FlightGear version check

This article is a stub. You can help the wiki by expanding it.

Caution  When installing/using aircraft the FlightGear version and the aircraft version must match. Otherwise strange bugs should be expected and the version-mismatch combination will not be supported by the FlightGear community.

pui/xml dialog showing a version conflict between fgfs binary and aircraft version

If in doubt, people should check the About dialog or even /sim/version in the property tree using the proeperty brwoser.

For aircraft developers

{{Non-stable]]

  <minimum-flightgear-version>4.0.0</minimum-flightgear-version>

Minimum FlightGear version required for this aircraft [1], note that this is a "soft" requirement - i.e. it will not terminate fg or trigger an error, but only show a warning in the console/fg window using a Nasal script that checks if the property is set. This is mainly intended to make compatibility issues more obvious, i.e. end-users downloading new aircraft and wanting to use them in conjunction with an old version of FlightGear, which is causing quite a bit of workload on the support forum. We are hoping to also display this info in the About dialog

Fgdata

property browser showing /sim/version info

Note  This is currently just proof-of-concept code which will need to be refined/reviewed and committed to fgdata.

$FG_ROOT/Nasal/version.nas (this ensures that the check will be executed for each loaded aircraft, without having to touch any -set.xml files, and it will also work with Reset & re-init).

# anonymous function that will be called directly
(func() {
##
# current aircraft
var ac = getprop("/sim/aircraft");
var url = "http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_Version_Check";
var fgversion = getprop("/sim/version/flightgear");
logprint(3,"FlightGear v."~ fgversion);

var acversion = getprop("/sim/minimum-flightgear-version");

if (acversion == nil) {
logprint(4,ac~"-set.xml file missing version info, see: "~url);
return; # version not specified 
}
logprint(3,"Aircraft requires FlightGear v."~acversion);

# parse the version number into major/minor and patch level
# http://plausible.org/nasal/lib.html
var (major, minor, patch) = split(".", acversion);
}
)();