wlbragg wrote in Thu Oct 10, 2013 5:04 am:Aesthetically speaking, why do you need to select starting location or aircraft from launch control? You could just start the game and then select it. Why have a launch control at all?
Actually, that's the goal, to get rid of the launchers for the common users, but first I need to fix the sim so you can select aircraft from within.
Once that is done, the role of the launchers changes exactly as you said, to a way for advanced users to customise settings without needed to edit command lines - and I'm absolutely agreed that is a reasonable use case - we sure don't want to try to create UI for every customisation option inside the sim!
The problem is right now the launcher has to do both tasks, and I care more about novice users than I do about your experience, because I'm confident you will ask or complain if you can't make something work. Novice users will simply walk away without us ever hearing their problems. Like I said, the solution here is simple - make an 'advanced' section for FGRun, or more likely make a new 'simple' section, and mark the entire existing UI as advanced apart from aircraft selection. Please feel free to work on doing that, I will be happy to help with advice on the coding!
wlbragg wrote in Thu Oct 10, 2013 5:04 am:are scenery files app data or user data? I guess I would lean towards app data except we have custom scenery which then I would categorize as user data. Lots of games use the users\Documents directory to store their settings, states, saved game data and other variable data in so maybe it would be a better fit for scenery.
If I was making the decision, I would put it in a Documents\flightgear.org\data\terrasync or something to that effect so users know it is there and can decide whether or not they want that much data on their system drive.
As long as we have the option to move it wherever we want I guess that will have to do. It wouldn't be the first thing I moved out of its default location because I disagreed with the authors reasoning for having it there.
Right, you could argue this either way. Some of the files we have a definitely AppData - the autosave files and aircraft XML state which records liveries, and the nav-cache. TerraSync and downloaded aircraft could be considered documents. I'd be happy to change the default path to 'Documents/FlightGear' if a majority of Windows users think that's a better location, I am no Windows expert at all!