DevNote Jan-09-2008
Wide

New GUI is coming soon

Jan-09-2008

Happy New Year!

FlightGearMacOSX-screenshot1.png SIZE:532x260(?KB)

Since I've been busy preparing FlightGear Mac OS X 1.0.0, I couldn't update GUI launcher. But Now FlightGear is released and I have a bit free time renewing GUI launcher for Mac OS. It'll be coming soon after some more tests.

Though GUI launcher is getting better compared to the one at the time when I involved to this project, I don't get satisfied at all.

The new GUI launcher has some new features including:

  • Aircraft searchable (using name, FDM, status, or filename (without -set.xml))
  • More Airport data (almost all airports/carriers in FlightGear), searchable with code, city/location, country, or name
  • Super Fast launching (less than three seconds with all aircraft from CVS when aircraft data are cached)
  • More Options like real-weather-fetch, visibility, etc
  • New Look (a bit though)
FlightGearMacOSX-screenshot2.png SIZE:532x582(?KB)

What I first did was adding full airport data to GUI launcher, but it took more than 20 seconds to read all data. So I changed the data format from binary plist to ruby script, which makes 10 times faster than the original one even with 20,000+ data.

Then, I added the aircraft search similar to airport search, which also reads all -set.xml files from Aircraft folder. Since the xml parser on ruby is very slow, it took about 5+ seconds to read all aircraft data. To make launch time shorter, I introduced cache mechanism in loading aircraft data. As a result, launch time is less than three seconds with all aircraft in CVS when fully cached.

Though searching airports takes a bit longer than the current version, flying from 20000+ airports in FlightGear is way better, I believe. so I'm very happy with the new GUI launcher.

GUI launcher is getting better compared to the one at the time when I involved to this project, but I don't get satisfied at all. I want to add more options, more useful features to Mac OS X version, so be patient!

By the way, I'm kinda interested in building fgcom for Mac OS X platform. Though it has some OpenAL related problems, it seems very attractive to me. If any of you already tried it out on Macs, please let me know.