The other day I was browsing through AI flight plans trying to get my
head around how they are setup.
I want to setup a scenario where I have a lead plane that I am trying to
follow. It will climb/decend and/or turn left/right. Usually the lead
and chase planes will want to maintain some fixed speed and some fixed
spacing. I want the pilot to try to hold the lead plane at the center
of the hud (the pipper?) as best as he possibly can.
However, I want to be able to give the pilot only individual components
of the task, not necessarily everything at once. For instance, in one
scenario the lead plane may simply climb and decend in some sinusoidal
pattern, but hold a fixed heading. In another scenario the lead plane
may hold a fixed altitude, but make left and right turns. Because I'm
isolating the things I want the pilot to have to deal with, I want him
to be able to set his throttle and not worry about speed.
This means I need to be able to control the lead aircraft's speed and
have it match the chase plane and maintain some fixed lead distance.
To do this, preprogrammed flight plans are out.
However, what if ... instead of feeding in a fixed speed for a portion
of a flight profile, we instead allow the flight plan to specify a
property name. The AI system would then track whatever speed the
property is set to. We could do similar things with altitude, heading, etc.
Once that is in place, we could setup a nasal script or external script
to track the distance between the two aircraft and continually adjust
speed to maintain an approximate lead distance.
This would also open up the door for us to build in a much larger
variety of scripted AI aircraft scenarios.
Let's not worry about this until after v0.9.10, but is anyone interested
in working on something like this? I think it would ne a neat, logical,
and very useful extension to the AI system.
Thanks,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org
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