [[Aircraft Center]] for directly installing/managing aircraft from within FlightGear, an upcoming feature scheduled for FlightGear 3.2, currently being developed by TheTom and Zakalawe]] | [[File:Aircraft-center-prototype.png|500px|thumb|Canvas dialog showing the prototype for an [[Aircraft Center]] for directly installing/managing aircraft from within FlightGear, an upcoming feature scheduled for FlightGear 3.2, currently being developed by TheTom and Zakalawe]] | ||