I got some messages from aircraft developers asking if they could use the Canvas system and Nasal to create more dynamic splash screens.
I said this wouldn't be possible currently. But theoretically, most of the required hooks should be in place for this, right ?
I mean, we already have support for raster images, text and vector graphics (SVG) already.
Now obviously, this is not such an important thing - but it would seem doable, and we could implement much more interactive splash screens that way, showing much more useful information.
In addition, it's worth keeping in mind that our existing splash screen handling code is rather inflexible and could be greatly simplified by allowing Canvas+Nasal to handle the animation side of things.
In fact, we could even show instruments or MFDs on the splash screen by supporting Canvases there, but also a loglist widget or other useful information that we cannot currently show easily when just starting.
So maybe it's not such a bad idea after all ?
Based on looking at the code, we would primarily need a way to add a new "splash screen" placement, so that a canvas could be used instead of a static RGB/PNG texture, right ?
We could then change the splash screen code to load PropertyList-encoded XML files with an embedded Nasal load/unload section, analogous to our GUI dialogs to run some scripting code for animation purposes. "Splash" images would then become XML files.