Use Nasal to Randomize Splash Screens

[Hooray]

Agreed, I just had a look at the code ($FG_SRC/Viewer/splash.cxx) - it seems fairly straightforward to re-implement the existing functionality using ~50-80 lines of Nasal/Canvas code.

Currently, that's simply not a priority though - so you may still want to file a feature request (issue tracker) so that we don't forget about this.
Obviously, the existing feature works "well enough", and touching working code isn't exactly popular

Technically, it would even be a good thing to pursue - the splash screen code is not exactly compact and it handles several corner cases already.
So this could be greatly simplified by supporting Nasal & Canvas. So I may revisit this depending on progress in the FGCanvas/Nasal-initialization department, and spare time obviously.

But for the time being, I'd like to provide hooks to make most FG subsystems optional and configurable/selectable via "boot" scripts.

That is something that will help us significantly with regression testing, including debugging & profiling, but also troubleshooting on the forum, because we can actually disable things entirely and ask people if a certain problem still persists. And we'll have a straightforward way to tell just how wasteful certain subsystems really are when it comes to CPU/RAM.

[Hooray]

ok, I just checked it again - it's actually trivial, we don't even have to touch the viewer/splash screen code at all: there's an existing option to disable the whole thing via --disable-splash-screen, which is currently defaulted to false - but we only need to edit options.cxx to default it to true, which will keep all the splash code disabled - so that we can directly use Nasal/Canvas to show a GUI dialog without decoration to render things, including randomly-selected splash screens. Amount of C++ changes: ~1 line - and then it's roughly 30 lines of Nasal code to come up with a scripted splash screen that will be loaded from $FG_ROOT/Boot/default.boot - and which could support the existing scheme, as well as a "random" selection scheme, but also a totally scripted Nasal/Canvas splash mode

Once this is in place, we can safely remove the hard-coded splash screen

[Hooray]

Also see: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=26434