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FGplot: where to find? how to use?

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FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby jsb » Sun Jan 10, 2016 12:20 pm

Hi,
I read abouf FGplot and it is exactly what I need for my work. Unfortunately, the documentation http://wiki.flightgear.org/FGPlot is outdated, gitorious.org is not available any more.
Tried google and found https://sourceforge.net/projects/fgplot/
There it says removed since fgplot is included to flightgear now. While this sounds like good news, I wonder WHERE to find it and how to run it?

cheers
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Alant » Sun Jan 10, 2016 4:14 pm

It seems that there has been a breakdown in communication between those who expected that fgplot was being added to flightgear and whoever took it down from sourceforge.
Hopefully one of the developers can sort it out soon.

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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby jsb » Sun Jan 10, 2016 7:48 pm

That is bad :(
I guess most aircraft developers will need e.g. to see what AP controllers are really doing etc.
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Hooray » Sun Jan 10, 2016 8:27 pm

this is true, at some point this was put up for review, but got lost during the sourceforge transition, I do know that it was also part of the canvas hackers team clone. Since then quite a few things have changed admittedly, you could check the wiki article for pointers, i.e. links/forum threads and people involved and get in touch that way.

I do think that it should be possible to retrieve the original code by doing a bit of networking.

Otherwise, it is true that this is probably just another feature/merge request that didn't make it into FlightGear, despite being entirely optional and not having much of an impact otherwise.

In the meantime, you could use the built-in logging features and external plotting tools obviously
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Alant » Sun Jan 10, 2016 11:43 pm

I would be surprised if fgplot's author was not more than a bit pissed off by the actions of the core developers involved in this process. It was not far short of being disgraceful..

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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Hooray » Mon Jan 11, 2016 12:19 am

Alant wrote in Sun Jan 10, 2016 11:43 pm:I would be surprised if fgplot's author was not more than a bit pissed off by the actions of the core developers involved in this process. It was not far short of being disgraceful..

frankly, I don't think he particularly cared about it being committed - he did put up 2-3 merge requests according to the archives, but at some point simply moved on apparently.
Also, in all fairness, pure fgdata related commits don't have much to do with core committers necessarily - i.e. they can be reviewed/merged and committed by any fgdata committer.

i think it's more an unfortunate turn of events and different priorities/schedules.

Just look at the number of other merge requests that might have made it if the corresponding people had been a little more proactive, especially with regard to the release plan and deadlines (feature freeze).

So this does not have to do much with core developers being generally "overstretched" in terms of their responsibilities, but it's more about none of the fgdata committers generally feeling confident to help review merge requests that are unrelated to their own aircraft.

Obviously, that's just my 2cents ...

It is however true that there is an increasing number of optional sg/fg and fgdata patches that never make it into any of the upstream repositories, and I think this has more to do with a general lack of manpower (and project guidelines) than with any particular group of contributors.

I really have no reason to sugar-coat any facts here or to misrepresent the state of things.
Like I recently mentioned in the FlightGear Development Push thread, you cannot real blame any fgdata or core committers for such incidents.

What is really needed are updated guidelines to deal with new contributions, and contributors - and that has more to do with having a sufficient number of active project administrators who are able, and willing, to add new contributors, with commit privileges, to the sourceforge project - to help ensure that there will be a steady supply of fresh blood, and features.

Otherwise, we are probably going to see more and more features put up for review that simply add to the workload of those few remaining contributors who are willing to help peer-review new additions, which inevitably means that the project needs to make concessions elsewhere.

And quite frankly, I also don't remember if I offered any help to get the corresponding Nasal/Canvas code reviewed - despite being probably in a pretty good position to help doing so, unlike most others (including most active core/fgdata developers).

So it is far too easy to yell at others who didn't respond to such merge requests, while ignoring that all of us can help and do our share to get things discussed ,reviewed and committed - which is far easier for fgdata level additions than core patches obviously.

It is however unfortunate that we are seeing so many features that don't make it back into the project, despite many representing dozens, if not even hundreds, of hours of work.

