Friday, June 23, 2006

The little things...

It's the little things that often take the longest to program, or at least make developing a feature take longer than expected. But I think flight simulation has reached the point where the details are what matters.

Trivial example: if we have a runway that's shorter than 9000 feet and about an even multiple of 1000 feet then the distance-remaining signs (every 1000 feet) from the two directions may be too close to each other or even overlap. X-Plane 850 will detect this case and generate a single two-sided distance-remaining sign (like real life), so that the signs don't obscure each other.

If the runway length is such that merging the signs would create too much error in their measurement, or we only have a sign in one direction, there is no merge.

The 850 airport code is full of tiny details like this.

8 comments:

Jamie Cole said...

I triple what Joshwa said - as I have also been compelled to make an account jst to post comment.

Jamie Cole said...

I triple what Joshwa said - as I have also been compelled to make an account just to post a comment.

Stephan said...

I wish NAVAIDS such as ILS etc. can packed into the custom scenery airport package... We edit airports in our VA and have some offset from runway<->ILS. Would be nice if we could include our changes into the airport package (so users to not reedit the nav.dat from the rescource folder each time Robin Peel releases a new update...

Benjamin Supnik said...

Hi Guys,

I'm sorry, but I really can't turn on non-authenticated posting...I already spend more time than I should deleting spam on this blog, the XSB forums and other places.

I think the best place for scenery discussions is on the scenery mailing list - the first post by all users is moderated - and with 3 moderators there isn't much delay, so the list has been pretty topical and spam-free.

/ben

Benjamin Supnik said...

Cute - spam got posted WHILE I was replying...I think I may leave that one in for illustration purposes. ;-)

DK said...

See Ben I'm not the only yutz asking for ILS data in the airport definition :P

I understand why things have to remain the way they are, but in that case, would there be a way to have WED "Align ILS to Runway" automatically while editing mayhap? Just throwing that out there....

Benjamin Supnik said...

I'll try to cover the issue of ILS editing and customization in another blog post soon. A lot of good arguments have been presented, but overall they haven't convinced me to change our current policy.

Anonymous said...

I have enabled comment moderation and turned off the account requirement. So now anyone can comment, at least in theory...thanks to those who posted the recommendation.