Separate coordinates for SAP and APW and all that processing

[Ricardo Sousa (1110850)]

Just something I randomly thought up that could maybe increase performance. Similar to the BOUND entry for round areas, an option that behaves exactly the same as BOUND, but with a list of coordinates. Intended to help with complex areas with a lot of coordinates, like those that reference borders or other more natural properties like this

Or maybe the performance impact is low enough to be negligible, I for one don't note any sort of impact regardless of active areas, but I do have a higher end system so.

 

Just food for thought, not something urgently needed or anything

[Juha Holopainen]

The code already sets an automatic bound rectangle based on the minimum and maximum latitudes and longitudes of the area when the circular bound is not specified. For most areas that should provide adequate bounds checking so that more complex checks are not needed. The vertical limits are also checked before the lateral ones, so if a flight will pass over or under the maximum vertical limits of an area, the performance-costly lateral hit checks are skipped completely. The actual performance cost of APW and SAP depends of course on many things such as the number of active areas, their vertical limits, location relative to commonly used aircraft routes and such, but in any case the fewer vertices you can get away with when defining the areas, the better.