Re: [Flightgear-users] Traffic Manager II

[Greg H. <gr...@on...>]

Durk Talsma wrote:
> So what is traffic manager II? Well the main difference is that it will become 
> a lot easier for users to develop their own traffic. Instead of going through 
> a complicated procedure of compiling a sequence of flights into an xml file, 
> the new version just requires a plain text file that specifies which aircraft 
> are available and which flights are required to be operated.
Hi Durk,

My biggest problem with FlightGear's AI traffic is not the complexity of 
the XML files, nor the need to assign individual aircraft to flights 
(although anything that reduces that complexity is good). Instead, the 
biggest issue that I can see is that there is no way for FlightGear 
users to share their flight patterns with each other.

For example, my local airport is Melbourne's Tullamarine (YMML), and I 
can create AI flights from Tullamarine to various Australian and 
international destinations. There are other FlightGear users modelling 
flights arriving at their local airports, some of which will correspond 
to the flights that I have modelled leaving from Tullamarine. There is 
no way for those users to access the flights that I have created. This 
means that each user creates their own AI traffic XML database, without 
the ability to share their efforts with other users.

One solution to this problem is to create a shared database of every 
(well, every /regularly scheduled/) flight everywhere in the world. This 
idea is similar to FlightGear's world scenery database. That project 
claims to aim for world domination, so why not have the same aim for the 
AI traffic database? Of course, problems with this idea are that 1) 
maintaining the database is a huge job, 2) distributing it will be a 
large  download, and 3) I don't want my CPU burning cycles to simulate 
traffic on the other side of the world.

Another solution is similar to this, but to download only those flights 
for a specific airport -- or maybe for a specific region.

A third idea is to download flights only for a set of airports (for 
example, only those airports that I frequent).

Of course, what I really want is to fly from anywhere to anywhere, and 
to see all of the corresponding air traffic along the way. Updated 
automatically, and in real-time.  Could you add that to your to-do list, 
please?  :-)

Regards,
Greg Hawkes