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Help tag aircraft

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Help tag aircraft

Postby stuart » Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:48 pm

Hi All,

With 500+ aircraft in FGADDON alone, trying to find the exact aircraft you want to fly can be challenging.

To help with this, FG now supports aircraft tags - http://wiki.flightgear.org/Catalog_metadata. The idea is that this will be used on the website and launcher so that if you want to fly a 1930s twin engined tail-dragger, you'll be able to enter those tags and see a list of the appropriate aircraft.

At the same time, there's a new XML tag <long-description> for a longer description of the aircraft, so new users can get an idea of what the aircraft is before they download and run it.

For example, the entries for the c172p are:
Code: Select all
<sim>
        <description>Cessna 172P Skyhawk (1981 model, detailed)</description>
        <long-description>The Cessna 172 Skyhawk is a four-seat, single-engine, high-wing fixed-wing aircraft. First flown in 1955 and still in production, more Cessna 172s have been built than any other aircraft.</long-description>
        <tags>
            <tag>ga</tag>
            <tag>cessna</tag>
            <tag>piston</tag>
            <tag>single-engine</tag>
            <tag>fixed-gear</tag>
        </tags>

        <author>Original by David Megginson, gsagostinho (Gilberto Agostinho), wlbragg (Wayne Bragg), Juanvvc (Juan Vera del Campo), onox, thevirtualfer, Dany93 (Daniel Dubreuil), dg-505 (Jonathan Schellhase), tigert (Tuomas Kuosmanen), AndersG (Anders Gidenstam), wkitty42 (Waldo Kitty), algefaen, Horacio, D-ECHO, Jarl Arntzen (jarlarntzen)</author>

        <status>advanced production</status>
        <aircraft-version>2017.1</aircraft-version>
        <rating>
            <FDM type="int">4</FDM>
            <systems type="int">5</systems>
            <model type="int">4</model>
            <cockpit type="int">5</cockpit>
        </rating>


But, for this to work, we need people to add tags to aircraft. This is where you come in!

Erik has produced a list of the aircraft that are currently untagged here: http://adalin.com/ehtw.info/flightgear-metadata.txt, along with some suggested tags based on YASim FDM files.

If you'd like to contribute some tags etc. for an aircraft on the list, please post it below, and I will review it and check it in. Doing so you'll be helping the entire community and in particular new users find the hidden gems of the FlightGear hangar.

If you could use format above, that will make life easier for me.

Thanks,

-Stuart
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby sanhozay » Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:01 pm

Could you explain what this means?

The '(null)' flightmodel is unsupported at this time
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby Necolatis » Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:01 pm

Good news that the tags are gonna be used. :)

Btw. The wiki list of tags is not same as https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/fg ... logTags.py list of tags. So we go by the list in the wiki?
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby yanes » Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:08 pm

Good idea ,we really need to organize the repository , so a user interested in aircrafts of some type or Era can find easily what he's looking for.
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby stuart » Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:10 pm

@sanhozay: You can ignore it - it is a bug in the script used to generate the untagged aircraft list.
@Necolatis: Well spotted! The two lists _should_ match. I don't know which is correct. I will seek clarification from James, who wrote the original list :)
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby erik » Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:17 pm

sanhozay wrote in Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:01 pm:Could you explain what this means?

The '(null)' flightmodel is unsupported at this time

It is not actually a bug, in this case the script found a <flight-model/> tag but no <aero/> tag in the same file.

By the way the script also processed JSBSim files.

And the first tag should be the aircraft type only, without yasim or jsbsim.

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Less active: Cessna T-37, T-38, Santa Claus. Previous: General Dynamics F-16. Worked on: Wright Flyer
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby sanhozay » Fri Mar 24, 2017 12:53 am

erik wrote in Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:17 pm:...the script found a <flight-model/> tag but no <aero/> tag in the same file.

Thanks for the explanation.

This can occur if an aircraft with multiple variants includes a "common" file, where the "common" file defines the flight model and the -set.xml files for each variant define the aero tag. Will this cause a problem for the launcher? Should the flight-model tag be moved to the -set.xml files in these cases?
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby erik » Fri Mar 24, 2017 8:57 am

No this is just a problem for the script that prints the tags based on aircraft configuration files.

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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby erik » Fri Mar 24, 2017 1:47 pm

The list has been updated to include helicopters, afterburner, supercharger and variable-pitch propellers:
http://adalin.com/ehtw.info/flightgear-metadata.txt

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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby pommesschranke » Sun Mar 26, 2017 8:06 pm

please give an example in which way / format you'd like us to contribute.
do you have a preview/mockup of the gui for AC selection.

the filters on this website are useful:
http://helijah.free.fr/flightgear/hangar.htm
can we use/convert this metadata ?

I'd add the tags "airliner" and "passenger" to all aircraft where the name starts with "7" or "A3" :wink:
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby stuart » Sun Mar 26, 2017 8:39 pm

If you submit something in the format at the top of the topic, I can easily merge it into the -set.xml file.

If you could write a <long-description> and set the <rating> tags, that would be a bonus :)

-Stuart
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby Thorsten » Wed Mar 29, 2017 1:16 pm

I'm slowly chipping away at this, adding tags to 1-2 aircraft a day. That'll give me some 30-50 with metadata within a month. It's basically a 5-10 minute task, firing up the wikipedia page of the real aircraft, then going through the tags, skimming the wiki page which of them apply.

If ten more people would join the effort at a similar rate, the whole repository would have tags within a month. It's not an outrageous workload, and it takes zero coding skills - just a little willingness to do community tasks.
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby Isaak » Wed Mar 29, 2017 2:58 pm

I'll do a bunch tomorrow morning. I didn't find a list of Aircraft that are already done yet, except for the auto generated list in the OP. Can someone point me in the right direction so that I don't redo the work of an other?
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby Thorsten » Wed Mar 29, 2017 4:03 pm

It's not a problem yet, as you have a 95% chance of picking an untagged aircraft by randomly selecting one. I hope there'll be a list provided soonish.
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Re: Help tag aircraft

Postby Isaak » Thu Mar 30, 2017 9:02 am

I 'm starting now at the F4U
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