Aircraft Center
This article describes content/features that may not yet be available in the latest stable version of FlightGear (2020.3). You may need to install some extra components, use the latest development (Git) version or even rebuild FlightGear from source, possibly from a custom topic branch using special build settings: .This feature is scheduled for FlightGear 4.x. If you'd like to learn more about getting your own ideas into FlightGear, check out Implementing new features for FlightGear. |
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Recently I've also been mulling the possibility of selecting
aircraft from an "in program" dialog similar to Fly II where you can climb up
to 35,000 feet in a 747 and then switch to a C172 :-) Seriously, even if we
did a full reset, it'd be nice to switch aircraft (3D models as well) and
fdm's on the fly (pun not intended).
— David Megginson ( Fri, 08 Nov 2002 18:01:41 -0800). starting the XML GUI; early implementors needed.
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Background
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.
— Hooray (Thu Jun 26). Re: About FlightGear being user-friendly or not.
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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.
— Hooray (Thu Jun 26). Re: About FlightGear being user-friendly or not.
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The FlightGear Frontend Situation
Note This is currently being addressed via the Canvas system, see ticket #1295 and Aircraft Center. |
That in fact many users do feel a need to improve the current situation, can be seen by the multitude of GUI frontends that have been developed for FlightGear during the last couple of years.
In fact, in 2006 there were reported to be at least five different GUI launchers available for FlightGear [1]:
- Fgrun
- KFreeFlight
- MacFlightGear
- FGTools
- JFlightWizard [2]
- fgkicker
- FGWalk [3]
- FGo!
- FG Flier
- FGStartup
- FGX
All of which supporting different functionality/features, having different library/system dependencies and being different code bases, with little -if any- reuse of existing code, all of which serving however the very same purpose of providing: a GUI frontend for FlightGear.
Furthermore, plans to develop even more new frontends in addition to the plethora of existing ones are still being discussed [4].
As has been pointed out in the original discussion [5], this pattern is a not only a very unfortunate one, but also a recurring one - which is also likely to drain development resources from FlightGear itself - simply because a number of developers and potential contributors spend time developing redundant software that wouldn't need to be developed in the first place if the FlightGear design were to be fixed so that the key facilities provided by existing launchers would be directly supported by FlightGear itself.
While it was pointed out in one case that the reason for yet another FlightGear GUI frontend, was motivated by non-technical reasons (such as native/platform "look & feel"), all other remaining reasons for developing these launchers were indeed technical ones, meaning:
None of these standalone frontends would likely need to be in existence today if FlightGear itself featured a native, built-in GUI frontend
Indeed, FlightGear's cross-platform nature obviously provides additional challenges for developing standalone launchers, so that some launchers may only work on specific platforms.
So, the most natural thing to do would be to directly integrate these facilities into FlightGear, where they can make use of extensive FlightGear APIs that are known to compile and work across all supported FlightGear platforms.
Status
I've pushed now a first version of an aircraft install/removal dialog. Was a lot more effort than expected, but now there are a lot of — Thomas Geymayer (2014-06-10). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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The dialog is available in the menu (File > Aircraft Center) and shows a list of the 100 first aircrafts available to install/remove. I've — Thomas Geymayer (2014-06-10). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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Thomas Geymayer and I are working on it, I am not sure where’s he go to with the UI, the backend pieces are mostly there but will need some intensive testing. There is a #define flag you can toggle (in HTTPClient.cxx) to enable the code including the Nasal API; it will download / refresh a catalog, which is generated by the scripts I committed to fgmeta a week ago. Then you can access the package system from pkg.root in the Nasal console, using the API defined at the bottom of HTTPClient.cxx.
— James Turner (2014-06-10). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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My next objective will be actually switching to an aircraft, and setting up the correct paths so that dependencies work; this is more or less orthogonal, I will make a new command to select an aircraft (and reset the sim) based on an aircraft ID or fully-qualified ID. (Again to allow catalogs with ID collisions, such as org.flightgear.default.747-400 and nl.gijs-hangar.beta.747-400)
— James Turner (2014-06-10). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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the whole thing is still pretty experimental, it’s probably not at the ‘this text should be a little to the left’ point. We’re more at the ‘it didn’t erase your C drive? Great!’ stage….
— James Turner (2014-06-13). Re: [Flightgear-devel] Notes on Aircraft Center....
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The layout and widget systems is now maturing, so I think after 3.2 I can start with porting PUI. Just one major component is missing, namely — Thomas Geymayer (2014-06-13). Re: [Flightgear-devel] Notes on Aircraft Center....
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Tagging
Related to this, does anyone know how standardised the <status> values are? If there is a defined list of values I will add query support and expose them as an enum to Nasal.
— James Turner (2014-06-11). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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have updated my script with to restrict tags to the set I original wrote on the wiki some time ago:
— James Turner (2014-06-12). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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Variants
I don’t think there’s any pathological examples with more than eight -set.xml. Designating the ‘main’ -set.xml is still an issue.
— James Turner (2014-06-13). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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Development
I thought about adding a cache add Canvas::Image or rather at the HTTPRequest level to cache all HTTP requests/files which have not set — Thomas Geymayer (2014-06-10). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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for a first step I want to limit it only to the HTTPMemoryRequest which is mainly used for downloading canvas images. So — Thomas Geymayer (2014-06-10). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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A semi-related small thing: I'd like to have saved-between-sessions "default aircraft/starting airport" properties (/sim/default-aircraft, — Rebecca N. Palmer (2014-05-30). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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Currently box layouts are available. Once they fully work I'll start thinking of other layouts and widgets. — Thomas Geymayer (2014-06-13). Re: [Flightgear-devel] Notes on Aircraft Center....
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I want to implement a cache to speed it up after the first time, but not for — Thomas Geymayer (2014-06-13). Re: [Flightgear-devel] Notes on Aircraft Center....
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what I’d want is tabs at the top for ‘installed aircraft’, ‘available updates’ and so on. But again the question is really what UI we can build in the time available.
— James Turner (2014-06-13). Re: [Flightgear-devel] Notes on Aircraft Center....
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Known Issues
Prior to a reset, if you edit /sim/aircraft, it works as you would expect. However there are some quirks related to aircraft-specific menu items / dialogs, at least on Mac (the custom menu for previous aircraft is not removed).
— James Turner (2014-05-30). Re: [Flightgear-devel] select/download aircraft.
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If you've created a grid control for Canvas, it would be nice to see the FDM, Systems, Cockpit and Model ratings broken out into individual columns — geneb (2014-06-13). [Flightgear-devel] Notes on Aircraft Center....
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