On Monday 25 September 2006 09:24, Dene wrote:
> Hi,
> Just a note on this, recently I tried to use a wide variety of aircraft
> for an AI scenario... it was noted that the native xmls' and (098a AI
> fdm) didn't cater for tail-draggers, prop speed, flap or landing gear
> extension... I wrote specific xmls for each aircraft referenced to their
> IAS to mimic appropriate behaviour and, individually, they worked well.
> Because the AI property branch is indexed, when trying to select the
> requisite property branch for each aircraft I had to be aware of it's
> order of creation and edit the xml file to accommodate this. Two questions;
> a) is the work I did on the xmls of any use to you?
> b) did you encounter/over-come this issue?
>
> Cheers
> Dene
>

Hi Dene,

I read your original message, but didn't have a chance to reply
Firstly, to  answer your questions: 1) I'm certainly interested in how you did 
the animations. So feel free to send me any information you may have. 2) I 
haven't really worked on the issues you mention. For an explanation why, 
please read my comment on the general development plan below.

Just a few comments. If I remember correctly, you decided to use a pure 
scripted form of AI, instead of creating a traffic manager based routing 
table. in order to create fairly detailed animations. For the short term, 
your approach might be a good idea, as you will have very tight control over 
the animations, including the subtle effects you mention, such as prop speed, 
flap extension, and gear animation. 

However, I would also like to mention that in the long run this approach might 
also have some severe drawbacks, unless you would like to model very specific 
scenarios, such as the refueling stuff that David Culp is working on. As I 
have posted in several screenshots over the past months 
(see :http://durktalsma.xs4all.nl/FlightGear/web/ ) traffic manager based AI 
is capable of handling extremely high traffic loads and I've recently begun 
to try and add some intelligence to the system. Over the last few weeks, I 
have checked in some code into CVS that monitors ground traffic, and which 
makes sure that taxiing aircraft are aware of each other's position. Taxiing 
aircraft will slow down when they are following one another too close on the 
taxiway, and if necessary, they will hold position until their intended 
taxiroute is cleared again. I am currently testing an initial version of some 
code that will mimic the behavior of a tower controller, i.e. code that 
sequences aircraft for take-off and landing, and which ensures proper 
separation. 

While I've been working on that, the finer details of the aircraft animations 
are still a bit rough, so everything may not yet look as fancy as could be. 
I'm deliberately intending not to spend too much time on the details until 
the general infrastructure is ready. Eventually, we'll tackle these issues as 
well though, and by that time I hope to have a very flexible and powerful AI 
system.

FWIW, in theory, the traffic shown in the screen shots is almost within reach 
of every flightgear user; the code to run it is in CVS (and most of it will 
run in stock 0.9.10), and the AI aircraft can be downloaded from 
http://www.xs4all.nl/~dtalsma/flightgear.html. There is, however, one piece 
of the puzzle that's still missing: the xml traffic patterns. I have created 
a test setup for personal use by using material from projectai, containing 
about 24000 aircraft. However, due to licensing issues, I cannot 
redistributed the traffic files that are based on their work. Therefore, the 
next big step (and potentially an area where user contributions are mostly 
welcome :-)) is the creation of traffic patterns. For documentation on 
creating these, see: http://www.xs4all.nl/~dtalsma/flightgear.html


Cheers,
Durk

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