Hi chaps - I've been away for a week, and am now using V4. I've had a quick scan through this thread, and, without wanting to bore folk with repetition, I'll just mention a few things that strike me.
- I can't get the 3D prefs tab either
- I can't find a way of getting to Home - toolbar is greyed and F6 doesn't work
- On startup in 3D mode there's no 3D Map menu option and no Split View button
- I'm currently watching a Ryanair B738 showing an A320 model! Does the InfoBox not use any data from Navdata.db3? The airline, reg, etc are missing from the box when they are being fully displayed in the grid.
- We still don't seem to have a BAE146 model
- I'm really pleased that we can move the 3D toolbar - please do this for the others!
- I don't understand why bandwidth is being used downloading photos from the server when we often have perfectly good photos on our own computers
Looking forward to the next exe!
Rod
Hi Rod,
- The 3D Settings tab and the 3D View drop-down issue is now fixed (I'm getting a new .exe together right now to post to this thread which will fix this problem along with a few other items).
- The disabling of the 'home' button (along with others) has been fixed in the new exe. The app was disabling these when the 2D map closed (which now that a 3D view uses them, it will keep them open if a 3D window exists).
- The gray A320 is the 'default' aircraft. When the 3D view builds it's view, if it doesn't know what to show at the time of rendering, it will show this 'default' model. The way that RB works is that it looks in its internal DB for aircraft information, if it doesn't find the info, it queues a web request to get this info. So we use the default since we don't know at render time. We're working on modifying this logic to work better with the 3D (hopefully this can be done prior to the first release, but it may not be). This one is on the list of major items we're working on.
- Still working on the BAE146 (along with about a 6-12 others). These should be included in the final installer.
- Regarding the movable toolbar, we'll pass that along to the 2D RB developers and see what they can do to incorporate them into the other parts of the app.
- The reason that the 3D uses the web to download a photo is due to the fact that it's being displayed in an embedded webpage. The 3D view you are seeing is actually a webpage located on airnavsystems.com and it's embedded in the app. This is due to how the Google Earth plug-in works and part of their TOS requirements. When a balloon is displayed, it is currently just calling an image URL which provides the thumbnail. Not all images are already stored locally, so if we change it to only look locally, then any image that isn't already pre-downloaded on your machine will show up as a broken image (ugly red-x). The main RB interface uses a great pre-loading algorithm to queue to download and show when the image arrives. Unfortunately with Google Earth, we can't program such advanced logic to queue an image if it doesn't exist locally. I'll discuss this with others on the team and see if we can come up with some clever tricks to use local if we indeed have them already since bandwidth is understandably important for some users.
Stay tuned for a new .exe later tonight.
Thanks for your great input!