Am Montag, 13. Oktober 2003 23:12 schrieb David Megginson: > I'd like to propose the following changes to our current airport data > formats: > > 1. In $FG_ROOT/Airports/basic.dat.gz (the airport-level data file), > add two fields containing the ISO 3166 country code and a > country-specific region code. Either can be represented by 'U' if > unknown. For example, here is the current entry for KSFO: > > A KSFO 37.618763 -122.374926 13 CYN San Francisco Intl > > Here is a revised entry with the new fields: > > A KSFO 37.618763 -122.374926 13 US CA CYN San Francisco Intl > > This change will allow us to create airport dialogues sorted by > country and (optionally) state/province/region. Initially, we can > just set every one to 'U', or possibly apply some simple heuristics > (every four-letter airport identifier starting with 'K' is in the > U.S., every four-letter airport identifier starting with 'CY' is in > Canada, etc.)
I agree with that. Especially because such an airport dialoge is an important feature for a flightsim and still missing in flightgear. Maybe we should also think about adding another entry, the continent. If we want to use a "search by continent" feature in the airport dialog, then of course, it is possible to find the continents by country. But history showed that this is not a reliable value. For example 15 years ago, you could say that the UDSSR is more in Asia instead of Europe, but when you would check for the moscow airport your programm would assume asia because of UDSSR=>Asia, but that's wrong because, moscow is still in Europe. So, that's why an additional entry for continents would be probably wise. If we want to save space, we could save a number instead of the continent name and assign the appropriate name when the aiport dialog is started. Here's my proposal for the a number continent table: 1 Europe 2 Asia 3 Africa 4 Middle America 5 North America 6 South America 7 Australia So instead of: A KSFO 37.618763 -122.374926 13 US CA CYN San Francisco Intl This one: A KSFO 37.618763 -122.374926 13 5 US CA CYN San Francisco Intl Best Regards, Oliver C. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
