Alant wrote:My general impression with the phi effort is that has great possibilities, but has no documentation and requires an in-depth knowledge of HTML5, CSS, SVG, javascript and countless javascript addons/libraries.
As such it is great for someone who has all of this at his fingertips, but ....
The example code in Fgdata and the Senaca11 aircraft shows what can be done, but also reveals that this approach results in a near perfect example of code obfuscation. The data flow and linkage between all of these packages and Flightgear is very well hidden.
Yes I have searched for and looked at countless tutorials on the web, but have found very little of direct relevance.
to be fair, getting started with (D)HTML5/JavaScript is certainly much easier than learning all the bells and whistles of home-grown, FlightGear-specific, solutions like PUI/XML, Nasal or even Canvas.
Personally, I don't quite see much of a barrier to entry when it comes to HTML5/JavaScript or FG interfacing. FlightGear could be in great shape if more "industry standards" had been adopted earlier - and in fact, it is in pretty good shape when it comes to its non-proprietary file formats, because it is using a subset of XML.
I do however agree that it is using tons of fancy toolkits, without any formalized/standardized means to link those together - also, I find the way the interfacing is directly mapped to C++ unnecessarily inflexible, i.e. even if depending on Nasal should be undesirable, it would be better to use lookup tables implemented in XML space to expose missing APIs, instead of hard-coded C++ routines.
And while it is true that there's no real Phi documentation yet, the forum/devel list archives a full with postings made by Torsten documenting /some/ internals - I once began collecting related quotes on the wiki to bootstrap a "Phi" article, but then James came up with the Qt5 launcher, so that I focused on that instead:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Phihttp://wiki.flightgear.org/Integrated_Qt5_LauncherBasically, most of these articles start out with tons of quotes, and can be refined over time (by adding screen shots and rewriting stuff).
Originally, the Qt5 article looked pretty much like the Phi article - and none of these have been added to by their respective developers. In other words, there's some bootstrapping needed currently.
You could start this by adding some of the Phi screen shots that Torsten posted and then begin adding a development section, and fill in any questions you may have - I am sure that Torsten will be delighted to see someone interested in documenting his work, and paving the way for others interested in joining him creating/maintaining Phi.
Personally, I am unlikely to get involved in maintaining the article, simply because of the Qt5 effort - I could have just well deleted the Phi article, but opted not to do so, because it may still contain pointers that others consider helpful.
As can be seen by the Qt5 article on the wiki, bootstrapping wiki articles can work pretty well.
And as could be seen recently, a good wiki article can even be used to bootstrap entirely new features from scratch:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Proces ... ing_Canvas