I am pleased to announce the release of FFGo 1.8.0. The main changes in this release are the following:
- New “Airport Finder” dialog. This dialog, accessible under the Tools menu, allows one to easily find airports using various criteria: distance to a chosen, “reference airport”; number of land runways, water runways, or helipads; length of the longest or shortest runway in the airport, etc. Results are listed in a table giving these criteria for each airport as well as the initial and final bearings for the shortest path from or to the reference airport. The table of results can be sorted according to airport ICAO code, name or any of the aforementioned criteria (click on a column header to sort according to the corresponding field; click a second time on the same column header to reverse the sort order).
The Airport Finder dialog uses a new widget set for airport selection, that is mainly based on Ttk's Treeview widget.
See this message and the following one for screenshots and more details. - Add the number of land runways, water runways, helipads, plus the minimum and maximum runway lengths for each airport to the apt digest file (aka “airport database”). This allows to perform quick searches over all airports known to apt.dat using these criteria (used in the Airport Finder dialog). The format version of the apt digest file changed from 1 to 2 to reflect this change. Migration for users should be completely automatic.
- Previously, when in carrier mode, clicking on a different airport in the airport list didn't really select it, as it didn't leave carrier mode. This is not the case anymore.
- Allow resizing the main parts of FFGo's main window by dragging with the mouse (this uses a Ttk PanedWindow).
- More tolerant parsing of apt.dat, in order to make it possible to use current apt.dat files distributed at X-Plane's NOTAMs page.
- Tolerate invalid smoothness values in apt.dat. This is not really needed, since invalid values only cause an error when looking up buggy runway metadata, but this will allow users to access the rest of these particular runway metadata... Change mainly motivated by this bug report on the X-Plane Scenery Gateway.
- Fix calculation of airport centroid coordinates. Use n-vectors to compute the latitude and longitude of the centroid of each airport. The previous method, a simple arithmetic mean for latitude and longitude, could give incorrect results with airports having runway ends located on either side of the 180° meridian or very close to the North or South pole (not that I encountered any such problem, but I prefer a correct method, all the more since the performance impact is negligible).
- Fix wrong unit for runway width in apt.dat v850 and later data. In v850 format, runway widths and helipad lengths and widths are given in meters, whereas in v810 format, they were given in feet. This led to confusion and before this version, runway widths were wrongly converted as if they had been given in feet (for > v810 data). This is now fixed.
In runway tooltips, print the length and width first in meters, then in feet, instead of the other way around (since this is how they are specified in the primary source...). - Behind-the-scenes tooltip improvements. Most notably, the new TreeviewToolTip class allows to have dynamic tooltips in the Treeview widgets used in the new Airport Finder dialog.
- Update the German translation. (thanks to chris_blues)
As usual, you can get this release from FFGo's home page. Debian packages for jessie and unstable are available from there, along with the distribution-agnostic tarballs and zip files.
Note: users of Debian testing or unstable can now install python3-geographiclib from their usual Debian mirror (recently added package).