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Where to start?

Canvas is FlightGear's new fully scriptable 2D drawing system that will allow you to easily create new instruments, HUDs and even GUI dialogs and custom GUI widgets, without having to write C++ code and without having to rebuild FlightGear.

Where to start?

Postby Pro-Gamer » Thu Aug 09, 2018 1:37 pm

Hello guys, Im pretty new to flight gear but Im already well familiar with C++ I would like to start making my own avionics suite and I would like to know which sources I can use for information
Mainly Im looking for

Navigraph file specifications
ND programming and considerations when handling lat long to XY pixel coords
How to handle leg segments navigation where the leg its long enough to start using great circle navigation to compensate for earth curvature and how to display that on the ND route

Im already learning about control theory so autopilot handling is well understood by now

Thank you
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Re: Where to start?

Postby icecode » Thu Aug 09, 2018 2:32 pm

A Canvas ND already exists. You can have a look here: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_ND_Framework. If you still want to make your own, you can look at the sources for some reference about how specific things are done. Note that all of this is made in Nasal, FlightGear scripting language. It's pretty similar to C++ but you might want to have a look at the basics first: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_scripting_language.

About avionics in general, you can have a look at other aircrafts and see how they approach them. For airliners, the 777 and the A320 come to mind.

In general, there are no default avionics. There was a generic XML-based one written in C++, but it's deprecated in favor of Nasal, which offers more flexibility to the developers since each aircraft is different.
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Re: Where to start?

Postby Thorsten » Thu Aug 09, 2018 6:14 pm

How to handle leg segments navigation where the leg its long enough to start using great circle navigation to compensate for earth curvature and how to display that on the ND route


Generally the geo.nas module does that for you...
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Re: Where to start?

Postby Hooray » Wed Aug 29, 2018 10:29 am

Just briefly, the original ND stuff is a freakin mess, it would make more sense to look at Stuart's recent FG1000 stuff and Richard's MFD framework. As things are standing now, it would not be such a bad idea to come up with the corresponding frameworks and re-implement the ND stuff taking into account the lessons learned there
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pui2canvas | MapStructure | Canvas Development | Programming resources
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