Hello folks, I have been interested in working on a multiplayer server for FlightGear. Apparently there is a huge amount of interest in such a thing, but I haven't found anything functional yet. I did a little bit of research on what is out there. here's a summary of what I found, let me know if there is other stuff or if I'm off base with any of this:
Cumulas project: http://www.aurora-solutions.co.uk/~cumulas/ Emailed author, Paul Morriss, who said project is on hold. Unable to download it from the web page (broken?) to check current code status. FGCombatzone: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fgcombatzone/ Nothing in CVS on sourceforge. Nothing in the sf mailing lists No home page No activity in the last couple of years. Dead? fg-server: http://fg-server.sourceforge.net Last news on the page says coding is getting started, in July 2002. Grabbed source from cvs, but seems to be missing file server.h? CVS files not updated for over 18 months. Looks like it has some basic code for ACE: http://www.kbs.twi.tudelft.nl/People/Students/L.Otte/ So far the most promising looking, but not maintained for last year Complex installation to graft into main source tree 7500 lines of code, much of which is buffering/network code Never got this to work. integrated solutions: src/NetworkOLK - obsolete and removed from tree, don't know much more than that. src/MultiPlayer - peer-to-peer multiplayer support, handles updating plane models, supports broadcast or unicast udp, and I actually got it working! src/Server - looks like an attempt at a start to a server. Unfortunately, as it was pointed out, the basic MPI stuff should be easily handled by plib. Found some historical discussions about this one in the mailing list archives, which quickly degenerated into a tangent about whether to support military scenarios or not before the basics were in place. Last updated Nov 2003, so perhaps this is still being worked on? I emailed the author (John Barrett) but email address he was using bounced. Is this project still active? Is anything working yet? Ok, what did I miss? Basically, I never found anything I could really get working or that seemed "alive". The built-in multiplayer mode seemed to work pretty well, but is a different model from what I think everyone thinks of as a "multiplayer server". However, it was clearly written with a central server in mind. So my thought was since that code is mostly there and does practically all of the things that we would want to do on the server (with some slight differences), why not reuse as much of that code as possible? In doing this, I came up with a basic server in 500 lines of code that simply rebroadcasts in incoming position update to all of the other clients connected to the server (and using plib netSockets). The existing MultiPlayer code is somewhat reusable, but the globals hork it all up. Grr. Anyway, the clients still use the --multiplay options, but all specify the same out "ip" address/port (to the server) and different "in" ip address/ports (for receiving updates). I pretty much have this written and have done some basic testing, but need some help: what's the best way to run multiple flightgear instances on a single machine without hosing the CPU and memory? Any suggestions? NOTE: I'm not necessarily trying to start up a new project here, but am more doing this as a prototype/learning experience. If anyone is interested in checking out the code and playing with it once I've got some of the kinks worked out, that would be awesome! Please feel free to educate me on things I might have overlooked, or express opinions on the idea/approach. I still have not fully proved the concept yet either. More testing will tell. Thanks, -Adam _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
