RadarBox 3D (4.00) Ready for Beta Testing

[AirNav 3D Development]

One thing that would move towards that idea would be having radar rings on the 3d map.

With a user selectable on/off  button - same as the 2D map.

A previous suggestion of mine was a 3D polar/height diagram as well.

In the 2D map, the radar rings move around as you pan the map around with the center always located at the middle of the map. I'm having a hard time trying to visualize how to implement this in the 3D viewport. Any ideas what it would look like? Would it be located flat on the earth surface and be synced up with the 2D map centerpoint? Or would each aircraft get a radar ring? If you have any ideas what you would like to see, please give us as much detail as possible so we can try implementing this. It sounds like it would be very cool.

[pjm]

My impression is that the user should have full control of this and adjust settings themselves accordingly until they find a good balance. What do you think?

I agree with the user control philosophy, and my suggestion would be a 2 fold approach (depending on practicality).

1) a user option in preferences to select medium/minimum when network traffic is selected (turned off by default).
2) an option to discard network traffic further than xxx (user selectable) NM from the current centre of the 3d map, with perhaps a default value of 50-100NM set and enabled by default.

I actually like the current design where less detail is displayed as the aircraft are further away, and perhaps this can simply be extended along the lines suggested above....

All options should be saved & restored (remembered) across restarts of RB :)

[pjm]

Just a little light relief - saw an interesting phenomenon this morning, seems the aircraft was transmitting bogus ADS-B info, and was all over the place, but the resulting 3D graph was interesting :)

[prbflight]

Hi Everyone

I just returned from a business trip.  While I was gone I left Radarbox 3D running and all seems fine except MyLog screen has frozen.  I have not shut down the software yet so I don't know if I will lose my contacts from the last 48 hours.  There does not seem to have been any strain on my operating system while I was gone but then again I did not put any demands on the 3D software either.  Looking forward the the new exe.

Paul@cyyb

Note: after shutting down and re-starting it ended up that I did not lose my contacts.

[prbflight]

We're working on fixing these issues that you all have pointed out so far. Stay tuned for a new exe soon. Thanks for all of your testing.

So far there are is a lot great feedback regarding bugs and oddness in the app (which is great--we need this), but what in general do you think about the app? Do you like it so far? Would you continue to use it after the beta? What would you most like changed or added to the 3D part? General comments or suggestions like this help very much since you guys are the target audience for this. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

It's too early for me to tell if I would invest in the upgrade to 3D or not.  I'll save my judgement as the newer exe's come out I see how performance improves.  At this stage I would say it is nice but I'm just not sure if it warrants the extra cost.  But hey...I said I would never use theReal-Time network and it was only a week after my trial ran out that I realized I couldn't live without it!  Stay tuned.

Paul@cyyb

[prbflight]

In the pop-up box the image is sometimes different then the image my All Photos folder.  When the new image is shown in the pop-up is it being downloaded and stored somewhere?



Now my second question....would it be possible to make the pop-up box editable where the user could tick a box to show a 'Seen' or 'Heard' icon within it?

Paul@cyyb

[pjm]

pjm: not all liveries all included (it would be impossible). Anyway if you make a list of major liveries that should appear and aren't let us know. Maybe we can choose 50 liveries that should be there.

I have a list of a some I've made over the last few days (below). I've noticed quite a few times no livery is displayed until an entry appears in the "Airline" field of the text display, this despite there almost always being a valid entry in the "company" field. This is nota  hard and fast rule though as I've also seen many liveries without an entry in the "Airline" field.


Also sometimes I've noticed its very hard to distinguish between grey and white bodies, luckily with the exception of the Japan Airlines I have screenshots, so I'll leave it up to you to decide, but I'll sort them here by what I think is models & liveries.

