[Flightgear-devel] [Proposal] Class-based MP aircraft visibility

[Stuart B. <stu...@gm...>]

Hi All,

My patch to hide other MP aircraft opens the door to providing a
useful function to allow multiple different communities of flyers to
use the global FG
airspace independantly, without requiring additional sets of MP servers.

The main use-case is a group of pilots wishing to practise flying in a
ATC-controlled environment (e.g. TGA events) using FGCom. They would
like all the
aircraft in the area to be on FGCOM, and behave as realistically as
possible. Furthermore, they would prefer for new aircraft not to spawn
on the runway,
even though there are no define parking positions.

At present, this relies on going somewhere outside of the default
tile, and an element of luck that someone doesn't randomly turn up.
Note that this is
not really anyones fault - it's just a side-effect of sharing a single
virtual world.

My proposal is that users may optionally set a class or community they
are flying in (say /sim/multiplay/class) that is exposed over MP.
Using some
Nasal, other users may choose to automatically hide or show aircraft
from specific classes.

The class itself would be free-form, but I would expect to define some
standard classes along with a GUI to allow selection of the user's own
class and
the visible classes.

For example:
Default - the default
Newbie - for new flyers
Student - those training - might be reseting regularly
FGCom - those using FGCom - implies they will use realistic radio procedures
Dogfight - for those engaged in mock dogfights (ignored by default)
Ignore - for those who wish to be ignore (ignored by default)

So, in the use-case above, all the aircraft using FGCom under ATC
would select a class "FGCom", and use a dialog to only display other
aircraft
in that class. If a new aircraft wanted to take part, they could spawn
on the runway (having not set their /sim/multiplay/class), taxi to the
parking area, set
their class to FGCom, thereby making themselves visible, and contact
ATC for taxi instructions.

Other pilots just wanting to fly around would be able to see all these aircraft.

Other use-cases include
1) A developer testing some aircraft systems that rely on MP, but not
wanting to disturb other people. By setting a class of "Ignore" they
would by default be
ignored by all other aircraft.
2) A group of pilots wanting to engage in a dog-fight over San
Francisco without disturbing other pilots.

The obvious downside of this is that it may fragment the user-base.
However, if by default everyone is able to see everyone else, I think
that risk can be
minimized.

Thoughts?

-Stuart