[Flightgear-devel] Random oddities

[Renk T. <tho...@jy...>]

A collection of oddities I've encountered while trying to get my Windows edition of FG to work with an updated nightly (some of them sort of known, but just as a reminder - as a 'normal' user I'd probably have been lost two times over...).

* I think we claim that one can have easily several FG versions installed on the same machine. I think that's *almost* true - except for something in  $FGHome. When I updated the nightly binary, I got a series of crashes which I eventually traced to the navcache access (and possibly something else), and only after wiping $FGHome could I use the updated nightly. I know that each new version uses its own autosave - should we perhaps do something similar for the navcache, or wipe it per default in the windows installation process?

* Initially, FGRun didn't show all aircraft in my directory but only a collection. After fiddling around and rebooting, it finally did, I never came to the bottom of it, but there's at least one forum user report to the same effect. Might have to do with FGRun also storing settings from a previous session with an older FG version? I'm not sure how FGRun updates work when you install a new nightly.

Now, to a few things peculiar for using FG *without* internet access:

* I still got possible crashes during environment init when I don't do real-weather-fetch. This is almost certainly a racing condition, because it affects some aircraft sometimes, but not in a predictable way, and it never occurs for others (for reference, I've seen it with the ufo and the JSBSim f-14b, never with any other). The problem is easily 'fixed' by doing real-weather-fetch - the system then concludes after a short timeout that it can't get real weather and the environment initializes as planned. 

* When disabling terrasync, FG works fine if I specify a starting airport that's actually in the installed scenery. However, it hangs on 'Loading Scenery' when asking for an airport that's not installed rather than spawning on water as it used to, migrating to KSFO or writing out an error (max. I've waited is a minute, even CORINE scenery loads way before that on my box - so there may be a timeout eventually, but the decision that there is no scenery could be made in the first second...)

None of these are a real problem for me, but I guess they might drive a first-time user nuts.

Cheers,

* Thorsten