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Pilot's Notebook On-Screen

Discussion and requests for new features. Please note that FlightGear developers are volunteers and may or may not be able to consider these requests.

Pilot's Notebook On-Screen

Postby EigerSA » Wed Oct 26, 2011 10:17 am

Not sure if this has come up before, apologies if it has but I couldn't find it in search.

I was thinking that it would be pretty handy to have a "notebook" type application in FlightGear. Basically a place you can make notes while flying, or on the tarmac. Doesn't have to be fancy, just a place to type, maybe with tabs that can display an airport diagram to help with lands? Here's a mock up I did as an idea.

Image

Ideally the notebook should have the ability for notes to be saved under a simple reference number or date, and the airports diagram could be called maybe from FlightGear root data. There could also be a very simple flight tracker, start date and time, distance flown, fuel used, total weight etc.

It could come up under the 'help" menu or with a hot-key short cut.

I'm personally happy to undertake attempting something like this if it's possible or hasn't been discussed and discarded?
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Re: Pilot's Notebook On-Screen

Postby Hooray » Wed Oct 26, 2011 2:19 pm

I'm personally happy to undertake attempting something like this if it's possible or hasn't been discussed and discarded

Cool idea!

Possible, and in fact pretty easy too - just by using XML configurable GUI dialogs and some Nasal scripting, this would also provide for the possibility to save and load notes. In other words, this can be easily and quickly implemented without touching the C++ source code, just by adding some new "text files" to the base package.

You may want to look into $FG_ROOT/Docs/README.gui - existing GUI dialogs can be found in $FG_ROOT/gui/dialogs - while Nasal scripting is documented here: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_scripting_language

There's a number of more complex GUI dialogs that contain embedded Nasal code, too.

I recently provided some more pointers here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=13309#p134702

Let us know if you need specific help somewhere.
There's a dedicated Nasal scripting sub forum available here: viewforum.php?f=30


The easiest way to get started is probably taking an existing GUI dialog and copying it to a new name (i.e. exit.xml to test.xml), then renaming "exit" also at the top of the dialog source code, too - then you can start modifying things and see how they're hanging together.
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