Re: [Flightgear-devel] Three tentative multiplayer feature requests

[Ron J. <wi...@je...>]

On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 09:43 -0700, pebble garden wrote:
 (snip) 
> There are three features, though, which YS possesses that I'd dearly
> love to have implemented in FlightGear. I have no idea of their
> implementation difficulty, so I'll just toss them out and hope someone
> can tell me how do-able they are.
>  
> 1. Player labels to help identify others in the sim. 
>  
> 2. In-game chat, ideally with tunable private and global channels, so
> a teacher could communicate with their student without spamming the
> global chat.

This is doable now.  Under View->Rendering Options check "Enable chat
messages" then open the chat window under View->Chat to input your text.

I've used it a few times, it seems to work.

> 3. Shared cockpit, even if one person must remain as a passive
> ride-along. Preferably with shared instrument readings.

Passive ride-along should be doable now, as well:
See Docs/README.IO:

    example to slave one copy of fgfs to another

    fgfs1:  --native=socket,out,30,fgfs2,5500,udp
    fgfs2:  --native=socket,in,30,,5500,udp --fdm=external

    This instructs the first copy of fgfs to send UDP packets in the
    native format to a machine called fgfs2 on port 5500.

This will let you ride with a student, or a student ride with you.

> Now, there are workarounds for items 1. and 3., those being a
> wonderful online server map found at
> http://mpmap01.flightgear.org/, and use of an external chat client.
> But juggling three windows can be a bit overwhelming for a newcomer to
> flight simming, and a real barrier to fluid instruction. And those
> features would really push FlightGear into a new realm of
> functionality. 
>  
> Even in it's current state, FlightGear is awesome. Thank you to
> everyone who's contributed to the program, I really really enjoy it.

Me, too.

Ron