Oyvind Ellefsen <<email>> writes:

The new software for scoring, FS, was announced and demoed at the CIVL plenary last week. FS is now at version 1.1 and generally available for download.

The FS system is made to do one thing, and do it well - scoring competitions. It will not have much use for the general pilot. If you want fancy 3D tracklog analysis and task planning I would recommend something like SeeYou or ComepGPS.

FS does not need RACE, it will validate tracklogs against the tasks, score the tasks, and produce reports by itself. There's a basic tracklog viewer to manually verify tracklog against the task. FS currently implement the newer versions of the GAP formula, and PWC formula will be added shortly along with some new features and bug fixes in version 1.2

Early beta versions of FS have been used to score competitions since April 2007, and have proven quite functional and efficient. FS will handle IGC files, and produces KML files compatible with Google Earth and maps.

FS does not interface with the GPS units by itself, but leaves this task to GpsDump, SeeYou, maxpunkte, or any software that can produce a KML or IGC file. Do note that GpsDump have some very nice features to integrate GpsDump with FS, and we do recommend to use it as it will dramatically improve download speed and efficiency. FS will also interface with the CIVL pilot database, to help identify the pilots CIVL ID for WPRS points.

FS version 2.0 will be released as open source software, we hope this will increase participation from the users of the software, as you can add more features, report, formulas, improve the GUI, etc. as you want yourself. Currently FS require .NET 2.0 on Windows.

One of the key points of FS is the documentation Wiki. This Wiki enables the users to update the documentation, add tips and tricks, add feature requests, report bugs, and generally be involved with how the software should work. Anyone can add documentation, translations, new report templates, and so on.

We really need the scorers out there to help out with making this as usable and clear as it can be. Right now only the main developer Stein Tore Erdal, and I have written the Wiki documentation. We are probably the worst candidates to document this, as we know the software too well, and take many things for granted. Please help out by contributing!

Never heard about a Wiki? This explains it - http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

You find the Wiki and can download FS at http://fs.fai.org.

You can have as many GPSDump instances as you want. We found practical limit to be around four instances, which is more than enough in the age of USB downloads. If you have lots of serial ports and slow serial GPS'es you can add more. I'll write something about how to handle this on the Wiki.

I'll be reviewing (and testing) this long awaited scoring software soon. So far, so good.