An aviation navigation library. This library was created for developing old style navigation systems in x-plane with the fantastic xplane_plugin crate, but it could be used for a variety of other geospatial purposes. A number of the features will probably eventually be broken out into their own projects if they mature. Everything is still very much WIP as it has yet to be used in a serious plugin.
- Navigation database - capable of loading x-plane's GNS430 data. Optimised for typical FMS queries.
- Integer based geohash
- Flight plan routes, route statistics, route finding.
- parse/load all information in the GNS430 database
- basic database queries
- query acceleration structure based on geohash in a method similar to what is suggested here
- drawing in opengl in x-plane possibly using nanovg
- flight plan parsing (various formats)
- route finding
- route statistics
- sample plugin
I've a fascination with older navigation tools and systems which require much more interaction from the navigation and offer more learning, and interactive content at the expense of convenience and accuracy. I'm developing this library for use in a few potential projects:
- Omega navigation system simulation
- A comprehensive KNS660 simulation
- A celestial navigation simulation
- A seperate map application (possibly embedded in x-plane too if this is sensible) with plotting tools similar to the silent hunter, and with several useful navigation map projections
- Aircraft systems for addon aircraft
Having spent hours getting a basic x-plane c++ plugin to compile, it was a breath of fresh air to discover the great work of samcrow on the xplane_plugin crate, which makes it dead easy to get up and running with x-plane plugin creation.
A common source of bugs and frustration with x-plane plugins are crash to desktop from segfaults in plugins. Halfway through a 7 hour flight, there's nothing more annoying. Rust's inherent safety is a potential solution to this problem, and its performance should put it at an advantage to the existing lua plugin tools.