Hi Paul, As others have pointed out, there has been a small amount of AI traffic development going on, and as the guilty party I'd better pipe up sooner rather than later :-) I'll describe what I've been doing and leave it up to you whether you want to join in with that or start afresh.
I've started from the premise that if there's going to be a number of planes in the sky at once, then they should take up as few CPU cycles each as possible. Hence my vision is for very simplified mechanics of flying - basically known ranges of speed, bank, climb etc for a given flight condition, and a bit of smoothing of transitions in between. Also only very near AI planes to the viewer to be updated every frame, the rest to be updated 1 per frame, and hence robust to variable times between updating. I'm pretty sure that not everyone agrees with that, and that some would go for coupled autopilot/fdms flying the planes as if they were another user-fidelity flight-model, but the simplified route is the one I started down. Then my basic structure is that an AI manager iterates through a list of AIEntity classes, and updates one per frame. The AIEntity has the minimum logic necessary to be drawn on the screen, and progressivly more complex classes are derived from it - for instance a plane that can taxi, then a light plane that can fly circuits could be derived from that and would already know how to taxi, and then a light plane that flys from one airport to another could be derived from that and would already know how to fly circuits and taxi. Having said all that, I've basically hardly started! I've got one hardwired AI plane in so far, that can be seen by starting FlightGear with: fgfs --airport-id=KEMT --prop:"/sim/ai-traffic/enabled"=true --prop:"/radios/comm/frequencies/selected-mhz[0]"=121.2 --heading=10 You do need to download the w120n30 scenery block as well. This will start you at El Monte behind a light single (no, NOT cheese!!!) that takes off, flys a circuit, and then taxis back to a parking spot. It's great fun to try following it round. You can make it fly touch and go's by changing line 54 in AIMgr.cxx: local_traffic->FlyCircuits(1, true); to a larger value than 1. The limit of my ambition at the moment is to get light planes taxiing in and out of and flying circuits around GA airports at the moment. This is a huge amount of work in itself - particularly the taxiing part, which also involves writing an infrastructure to describe logical taxiway and parking networks at airports, and tools to allow users to create/modify them. There's absolutely no way I'm going to get time to do any planes that fly from one airport to another in the next year or so. Anyway, the nub of the matter is that you can either join in with what's started, where the best separation of work is probably to go for planes that fly from one airport to another, or start afresh if you think I'm on the wrong track. If you start afresh bear in mind you'll need some communication with the ATC system - both to send and recieve messages. Interactive communication with tower control (You are number 2, extend downwind for traffic on straight in / go-around I repeat go-around / cleared to land etc) should be comming quite soon and you'll need to respond to those. If you do you're own taxiing system then communication with ground control (in a programming logic sort of way rather than spoken transmission) is a right can of worms since we need to communicate a logical representation of a path to follow to and from tower and plane. James Turner has started some impressive work on implementing Flightplans in Flightgear, and an interface to the DAFIF data which includes loads of stuff such as airways, TMAs, SIDs, STARs, etc. I'd thoroughly recommend getting in touch with him before doing too much since you'll almost certainly want to use his stuff. Whatever you do, any logic on how to fly from one place to another will be useful whatever system to glue it in ends up getting used. Have fun, Cheers - Dave *********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 2/9/03 at 5:59 PM Paul Morriss wrote: >Hi, > Is there any procedure for software documents etc? > >I have an outline of how I intend to write the >software, I will start with other planes in the sky >for now. > >Paul > >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Jim Wilson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2003 4:29 PM >Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Dynamic Scenario's > > >> Paul Morriss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: >> >> > Hi all, >> > I am new to Flight Gear, but not to flight >> > simulation, thats my line of business ;) Anyway I >> > would like to propose (and develop) a server or >system >> > that can be used to manage the environment. What >I >> > mean is that the scenario system manages: >> > >> > * Other plans in the air, these can add the >reality >> > of busy airspace near large airports. >> > >> > * Weather system controlled through scenarios, >this >> > would include clouds, rain etc... >> > >> > * Ground vehicles movement (aircraft ready to >taxi >> > for takeoff etc. >> > >> >> Sounds great. Actually I was recently thinking that >this might be the best >> way to do traffic. >> >> You should be able build a property tree under >/sim/traffic (or whereever) >> with multiple entries for the "position" and >"orientation". See the current >> /position and /orientation property paths for >example. The setup xml >> configuration files for the models you want to >include, specifing the paths to >> the property for each position and orientation data >item (e.g. >> latitude-deg-prop, longitude-deg-prop, >altitude-ft-prop, etc). >> >> Then all that is left is to set the position and >orientation values via the >> network interface and the models will move >accordingly. Of course the work >> will be in developing whatever technique you want to >use to move these around. >> >> Best, >> >> Jim >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Flightgear-devel mailing list >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Everything you'll ever need on one web page >from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts >http://uk.my.yahoo.com > >_______________________________________________ >Flightgear-devel mailing list >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
