> Something I'd love to see, in the long term, is a GUI that allows users to
> customize their panels, just like real aircraft owners do
A separate GUI would be complicated I think, or at least lots of redundant
work, given that FlightGear already has much of the required code in place.
Overall, I think this really isn't that far off the table, and would only
require very minor changes to FlightGear itself.
I did in fact do something very similar a couple of years ago when I needed to
add a capability to zoom into aircraft instruments inside FlightGear (2D panel
only).
And this turned out to be much simpler than I initially thought.
Doing that only involved changing the statically read panel properties for each
instrument (x,y for position, and width/height for dimensions, IIRC) to be
based on the SGPropertyChangeListener code and then expose these inside the
property tree under something like /sim/panels/panel[n]/instrument[n] (I think
hotspots were a bit tricky to get right though).
That provided the possibility to dynamically place and resize the instrument at
runtime, just by modifying the instrument's properties in the property tree
(using scripted Nasal actions), I didn't have to touch any of the GL code at
all.
Turning this method into a fully fledged "panel editor" (or even "panel
designer") should not be that complicated because it would mostly involve
providing a collection of available instruments (list of paths/filenames) and a
modification to the instrument manager code to allow instruments to be
dynamically instantiated by just setting a property under something like
/sim/panels/panel[n]/instrument[n] to a valid instrument filename.
Nasal routines could then be used to track mouse movements in order to move,
position and resize the instrument.
Such a customized panel could then either be directly saved (or just the
positions/dimensions to restore a panel configuration later on).
For panel editing purposes, one might also want to change the mouse cursor
texture to be configurable using a listener (which would also be useful to
highlight instruments hotspots).
For someone familiar with the cockpit code, doing it like this would probably
not take very long (maybe a couple rainy weekends?) while greatly improving
usability.
-hfitz
PS: congrats on the new release everybody, very impressive work!
-hfitz
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