Hi All, I recently came across http://www.marinetraffic.com/, which tracks shipping by means of their AIS transmitter, which all vessels over 299 gross tonnes must carry.
The data is transmitted by radio and includes position, speed, course, rate of turn, as well as the vessel type, dimensions etcs.. The project collects the data from various volunteer receivers and collates it into a DB, and provides mash-ups over Google maps etc. I think there could be a very nice little project to incorporate a data feed from their server through a proxy and into our MP network, displaying marine traffic in real-time. This would completely obviate the need for AI shipping routes, and at a stroke, the sea in FG would become accurately populated. Unlike aircraft transmitting ADS-B updates, shipping is quite slow slow and therefore has less of an interpolation problem, pluss it doesn't really need to interact with our aircraft*, so this seems a very good fit. Their tracking software is GPL, so one would hope that they would have some sympathy with us, plus it would provide a way for them to visualize their data. The only major downside I can see is that some ports are obviously very busy - a quick look at Antwerp showed over 1000 vessels in a 50nm radius. I guess this would have a significant impact on the MP protocol, However, on the plus side, the ship models themselves are very simple and wouldn't have any animations, so one would hope that the frame-rate hit would be reasonable. Anyone particularly interested in taking this further? I may look at it myself, and at least engage the people running the project, but don't expect any quick results! -Stuart * I guess technically a boat might have to give way to a seaplane, just as a motor vessel should give way to a sailboat. However I am reliably informed that size does matter in these cases :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Next 800 Companies to Lead America's Growth: New Video Whitepaper David G. Thomson, author of the best-selling book "Blueprint to a Billion" shares his insights and actions to help propel your business during the next growth cycle. Listen Now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/SAP-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
