This is a banner week for major FlightGear code overhauls. Jim Wilson's excellent view-code rewrite is now in the CVS. We should be very close now to adding a tower view and a more usable 3-D cockpit, among many other things.
I should also give additional thanks to Norman Vine, who wrote the original viewer code that we still steal all the hard parts from. *** NOTE *** I had to do a make distclean to get this to work, because of screwed-up dependency information somewhere in my source tree. You may have to do the same. Here's Jim's description of the changes (also in the CVS log): ************************************************************************ Description: This update includes the new viewer interface as proposed by David M. and a first pass at cleaning up the viewer/view manager code by Jim W. Note that I have dropped Main/viewer_lookat.?xx and Main/viewer_rph.?xx and modified the Makefile.am accordingly. Detail of work: Overall: The code reads a little easier. There are still some unnecessary bits in there and I'd like to supplement the comments in the viewer.hxx with a tiny bit on each interface group and what the groupings mean (similar but briefer than what you emailed me the other day). I tried not to mess up the style, but there is an occasional inconsistency. In general I wouldn't call it done (especially since there's no tower yet! :)), but I'd like to get this out there so others can comment, and test. In Viewer: The interface as you suggested has been implemented. Basically everything seems to work as it did visually. There is no difference that I can see in performance, although some things might be a tiny bit faster. I've merged the lookat and rph (pilot view) code into the recalc for the viewer. There is still some redundancy between the two, but a lot has been removed. In some cases I've taken some code that we'd likely want to inline anyway and left it in there in duplicate. You'll see that the code for both looks a little cleaner. I need to take a closer look at the rotations in particular. I've cleaned up a little there, but I suspect more can be done to streamline this. The external declaration to the Quat_mat in mouse.cxx has been removed. IMHO the quat doesn't serve any intrinsic purpose in mouse.cxx, but I'm not about to rip it out. It would seem that there more conventional ways to get spherical data that are just as fast. In any case all the viewer was pulling from the quat matrix was the pitch value so I modified mouse.cxx to output to our pitchOffset input and that works fine. I've changed the native values to degrees from radians where appropriate. This required a conversion from degrees to radians in a couple modules that access the interface. Perhaps we should add interface calls that do the conversion, e.g. a getHeadingOffset_rad() to go along with the getHeadingOffset_deg(). On the view_offset (now headingOffset) thing there are two entry points because of the ability to instantly switch views or to scroll to a new view angle (by hitting the numeric keys for example). This leaves an anomaly in the interface which should be resolved by adding "goal" settings to the interface, e.g. a setGoalHeadingOffset_deg(), setGoalPitchOffset_deg(), etc. Other than these two issues, the next step here will be to look at some further optimizations, and to write support code for a tower view. That should be fairly simple at this point. I was considering creating a "simulated tower view" or "pedestrian view" that defaulted to a position off to the right of whereever the plane is at the moment you switch to the tower view. This could be a fall back when we don't have an actual tower location at hand (as would be the case with rural airports). ViewManager: Basically all I did here was neaten things up by ripping out excess crap and made it compatible as is with the new interface. The result is that viewmanager is now ready to be developed. The two preexisting views are still hardcoded into the view manager. The next step would be to design configuration xml (eg /sim/view[x]/config/blahblah) that could be used to set up as many views as we want. If we want to take the easy way out, we might want to insist that view[0] be a pilot-view and have viewmanager check for that. Anyway, that's the scoop. There's an odd mix of inlined and not inlined, const and not const declarations, but I was going to wait until things were closer to done before messing with that kind of thing. Let me know if you have any questions. ************************************************************************ All the best, David -- David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
