[Opengc-devel] OpenGC progress update

[Damion S. <dam...@ho...>]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to give you a quick status update of what I've been doing over 
the last couple of weeks.

1) X-Plane is supported once again! I've reimplemented X-Plane support using 
the Plib library (which is already required to build OpenGC). This means 
that the X-Plane data source should be supported on all platforms 
(Win/Linux/MacOS X) although I have not had a chance to check support on 
anything but Windows. The X-Plane data source is still a bit sketchy, but 
works fine. In particular, byte-swapping over Mac/PC networks is not 
supported, nor does the data source implement bidirectional communications 
to request particular sim parameters.

If you want to try out X-Plane, look through the code and "check" the 
appropriate output boxes in X-Plane's data output dialog.

Because Austin tends to change things rapidly and unpredictably, the data 
source in OpenGC will always track a particular version of X-Plane. In this 
case, only 6.30 or related versions (most of the .20's I think) are 
supported. 5.xx versions will not work.

2) The file initialization portion of the AppObject has been substantially 
improved. It now follows a crude finite state machine model, which helps to 
enforce the order in which things are initialized.

***Please refer to the sample opengc.ini present in the CVS. The new data 
initialization code is fairly strict in how it wants things done, but is 
also better about reporting errors and exiting gracefully.

Other improvements to the file reader:
a) Comment lines using # are supported
b) Gauge names have been standardized to GaugeName, rather than ogcGaugeName 
(there was a mix). For example, the correct name is now Boeing737EICAS, not 
ogcBoeing737EICAS.

I have also reduced the number of parameters parsed in the command line. My 
opinion (comments welcome) is that the bulk of the initialization should be 
handled using the INI file, and not the command line. This may break 
Flightgear support; if so, I apologize.

3) Misc. news
I think I've found a memory leak that causes OpenGC to consume an additional 
20-30K/sec (under Windows at least). This will eventually overwhelm 
available memory and crash the program. I'm still trying to determine what's 
causing this; if anyone has any ideas, let me know. It does not seem to be 
dependent on which data source is used, so I suspect a gauge.

As a final reminder, you will probably have to change your INI file to 
comply with the reader structure.

Cheers,
-Damion-

_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com