* Ralf Gerlich -- 10/30/2008 8:06 PM:
> - Taxiway signs at 6 airfields: KSFO, KBWI, KLVK, KRHV, TFFF, TJSJ

Excellent -- this is a good start. Several of those at KSFO seem
wrong to me, though. Some of the (IMHO) mistakes:

  ** BAD **     ** GOOD **
  [A]<-B         <-B[A]         The arrow should point away from
                                the sign if possible, not to another
                                element, except in cases like this:

  <-B[A]B->      <-B->[A]       The crossing B shouldn't be shown twice.
                                The [A] ("you are on taxiway A") should
                                IMHO be next to the taxiway. So the above
                                sign is for left side use, while it would
                                be  [A]<-B-> on the right side.

I haven't checked the syntax, but sign specifications should use the
newer syntax, where arrows start with a ^ (i.e. "arrow head") rather
than a @. So ^r means right-arrow and ^ru means right-up-arrow. Only
one form of diagonal arrows will be supported: left-right letter first,
then up-down:  GOOD: ^ru,  BAD: @ru, @ur, ^ur). The older syntax won't
be supported in the future.

Looks like it's now time to add poles and housings to the magically
floating signs.  :-) 
  



> Airport data proposal

Sounds good to me.



> Currently the apt.dat makes up nearly 5MB compressed, containing lots of
> data which is actually only needed by genapts, but not by FlightGear
> itself. [...] this amount of "superfluous" data will increase.

Indeed. Also, the big compressed blob makes minor updates and
additions rather painful for CVS users with dial-up or quota
bound users. (A group I no longer belong to, but did for a long
time. :-)

And then, with the big apt.dat.gz file one had to have a lot of
data permanently in memory, which had to be accessible, even if
only very rarely. Smaller files in <PropertyList> format allow
to load that piece of information if necessary, while it doesn't
use up RAM most of the time.



> These files are found in a three-level directory structure (poor man's
> index). The files for KSFO are for example found in
> Airports/K/S/F/KSFO.*.xml

I have a slight preference for  Airports/K/KS/KSF/KSFO.*.xml.
Not only is it more consistent, it also tells quickly on which
level you are while navigating the directory tree. (Of course,
Airports/K/S/F/O.*.xml would also be consistent. And ugly. ;-)



> In addition, the Airports directory contains an index.txt-file with
> three columns: ID, longitude and latitude of the airport, sorted by
> longitude and latitude. The position is calculated as the center of
> gravity of all runways specified for the airport.

A .txt extension implies that it's (primarily) meant for human
consumption and doesn't follow any strict formatting, so this is
unsuitable. (It's also typically used to mark ASCII files on
utterly broken operating systems if people can't think of something
that makes sense. :-)   Please use another or no extension.

m.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/
_______________________________________________
Flightgear-users mailing list
Flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users

Reply via email to