OpenATC Forum

[AlanC]

Dear all,

I thought you might be interested in seeing the early results of some of the development work I'm doing for future versions of Java OpenATC client.

First, a look at the 3-D view. You could soon be able to select this as an alternative to the standard view. This is coded in Java3D which uses OpenGL as its rendering engine. I decided to attempt initially coding a 3D solution the hard way i.e. using vector maths but a quickly fell off it. While thinking about solutions I remembered I'd had some good results with Java3D some years ago... 'Simples' as Aleksandr Orlov* would say.



Aircraft are rendered from a model constructed from J3D primitives, and each plot is identified with a raster label (always faces the viewer). Aircraft are shown at their true latitude and longitude, but at a somewhat exagerated altitude. You can navigate around the entire region using only the mouse; right-dragging to move side-to-side or up and down, and left-dragging to rotate or tilt the viewpoint. The scrollwheel zooms you in or out. This is very much work in progress as J3D can be a bit quirky!

The second feature that I've been working on is logging flights or aircraft, using a SQL database instead of a flat file or CSV or whatever. There are good free db servers e.g. HSQLDB available and this method is very fast and easy to use. Having created the tables, you just fire up the server (which listens on the localhost) and enable logging in Java OpenATC Client...



The beauty of this approach is the speed with which you can trawl out the data you want.

From simple queries...



To slightly more complex ones...



I'll keep this updated as far as possible. Meanwhile if you've any feedback or suggestions, simply reply to this post or post under 'Bug reports/feature requests'.

Cheers for now

* Go on, who is Aleksandr Orlov??? He's the meerkat on the 'compare the meerkat/market' tv ads- if you live outside the UK you won't have seen this so look at www.comparethemeerkat.com to see what this is all about... very funny.
_________________
Alan

** Always expect the unexpected! **