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Aircraft rating system: Difference between revisions
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On the other hand, some of this information should probably not directly go into the toplevel *-set.xml file, but rather into files of the various components (i.e. the cockpit/panel status would be a good candidate to have its status being tracked directly in the panel file). | On the other hand, some of this information should probably not directly go into the toplevel *-set.xml file, but rather into files of the various components (i.e. the cockpit/panel status would be a good candidate to have its status being tracked directly in the panel file). | ||
=== Extending status information === | |||
Given that not all conceivable status for the above mentioned criteria can be properly represented using the existing notion of "status" information being restricted to "alpha, beta, early-production...", it should be considered to support additional states, such as for example "none/unavailable", "draft" or "design". | |||
While it would of course be much easier to simply provide a full-length description space of the status information for each individual entry, where each contributor could leave some information, this would make it more complicated to later on provide web-based frontends to facilitate searching/picking aircraft based on certain attributes. | |||
On the other hand, it is not unlikely that even this level of more finely-grained status information should turn out insufficient in some cases, to describe the status properly, thus combining the two previously mentioned approaches of 1) providing formal status information and 2) providing an optional textual description of the progress would probably be the most powerful long-term solution. | |||
This could for example be accomplished by allowing contributors to optionally specify a corresponding attribute to point to a plaintext (or possibly even HTML) file (residing in the aircraft's folder) that may contain further details, such an XML attribute, named "info-file" is shown in the following example: | |||
<PropertyList> | |||
<aircraft-status> | |||
<fdm '''info-file="fdm-status.txt"'''>beta</fdm> | |||
<exterior '''info-file="ext-status.txt"'''>early-production</exterior> | |||
<cockpit '''info-file="cockpit-status.txt"'''>alpha</cockpit> | |||
[...] | |||
<eye-candy '''info-file="effects-status.txt"'''>alpha</eye-candy> | |||
</aircraft-status> | |||
</PropertyList> | |||
These attributes could not only be easily parsed by an XML parser to provide web-based search facilities, they could even be used within FlightGear at runtime, to provide enriched status information by reading in the corresponding files and showing their contents in a dialog. | |||
=== Challenges === | === Challenges === | ||