Hi All, My patch to hide other MP aircraft opens the door to providing a useful function to allow multiple different communities of flyers to use the global FG airspace independantly, without requiring additional sets of MP servers.
The main use-case is a group of pilots wishing to practise flying in a ATC-controlled environment (e.g. TGA events) using FGCom. They would like all the aircraft in the area to be on FGCOM, and behave as realistically as possible. Furthermore, they would prefer for new aircraft not to spawn on the runway, even though there are no define parking positions. At present, this relies on going somewhere outside of the default tile, and an element of luck that someone doesn't randomly turn up. Note that this is not really anyones fault - it's just a side-effect of sharing a single virtual world. My proposal is that users may optionally set a class or community they are flying in (say /sim/multiplay/class) that is exposed over MP. Using some Nasal, other users may choose to automatically hide or show aircraft from specific classes. The class itself would be free-form, but I would expect to define some standard classes along with a GUI to allow selection of the user's own class and the visible classes. For example: Default - the default Newbie - for new flyers Student - those training - might be reseting regularly FGCom - those using FGCom - implies they will use realistic radio procedures Dogfight - for those engaged in mock dogfights (ignored by default) Ignore - for those who wish to be ignore (ignored by default) So, in the use-case above, all the aircraft using FGCom under ATC would select a class "FGCom", and use a dialog to only display other aircraft in that class. If a new aircraft wanted to take part, they could spawn on the runway (having not set their /sim/multiplay/class), taxi to the parking area, set their class to FGCom, thereby making themselves visible, and contact ATC for taxi instructions. Other pilots just wanting to fly around would be able to see all these aircraft. Other use-cases include 1) A developer testing some aircraft systems that rely on MP, but not wanting to disturb other people. By setting a class of "Ignore" they would by default be ignored by all other aircraft. 2) A group of pilots wanting to engage in a dog-fight over San Francisco without disturbing other pilots. The obvious downside of this is that it may fragment the user-base. However, if by default everyone is able to see everyone else, I think that risk can be minimized. Thoughts? -Stuart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
