On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 07:16 pm, Gene Buckle wrote:
Wouldn't it just be easier to allow the user to configure how they'd like
the aircraft lists presented? The model file can indicate aircraft
details such as licence requirements, operation category, etc. The user
could then configure via a global option of some kind as to how they want
the available aircraft sorted and listed.
Agreed whole-heartedly
Basically I have been planning to suggest the same thing : Mozilla uses .jar files for this purpose, and it works really (really) well. Managing different packages / installing aircraft for FS2k(2) / Fly! is an exercise in tedium and hassle getting paths correct, copying panel files, etc, etc. A simple package format (hence something zip / tar.gz based) with good meta-data for type and versioning will be a huge, huge benefit as the number and kind of add-ons grows.
I think storing each aircrafts' data in a tar file was mentioned earlier.
Why not use the infozip libs (gpl'd I think) to create ".FGAR"
(FlightGearARchive) files that would hold the model configuration and any
associated textures in a compressed format. It would keep things simple
for the end-user and any fancy editing tools could be built to crack open
the archive easily enough.
The software should be smart enough (based on data in the "config" portion
of the model definition) so that directories breaking down aircraft by
FDM wouldn't really be required any longer.
And FG already uses Zlib, so adding jar support wouldn't even require another library dependency.
Crystal space again uses .zips for this purpose, with a VFS layer that can 'mount' zip archives into the data file-tree, and again it's very simply to author for and works well.
Dependency tracking would be a huge benefit here (common instruments / models / sounds / whatever) if it can be done simply and effectively. And of course if the system can be coupled to wget / curl, it will just rule :-)
Though that's getting a bit carried away.
Good ideas or should I go back under my rock? :)
Excellent ideas :-) H&H James -- Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
