On 3/2/04 at 4:50 PM Roy Vegard Ovesen wrote:
>I find it a little hard to read the ATC messages that appear on the top >of >the screen. The dissapear before I get a chance to read them. Maybe I'm a >slow reader, but still I would like them to be displayed a little longer. >Using multiple lines might be a solution, that way multiple messages can >be displayed at the same time giving some history to the dialog. > Hi Roy, This is a valid complaint. To a certain extent, I'm currently concentrating on getting the actual logic of what's transmitted improved, and on editing some voice files to replace the text display. However, the text display will always be needed as a backup for those without sound, so eventually this should be addressed. I can think of a number of improvements. The first, and one which would also help the voice output, is that many of the airport names pulled automatically from the DAFIF are far too long - for instance "Metropolitan Oakland International Tower" should almost certainly be simply "Oakland Tower". I'll go through these and try to manually change as many as possible to what seems right - in fact I'll run a script to remove "International" from all of them. Some of them are tricky though - should "Brisbane Archerfield" be "Brisbane Tower" or "Archerfield Tower". I'm guessing the latter since there's also a Brisbane International. What about "Burbank Glendale Pasadena" - that could be any of the three! If real life pilots, or those who otherwise know definately, could send me corrections for their favourite airports that would be great. There would be a double benefit here - less length of message to read, and less of it going off the edge of the screen. As for the actual time the message is displayed for, currently messages get overlaid if they overlap, which means that the message resisdence time has to be kept fairly short in order to keep the dialogue within a reasonable time. However, as you say, it could be possible to dynamically stack the messages to allow a longer resisdence time. Additionally, this could be made user preferable, and also related to message length for each message. It could also be possible to display each one in a pui dialog box and wait for OK to be clicked before removing, but that would require the focus for the return key on the ok button to be kept on the earliest dialog box, which could be tricky - I imagine the most recent message would tend to grab the focus each time. The current messages can be hard to read at night - some different colours, and possibly a background colour, could possibly be an improvement. All the text display stuff is in ATCdisplay.cxx and shouldn't be too complex - feel free to hack and send patches! I'll try and take a look at it sometime and get something more reasonable in. Cheers - Dave _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
