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Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby danielHL » Wed Jun 02, 2021 1:30 pm

Yes, that's the plan :-) I stumbled upon orientation/side-slip-angle and blindly used it without thinking. Later it dawned on me... :-) the geo-namespace and airportinfo() is already widely used in the code...
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby merspieler » Wed Jun 02, 2021 2:26 pm

I already use the airportinfo() stuff for the side loading and offcenter... which causes the issues at a few aiports.

I've just pushed my addon to Gitlab so you can take a look at it...
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby ludomotico » Wed Jun 02, 2021 6:41 pm

Thanks! I started a similar project a few years ago, but I lost the source code and never tried to replicate it. Check some details at: viewtopic.php?p=206944#p206944

If you accept some piece of advice: do not try to make the "landing challenge" generic for any airport. Choose an airport that is well modeled and is surrounded by interesting scenery to get plenty of visual references and stick with it. For example, I chose LECD mainly because you can use the river and towns near it for visual references. Maybe you can propose different airports for the different challenges: a small field for precision landing, a big airport for ILS...
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby TheEagle » Wed Jun 02, 2021 6:44 pm

PLEASE DONT :wink: I want it for usable for every airport; instead, the plugin could provide a recommended airport in a tooltip for each challenge type !
Last edited by Johan G on Thu Jun 03, 2021 11:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby Alant » Thu Jun 03, 2021 11:23 pm

Here is one from real life.

The VC10 was built at Brooklands, Weybridge. The runway length was only 3750 ft, and all aircraft made their first flight (with minimum fuel and zero payload) from the factory to the flight test airfield at Wisley which was about a mile away.

Occasionally some came back home for work. The company test pilots had a (unofficial) competition to see who could touch down nearest the end of the runway, as judged by the tyre marks, Brooklands had no landing aids or lights, so approach was visual.

Image

Underneath the aircraft nose you can see a section of the banked track of the pre-war Brooklands car race circuit. A section of the banking at the south end of the runaway was removed before the Valiant bomber made its first flight.

Should you want to try this, a 1970´s version of Brooklands airfield and Vickers factory is available for Flightgear at https://github.com/alanjt/EGLB.git
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby TheEagle » Thu Aug 05, 2021 6:02 pm

How is your work going ? Can I help you with anything ? I still cannot put the landing challenge up everywhere, only at Uetersen ! :cry:
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby danielHL » Thu Aug 05, 2021 10:33 pm

Hi,

I was a lot less active during the summer months, but I have picked up hacking on it again. I had to do a bit of a rewrite because the old code didn't scale to all the planned features. Next on my list is a nicer stats window and also more configurability.

By the way, you can edit the default values in the xml file or at runtime in the property browser for now. As long as you enter a correct combination of airport code and runway, you should be able to set it up anywhere. But at the moment, that's a hack - I know.

If somebody with inkscape skills could design some SVG icons, that would be a big help! A fitting icon set for values such as airspeed, vertical speed, lateral and longitudinal deviation on the runway, roll and sideslip angles, acceleration/g-force... that would be the values that need to be shown on the stats window...
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby TheEagle » Thu Aug 05, 2021 11:47 pm

SVG is my part ! :) Just tell me how exactly you want it ! I'm a big fan of SVG …
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby danielHL » Fri Aug 06, 2021 10:08 am

That's perfect! I don't know yet about the layout and if I will place separate icons and text objects via canvas or if we should integrate everything into one big svg and just access the text objects... Anyway, design-wise the icons are much more work.

I'd like to visualize the following data with icons:
  • airspeed
    stylized ASI gauge maybe?
  • vertical speed
    stylized VSI gauge maybe?
  • bank angle
    airplane icon from front and arrows indicating bank?
  • crab angle
    airplane over runway from top, crab angle indicated with arrows
  • G-Force
    weight, acceleration symbol, somehow
  • lateral landing deviation
    airplane top view over runway, laterally displaced with arrows
  • touchdown distance
    airplane at touchdown in side view over runway, length from threshold indicated

the icons and gauges need not be animated, they are supposed to be just icons. If you could sketch something up, that would be great!
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby Hooray » Sun Aug 08, 2021 9:55 am

since you seem to be more interested in coding rather than creating artwork: there really is no need to have any artwork, the Canvas can create graphics procedurally (including vector graphics). And in fact, a number of contributors have created code routines (library code) to render gauges procedurally (rleibner, jsb, ThorstenR).


Thus, for something like this, I would definitely suggest to take a look at these options, if only to save you a little more time while prototyping things:


https://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_Draw
Image

So, anything involving visualization of flight parameters could be easily handled by existing library code.

If you need more sophisticated graphs/plots, we also have a working MathGL integration (however that requires a few minor C++ changes), which can render simple stuff efficiently, but also fairly complex diagrams (this was inspired by some comments on the forum - it's integrated as a custom Canvas element):

https://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Exten ... ort_MathGL
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Image

Image
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby TheEagle » Mon Aug 09, 2021 1:22 am

I have added two icons in the gui/images subdirectory of my LandingChallenge fork:
  • bank-indicator.svg - contains a group "airplane" which can be rotated to indicate bank angle
  • threshold-deviation.svg - contains a group "airplane" which can be rotated to indicate crab angle and displaced vertically and horizontally to indicate distance from threshold and centerline.
when I finish them all I'll send you a pull request.
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby TheEagle » Sun Aug 15, 2021 2:26 pm

Are you going to push your changes soon ? I can't keep my hands off this project :wink:
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby danielHL » Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:25 am

If you just want to fix the GUI/Dialog part, go right ahead - that won't change much. Most other things can then be fixed when merged. What I'm restructuring is separating the gathering of landing data out of the base class.

I will soon push the template class for the landing stats canvas window (that's the big window that will display details) - this is the one where the icons should go...

Sorry about the delays, got some real life issues to sort out. But I really appreciate the help!
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby TheEagle » Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:28 am

danielHL wrote in Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:25 am:Sorry about the delays, got some real life issues to sort out.

No problem - real life always goes first.
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Re: Development of a Landing Challenge Add-on

Postby TheEagle » Thu Aug 26, 2021 9:34 pm

Daniel, I need your help - can you please test whether the landing notification is showing correctly both with the code in your repo and the code in my forked one ? Because, since today for me it's showing just a blank white rectangle both with the original code and my improved one.
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