And I would hope that we as a community can find a way to address such challenges sooner or later - or people may get the impression that we don't particularly care about their contributions and will just move on, for good.

And that would be a pity for the FlightGear project, not so much for the people ...

But as far as I remember, fgplot not getting committed was more due to it being put up for review during the feature freeze, and some of it getting lost during the subsequent sourceforge transition.

So I reckon, that other contributors are more likely to be irritated by the whole "review process" than the fgplot developer. :D
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Alant » Mon Jan 11, 2016 12:43 am

So, without getting into recriminations, how can we get fgplot committed?
I have it here and it is very simple - just put the fgplot code into fgdata, and add a couple of lines of code to add it to a sensible place in the menu. No rocket science.

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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Hooray » Mon Jan 11, 2016 12:58 am

We would need to find an fgdata committer willing to help review/commit this as an optional feature, which implicitly means that it would need to be implemented as a Nasal submodule (residing in its own sub-folder).

I haven't looked at fgplot in a while, but I do remember that there were several versions of it around.

Also, apart from the sub-module idea, the GUI menu/translations would need to be updated.

The corresponding fgdata committer would ideally have some track record of using Nasal and Canvas, without being necessarily specific to aircraft development.

Equally, having an actual use-case for testing could be useful - i.e. plotting fdm/ap properties as a test.

So there will certainly be more than just a single person involved, because we also need to review the code to ensure that it does not conflict with other ongoing developments, e.g. reset/re-init.
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby jsb » Tue Jan 12, 2016 9:15 pm

Well, as I would like to use something like fgplot, I'd like to help.
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Hooray » Tue Jan 12, 2016 9:39 pm

If all you want is to use fgplot, you could also get the tarball from any of those who still have a copy - getting things reviewed, merged and committed is usually a fairly tedious process, which may ,even under perfect circumstances, take ~6 months

I guess you could ask Alan to provide you with a copy of the tarball and post a link here.
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Necolatis » Sun Dec 18, 2016 11:12 pm

I would also like a copy of FGPlot, does any have a copy?
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Necolatis » Sun Dec 18, 2016 11:16 pm

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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Necolatis » Mon Dec 19, 2016 12:56 am

It works fine, just prints alot of useless info in console. (didn't test load and save though)

I now host it at https://github.com/NikolaiVChr/FGplot to preserve it, so it don't get lost.
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby jsb » Fri Jan 06, 2017 5:56 pm

It seems to have some minor bugs but it works somehow. I had only a very brief look into the code but it seems parts of it implement canvas gui elements. Maybe this should be unified with the current canvas gui implementation, e.g. use the canvas gui from fgdata and possibly extend it with elements (widgets) from fgplot.
Will check this...
And I will email the FG developer mailing list and ask who is currently working on canvas things.
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Re: FGplot: where to find? how to use?

Postby Hooray » Sun Jan 08, 2017 7:56 pm

Thorsten has the most recent experience creating FAST 2D plots - so, I would suggest to review his postings in the Canvas sub forum.
Apart from that, technically the "right" thing to do now would be creating a dedicated plotting widget (e.g. a simple 2D one with x/y axes).
Such a widget could then be easily used elsewhere.
I think the wiki contains a few examples on creating new Canvas widgets from scratch - in fact, Necolatis once created a few widgets by referring to the existing ones and using those as templates I think.

I also once created a dedicated "map" widget for the Canvas GUI with integrated checkboxes shown next to the map itself:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_MapSt ... map_dialog
Image

Thorsten also mentioned that he was considering to move some of his 2D drawing functions into a utility library - which is touching on the original idea of creating a 2D plotting framework: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_Plotting_Framework

Anyway, the whole SVG/OpenVG approach going through properties is unnecessarily heavy from a performance standpoint (property throughput), so that it may make more sense to come up with a new dedicated "plot" element at the Canvas::Element level - this could be prototyped using OpenVG, or it could use an existing open source plotting framework: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_Sandbox#2D_Plotting
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