Aircraft dialogs: Difference between revisions

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If anyone wants to follow the development or use the code, it's here:
If anyone wants to follow the development or use the code, it's here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/fgspaceshuttledev/code/ci/development/tree/Nasal/canvas/canvas_dialogs.nas
https://sourceforge.net/p/fgspaceshuttledev/code/ci/development/tree/Nasal/canvas/canvas_dialogs.nas
== Good to know ==
* [[Canvas Event Handling]]


== Features ==
== Features ==

Revision as of 16:40, 27 January 2018

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Background

Some of you may already know that the current tool to generate the dialogs (PUI) is going to disappear in the mid-future.

After some (partially controversial) discussion, there seems now to be some support for the idea that canvas is a good tool to generate aircraft-specific dialogs in the future [1] (as it allows to tailor the dialog closely to the plane and also, canvas being canvas, the UI can smoothly mesh with the 3d models, so you can project a canvas checklist onto a 3d model in sim for instance rather than a popup window).

Thus, Canvas is a good way to make aircraft dialogs future proof and explore the fun of more radical canvas designs.[2]

Idea

Thorsten would very much like to claim to be pioneering this approach, but in fact he believes the Extra-500 team is - look at the failure dialog of that plane where you can click the components you want to fail and you see what he means!

Extra 500 - failure dialog - de-ice

Status

Anyway, Thorsten has started to roll out a few designs of his own and tries to keep the tools fairly general so that they can be re-used by others- so here's the revised version of the Shuttle propellant dialog.

an example of the detail dialog which allows to set levels of fuel and oxidizer separately (and the overview dialog shows the usable propellant then, i.e. the minimum of the two) - for aircraft, this would be somewhat simpler.

The general idea is to use semi-transparent 'content gauges' on a background raster image to show where the tank is located and how full it currently is - double-clicking any tank will bring up a detail window which allows to set the content (here propellant and oxidier separately, this is rocket fuel...) and also shows the current tank pressures and temperatures.

The whole thing can readily be applied on top of a different raster image with a different number of tanks - you just instance and position the labels and 'gauges' you need - in fact placement is probably what's going to take longest.

The whole thing is currently in flux [3] If anyone wants to follow the development or use the code, it's here: https://sourceforge.net/p/fgspaceshuttledev/code/ci/development/tree/Nasal/canvas/canvas_dialogs.nas

Good to know

Features

Related

References