Hello List, some of you may already have taken notice of my multiplayer server for flightgear (http://www.o-schroeder.de/fg_server). It's working quite well in sane environments but I want to improve it and therefor have some questions you may be able to answer.
1) "out of reach" The server receives position information of clients and thus should be able to calculate the distance of two given clients (measured in nautical miles, disregarding height) so it is able to decide if it has to send packets to a client or not. In case it is "out of reach", i.e. all actions of client A do not affect anything for client B, the server can stop sending packets between those two clients. So it is possible for the server to handle hundrets of clients even though each client does only see a couple of them (at least if the clients are scattered around the world). So the question is: How can I easily calculate the distance and how many nautical miles are "out of reach" (thinking of e.g. radar systems) ? 2) chat messages The server (in fact every client) should be able to send messages to clients which get displayed on the screen (i.e. the flightgear window), just like ATC messages. So the server can send state information to the client. After reading some source code and discussing this on the irc channel I've noticed that the necessary infrastructure is already there but not used. The network protocoll supports chat-messages and the ATC-module has functions to queue and display them on screen. So it should'nt be too hard to combine them and enable chat-messages. Somebody willing to give it a try? 3) artificial life at airports The server gives a lot of opportunities. One of the first things which came to my mind was artificial traffic at airports. It should be fairly easy to write clients in any (network capable) language which do simulate a client. This can be simply a helicopter standing near a hangar or even a plane flying around an airport. This would disburden fgfs itself (since it does not need to create AI traffic itself) and allow an arbitrary number of artificial clients, each serving it's "own" airport (or whatever area), bringing life to many areas of the world without manipulating fgfs itself. so far, Oliver _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
