TopSky Draw Order - Areas over Maps

[Luke Brown (1116943)]

Once again Juha, I call on your wisdom!

I'm currently drawing a map, with conditions to allow for time-specific triggering of airways and controlled airspace using the maps and regions within them. The airways when inactive, are replaced by a danger area complex defined as an area.

Unfortunately, as it stands the regions defined in Maps.txt seem to be drawn over the top of the TSA defined in Areas.txt.

Is there anyway to allow the area to be drawn on top of the map defintion?

A workaround that I can think of is drawing the area with no border, and defining an identical map with the border colour of the TSA. I hope you have a more elegant solution?

Thanks as always. With this in place, the enroute controllers in the UK are starting to see the benefits of what your plugin can achieve!

Luke

[Juha Holopainen]

I'd say the simplest option is to draw the airway using the sector file, that way it'll end up below the area. One option is also to draw the airway as an area, either completely or split into area and map parts depending on what's needed. The draw order of areas (and maps) is the order they appear in the respective data files.

[Luke Brown (1116943)]

Thanks for 2.3.1b3, looks like some useful new features!

Still trying to tackle this issue of layering however...

Let me add some images to better explain what I want to achieve.

The area in red is part time airspace, weekends only. By default the airspace is there on EuroScope, however, I am using a TopSky map to "hide" it during the weekdays so our controllers have a chance at applying the rules surrounding it. It closes during the week to allow the military to activate a danger area complex.

So, during the week, I have used a polygon to fill the inactive area, and the lines disappear as they are defined as a separate map., this works well, but as you can see the fixes indicated by the dots disappear behind the polygon. Is there a way to allow sector file defined fixes appear above a polygon drawn by TopSky?

The second issue I encounter, that unfortunately hasn't been fixed with the LAYER: variable is when the Danger area is activated. With the grey polygon defined as LAYER:-1, the danger area still fails to appear above it, shown in image 3. I have already got around this issue by defining the danger areas as maps as wll as an area (image 4), but hoped that this could be avoided with the LAYER: option.

Thoughts? Suggestions?
Thanks,
Luke

 

[Juha Holopainen]

3 hours ago, Luke Brown said:

Is there a way to allow sector file defined fixes appear above a polygon drawn by TopSky?

Yes and no... As map symbols - yes. As sector file items drawn by EuroScope - no. There are a number of stages where plugins are allowed to draw on the screen. When refreshing the radar screen background, the plugins' turn comes only after EuroScope has drawn everything it wants to draw on it.

The map layer code seems to be missing a line. It's stepping through the defined layers, but then a check is missing to draw only the maps in that layer so all active maps are drawn in every layer. The intention is that (eventually, once the code does what it's supposed to) all maps with a negative layer number are drawn before areas.