Missing models (grey body)

Aerolineas Argentinas A342
Australian Airforce B73B
Emirates B77W
Jetstar A321
MAS/MASkargo B742
QantasLink DH8C
Pacific Blue B738
Virgin blue B738
virgin B738 - some only - see previous post
LAN A343


Missing Livery (white body)

* Note sometimes liveries will appear after a while when then "Airline" field is populated

Air Austral B772
Aircalin (Air Caledonie International) A332
Air Canada -  B772
Air China A332
Air Vanuatu B738
Ethiad A346
Garuda Indonesia A332
Jetstar A320
MAS B744
Qantas B738
Qantas B762
Qantas A332
Qantas B744
Singapore Air Cargo B744
Pacific Blue B738  
Japan Airlines B772
Air Niugini B752


screenshots here: http://www.petermcgrath.info/AirNav/missing.zip

I shall update this list if I notice anything of interest over the next few days - especially on the weekend, where we may get a few more international flights from "exotic" places :)

[AirNav 3D Development]

In the pop-up box the image is sometimes different then the image my All Photos folder.  When the new image is shown in the pop-up is it being downloaded and stored somewhere?



Now my second question....would it be possible to make the pop-up box editable where the user could tick a box to show a 'Seen' or 'Heard' icon within it?

Paul@cyyb

Hi Paul,

The photo in the 3D window balloon is loaded directly from the server over the web. It is not saved locally to your PC. Normally it should be the same as the images in the RB interface. We'll double-check why they are not always the same.

Would the tick box you mention prevent that balloon from opening again? Or would it simply close the balloon? In the early beta's we were having a lot of issues with that balloon closing too quickly and not leaving enough time to read it. So we made a few options in the '3D Settings' which allow you to tweak the timeout of the balloon and decide if you do not want them to be shown at all. Another tip to get them to go away faster is to simply move the camera position a tiny bit with your mouse and that will force the bubble to close. So when one opens, just click and drag the 3D view a little bit and it will close. Unfortunately there aren't any options to put form objects (tick box) inside of that balloon and capture the value easily.

[pjm]

In the 2D map, the radar rings move around as you pan the map around with the center always located at the middle of the map. I'm having a hard time trying to visualize how to implement this in the 3D viewport. Any ideas what it would look like? Would it be located flat on the earth surface and be synced up with the 2D map centerpoint? Or would each aircraft get a radar ring? If you have any ideas what you would like to see, please give us as much detail as possible so we can try implementing this. It sounds like it would be very cool.

I have the "draw centred at home location" preference option set, so the radar rings here stay linked to "home" when I move the 2D map around.

As for the the 3D polar/height display, I was thinking something along the lines of a transparent blanket, similar to a terrain map, that floats above the earth, Perhaps colour coded with the respective heights recorded at each location (and invisible - i.e. nothing - where no signal has been received).

[RodBearden]

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

[AirNav 3D Development]

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!

[AirNav 3D Development]

All,

Here is a link to a new .exe. NOTE -- this is not an installer, only a replacement exe for the main application. You need to unzip the file and overwrite your existing ANRB.exe in the location you installed the beta. Let us know if you have a problem doing this.

http://www.airnavsystems.com/cgi-bin/ANRB_3D/ANRB.zip

This exe is not a final version, however it addresses several of the latest major problems, plus it adds a new beta-logging feature that will log error/warning messages into a log file that you can zip up and email us to help us track down the specific errors. The new log file that gets created is named beta_log.txt and it will be saved in your application directory. So if you find issues, please post the issue to the forum and then email me ([email protected]) the zipped debug_log.txt. This will help out a ton! Thanks again.

[pjm]

Here is a link to a new .exe

Ouch... Preferences window fell under main window almost immediately...

All I had down, was

• the "restore down, move to top main, stretch across 2 monitors" dance.
• turned on split view and adjusted the window sizes
• selected a 3D aircraft & view
• went into preferences.

will try to replicate...

fwiw the zipped exe seems to be a good way to distribute them. After extracting, I have on my system a software date/time which probably reflects when it was built, rather than the date it was downloaded to my computer. i.e. 2009/12/10 18:35

[pjm]

App does not close down. only minimises to taskbar, and must be killed in task manager.

Welcome screen returns at every restart.

Duplicated preferences window falling under - similar steps to above, but this time happened after selecting a second aircraft in the 3D window, which happened to be the Australian Airforce B73B with no model/livery. This was the first one I selected last time.

Attached beta log - fwiw...

[AirNav 3D Development]

Attached beta log - fwiw...

Thanks for the log. Investigating now... (wasn't able to duplicate the fall-behind here yet)