good morning !
Oliver C. wrote:
On Tuesday 13 July 2004 00:25, Boris Koenig wrote:It wouldn't matter if FlightGear needs to be running directly or if only subsystems get called.
I would like to have it integrated into FlightGear,
so that the user can start the lessons from FlightGear in the
Sim/Game menu.
yes, that's also something I'd like to see ultimately, and I didn't mean to imply that FliteTutor should be run externally - just the way the
actual interfacing takes place wouldn't be that important to me.
But as I said already: IF Nasal can be used/extended for my purposes, I would love to use it. Using Nasal would really simplify many things- e.g. you wouldn't even need to compile yet another package to get FliteTutor to work - also, and even more important: I wouldn't have to mess around with the FlightGear code ;-)
The lessons could then be picked up in a separate list menu or a menu where the lessons are organized by the required skill level or training tour (basic flying, VFR flight, instrument flight etc.).
yes, it's good that you mention this here - you are the 4th user so far requesting some kind of categorization for FliteTutor units to take place. And we've made already some drafts for potential categories, some of which comprise:
The two global categories:
GROUNDSCHOOL or FLIGHT TRAINING
(the difference MAINLY being the variying demands for subsystems to be loaded/running)
Both gobal categories would then contain categories named
"VFR"
and
"IFR"
to separate lesson units.We could then add general categories such as "Instrument Interpretation" to the relevant sub-menus.
This would be where the final learning units get stored - probably using a title and a short description to be displayed in some kind of "quick-browser" to get an impression of the outline of a specific unit.
But regarding this categorization thing there were really plenty of ideas, some of which even suggesting a user rating for each unit, so that users can provide direct feedback to an author of a FliteTutor lesson-I really can't complain that there are too few ideas for FliteTutor ;-) It seems to be mainly a matter of getting the thing rollin'...
Unfortunately, people keep contacting me privately be email in order to make such suggestions instead of directly using the forum or at least this mailing list ;-) - hence, it's likely that many suggestions are repeatedly being made, but so far I've written everything down that I received.
But I would like to ask you to post your ideas and suggestions in the forum - that way we have them in a central place and everybody could see what's been suggested so far-there's no need to register in order to post anything in the forum.
Also, as I mentioned already on the webpages, I am going to add those features most frequently requested to the "features" section on the webpage.
if you want me to, I can go into even further detail :-)
A webpage with example screenshot drawings with these step by step explanations would be nice. :)
Well, what do you expect: the FliteTutor webpages are not even 4 days old...
Actually, I meanwhile have indeed been contacted by some users who would be willing to help FliteTutor become a bit more than just a vague idea-a lot earlier than I had anticipated.
So, we are currently about to collect all feature requests and connect them to our own ideas & imaginations - and try to get a working draft for a concept. But this may still take some time.
I am also going to send a notification to this list as soon as the first detailed draft for a concept has been finished and when we've put it on the webpage.
Particularly, in order to get some feedback about the overall feasibility of all this.
But due to the various feature requests that I've received so far, we will have to concentrate mainly on those features that are realistic to be implemented easily into a first coding attempt - which does not mean that anybody should stop sending in "utopic" suggestions :-) (But please try to use the forum, it makes things easier)
Anyway, I do intend to offer some graphical representation of the goals behind FliteTutor - actually, also in order to make the whole thing easier to grasp and to attract those people to keep on reading who don't like to read ;-)
Well, I hope it's now easier to understand what I would like to achieve with FlightGear.
Yes.
Glad to see, but now tell me HONESTLY: how thorougly did you *really* _read_ the webpages ? :-)
BTW, i like the idea very much. ;)
yes, thanks - strange thing being though: people keep telling me how much they like the idea but fail to leave a vote on the webpage- well at least during the first 2 days, now the situation has already somewhat "improved" ;-)
It would be also very nice, if FliteTutor could be used for in flight lessons.
You are again requesting something that has already been requested, and I do wholeheartedly agree with you, but personally I consider it unlikely to be added to a todo list that soon, cause I think that would really require some more significant code changes to FlightGear- but yes, that's been requested and I would also love to see it implemented.
For example a voice of a pilot instructor could be played that explains what to do next, like turning to heading 230.
<OFFTOPIC> yep, exactly - by the way: I don't know if something like that has already been discussed here or not, but has anybody thought about adding speech synthesis support to FlightGear ?
This would not even be *such* a big step, since there are speech synthesis packages like "festival" (and several others opensourced) that can be easily used - for example by using a specifically created device under /dev/speech - which would then be used by running
# echo "hello world" > /dev/speech
Any text that is to be spoken using festival would then simply be passed to the corresponding device, a specific daemon takes care of the rest.
So, this might be really a pretty simple modification in general- even though there might be certain things needed to be adapted in the future, for example a specific parser to support aviation talk specific phraseologies comes to my mind.
There could be a general option to additionally offer speech support for 3rd party software such as festival - that way you could really also make FlightGear talk.
As it would be only optionally available there's no drawback connected to such a feature - which is good, as festival and most other packages are usually not particularly small - regarding the size of the necessary downloads... </OFFTOPIC>
Then the pilot instructor points to the compasssurrounding
which gets in this moment highlighted by for example a box that is
the compass so that the student pilot knows which instrument was meant by the pilot instructor.
okay, gonna have to admit: something like that wasn't yet suggested, so go to the forum and write down what comes to your mind :-)
Or it would also be very usefull if an 3d objects like a runway could beover the
highlighted with an arrow in the 3d scenery by placing a 3d arrow
runway. Such a feature would also be very helpfull when the pilot instructor wants to teach the pilot student how to do taxiing on an airport or how to land on an aircraft carrier etc..
not sure if I got you correctly, but I think you mean some kind of finger/pointer to show certain features/parts in the scenery/panel ? (if so: wasn't suggested yet either - but would make sense in a CBT environment !)
And for showing how to fly a special flight maneuver we could usetransparent
squares with visible borders that are placed in the air and describe the flight path that should be flown.
Okay, while that wasn't yet suggested either, I've seen something like that being used in actual real life simulators - for "next generation" IFR flying research - even with HUD support.
But yes, I think something like that could be easily added, as long as Nasal is able to directly make some subsystem draw rectangles into the outside view and dynamically modify these, depending on how the flight is processing.
The underlying logic could then be also implemented using Nasal, I guess.
BTW. to describe an instrument we could also displaypilot view)
the cockpit of an airplane and then zoom the instrument (not the
to the pilot view by moving the instrument closer to the pilot view.
Yes, that sounds also like a pretty good suggestion - also you would be able to directly see the (standard) alignment of instruments.
Then the background (cockpit, 3d scenery etc.) could be faded out so that we only see the instrument on the flightgear window with for example a black or white background.
Yes, I think these would then really be specific suggestions for FliteTutor, not really that much about FliteTutor <=> FlightGear interfacing using Nasal.
After that we could continue with the steps Boris Koenig described above in his example.
Hey, that's really nice of you :-)
--------- Boris
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