Curtis L. Olson wrote:
I haven't had a lot of time over the past weeks to contribute here and I'm going out of town later this week, but we've discussed much of this before.
I know, but if there's one area where FlightGear can use an eminent update then it's the airport layout.
In the mean time Dave Luff is taking FlightGear airport updates and maintaining them as local mods to the Robin's x-plane format and giving me the result. We submit FG entries to robin so hopefully all our local mods eventually wind up in the upstream version.
In fact, David reported most X-Plane airport designers are using Taxidraw nowadays. :-)
Right now I'm inclined to start by using directional quads where the taxiway centerline is right in the middle of the two starting endpoint and the two trailing endpoints, like this:
p1 +------------------------+ p3 | | |------------------------| | | p2 +------------------------+ p4
Robin has granted us some "code" number space in the x-plane format so we can add our own entries (and maintain them separately) as we go ... whether that be polygonal airport outlines, polygon taxiways, or other objects.
That would make it even easier. Use one number in the assigned range to display the possibilities. Once they (X-Plane users/developers) are convinced they'll start using it automatically.
This isn't a perfect solution, but there are huge advantages to staying with the x-plane format as much as possible because they have a large user base of people contributing updated airports. It makes sense to stick with their format as much as possible because we tried an alternate format at the beginning of this project and it just because too difficult to manage, so we never got any updates.
True, that's why I propose a new format for the taxiways only.
Robin is a dedicated data manager and is committed over the long haul. Any proposal we might make to deviate from that would involve a volunteer who can dedicate serious time over the long haul to maintain "our" version. Historically, those type of volunteers are very difficult to find ... we have a few, but they aren't jumping at taking on new tasks, and when you try to pawn off new tasks on people they usually don't get picked up ... even something as simple as a FAQ maintainer anyone???
Agreed, many thanks for Robin for doing so. Erik _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
