Changes

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|supporters=none

|background=Stuart would like to improve how checklists are displayed within the simulator.

|background=Stuart would like to improve how checklists are displayed within the simulator.

Stuart would be very happy to help anyone who is interested in creating either a generic MFD checklist feature, or to replace the [[PUI]] version with a better canvas implementation.  

Stuart would be very happy to help anyone who is interested in creating either a generic MFD checklist feature, or to replace the [[PUI]] version with a better canvas implementation.  

<ref>https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37992&p=373519&#p373519</ref>So if someone is looking for a Hackathon idea - using QML or [[Canvas]] to render checklists so that they look more like a traditional checklist in a POH would be quite a neat little project. <ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/37124720/</ref>

<ref>https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37992&p=373519&#p373519</ref>So if someone is looking for a Hackathon idea - using QML or [[Canvas]] to render checklists so that they look more like a traditional checklist in a POH would be quite a neat little project. <ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/37124720/</ref>

The PUI checklist dialog has a bug where selecting a new group doesn't update the checklist selection combo-box. Stuart has tried various tricks to update it, but thinks it's an underlying issue with PUI itself. <ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/36292913/</ref>

Note that checklists are primarily PropertyList/XML encoded, so can be easily turned into a Canvas dialog - it would be pretty straightforward to do so using what we have already, unless people care enough to provide dedicated/custom widgets for a certain look and feel.

And in fact, given the groundwork by rleibner, Thorsten and jsb, there's now quite a bit of library code to draw widgets procedurally.

 

There probably isn't anything missing to provide a Canvas front-end for checklists, as per Stuart's original idea.

 

And in fact, t seems that Stuart has meanwhile actually created a Canvas-front-end as part of his FG1000 work - so for someone familiar with Nasal and Canvas, it should be pretty straightforward to extract that code, generalize it and turn it into a generic checklist widget.

 

So if there are folks who are interested in seeing a non PUI front-end (without depending on an optional dependency like Qt5/QML), their best bet would indeed be to look at the FG1000 repo and reuse Stuart's checklist implementation there.

 

 

* https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/fgdata/ci/next/tree/Aircraft/Instruments-3d/FG1000/MFDPages/Checklist.svg

* https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/fgdata/ci/next/tree/Aircraft/Instruments-3d/FG1000/Nasal/MFDPages/Checklist/

Hopefully as we move to using Canvas in the future we'll be able to improve the checklist display to include a set of dots linking the items.<ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/29824616/</ref>

Looking at the code, anyone wanting to just use Stuart's code "as is" would be best off by instantiating a fresh MFDDisplay object and simply adding Stuart's ChecklistPage to that (otherwise empty) MFD - the MFD would then merely act as the boilerplate, but could trivially be shown inside a Canvas GUI dialog. That way, even aircraft without an MFD could use Stuart's checklist work to render a Canvas-based checklist.

Trying to do something more complicated with Nasal and PUI is a real pain, and Stuart doesn't think it's worth the effort. One thought he had a while back was it would be nice to replace the checklist function with some Canvas window that looked a bit more like a traditional paper checklist.<ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/36937987/</ref>

To learn more about Richard's MFD framework (which is what Stuart's FG1000 is using under the hood), see: [[Canvas_MFD_Framework]] <ref>https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37992&p=373519&#p373519</ref>

|skills= [[Nasal]], [[Canvas]]

|skills= [[Nasal]], [[Canvas]]