#2628 Launcher does not show bezier/curved airport pavement

A long ago I noticed that the pavement is not shown on the launcher and Select Airport map, except for a few airports, but could not pinpoint the pattern. I found out that the problem occurs when the airport is using curve-based pavement, as opposed to the older rectangle-based.

• UUDD, PHNL: rectangle-based pavement -- works;
• EDDH, EDDF: curve-based pavement -- does not work.

Side note: on the Canvas and the Ctrl-M map it is never shown (but I am not sure whether it is supposed to be) -- it would probably be useful to have an option to show it and parkings like in Select Airport.

[James Turner]

Yeah right now we don't have a way to render the curve/bezier pavement data, someone needs to work on that.

[Anonymous]

For the record, pavement calculation code is:

• launcher: AirportDiagram::buildTaxiways() in flightgear/src/GUI/AirportDiagram.cxx
• Select Airport: fgdata/Nasal/canvas/map/TAXI.symbol

[Gijs]

The issue is actually not the rendering, but the fact that bezier pavement data is not included in the navdata cache. The rectangular taxiways/pavements are actually included as special types of "runway", which is why they do show up.

@jmturner: What is your take on adding taxiways and pavements as dedicated objects James? Would that make sense from a cache memory/size/speed perspective (i assume it would add quite a bit of data compared to the few old-format layouts we have)?

It would be a nice base for showing ground charts on the ND of our airliners.

[James Turner]

The pavement data is really noise in the cache, adding it would slow down the initial cache build but I'm not sure by how much (and more people have SSDs compared to when I first added the cache and rebuild time was a big concern)

Ideally we would store per-airport data which is not needed globally in their own files, to keep the global navcache smaller and faster, but architecturally that is a bit of a pain right now.

Basically we would copy all the pavement lines of apt.dat, and similar 'airport only stuff' like signage into a file under Airports/I/C/A/ICAO-apt.dat

... and then only load this when needed for an airport. This is pretty doable and much more scalable as we add more kinds of airport data.