Questions from a small fgdata-next cleanup check

Hi Folks,

I was looking through a local checkout of fgdata-next and wanted to ask a
few questions before I open any issues or MRs.

Basically I had an idea in mind to just use tools to go around finding
inefficient/legacy ancient stuff in fgdata that still persists.

This is not a complaint or a “please delete old things” message. I am
mostly trying to understand which things are intentional compatibility
paths, and which ones might be useful cleanup/profiling candidates.

My checkout is:

next
b694b4f HDR: Add debug display of hdr-forward buffer

A few things stood out.

First, Effects/ws30.eff still has a technique that references:

Shaders/HDR/ws30_old.vert
Shaders/HDR/ws30_old.frag

So I assume this is not dead code. Is this an intentional fallback path for
older hardware/drivers, or just an older path that has not been cleaned up
yet?

If it is intentionally kept, would a small comment or rename to make the
fallback role clearer be useful?

Second, I noticed that the runway textures are split between DDS and PNG
material definitions. For example, Materials/dds/global.xml references:

Runway/grass_rwy.dds
Runway/dirt_rwy.dds
Runway/pa_threshold.dds
Runway/pc_threshold.dds

while Materials/default/global.xml and some Materials/regions/*.xml files
reference PNG versions of the same or similar textures.

I am not assuming these are unused duplicates, since both paths are clearly
referenced. Is this split still intentional, or is this an area where a
clearer material/texture policy would be useful?

Third, I grepped for settimer() and found a number of zero-delay or
immediate-reschedule patterns, especially under Nasal/local_weather, but
also in aircraft.nas, multiplayer.nas and jetways/jetways.nas.

Some examples are weather interpolation, thermal/wave lift loops, weather
dynamics/quadtree loops, cloud array creation, and some jetway/multiplayer
update paths.

Are these mostly known and harmless because they are feature-gated or
short-lived, or are any of these areas already known to be worth profiling?

Fourth, I found 47 tracked .xcf, .blend and .zip files. Some of the larger
ones are:

Aircraft/Instruments-3d/ar-6201/src/ar-6201.xcf
AI/Aircraft/DH82/Paintkit/DH82-p-kit.xcf
Aircraft/Instruments-3d/bxp6401/src/bxp6401.xcf
AI/Aircraft/CCX/Paintkit/bomb-5000-pkit.xcf
Aircraft/c172p/Paintkit/Paintkit.zip

Are source art / paintkits / tool archives intentionally kept in fgdata for
convenience, or would it be better to move some of those outside the
runtime data tree?

I am happy to split any of these into separate GitLab issues if that would
be useful. I just wanted to ask first so I do not file noise or mislabel
something intentional as a problem.

Kind regards,

Philips Nguyen

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