[Flightgear-devel] Airport dependent ATC background chatter patch

[Tobias R. <tob...@ud...>]

Hello flightgear developers,

I created a patch for the Nasal script 'atc-chatter.nas' which makes ATC 
background chatter dependent on the airport id.
Currently the airport id used is the one set in 
'/sim/presets/airport-id' (but should probably be 
'/sim/atc/freq-airport' - the problem is that this property never has a 
value when I run fgfs).

The patch works as follows: for every airport there can be a directory 
'$FG_ROOT/data/ATC/Chatter/$AIRPORT_ID' containing the specific chatter 
.wav files. This directory is queried for existence by the patch and - 
if it exists for the current preset airport - is used for background 
chatter playback.
If there is no directory for the current airport id, the default 
background chatter is used ('UK').
The list of background chatter files is only updated if the airport id 
changes from one sample to another. The default background chatter is 
always loaded on init to save loading time because there currently are 
no airport specific chatter files.
That leads me to another point: I am planning on creating several new 
chatter files for KSFO, as this is _the_ airport in fgfs. I have already 
save d some audio streams of live KSFO tower/ground/clearance ATC 
chatter to my hdd which only need to be chopped into pieces and added to 
fgfs.

Another thing I am planning to change in ATC background chatter handling 
is the differentiation between ground, tower, clearance chatter. Then 
there will be chatter depending on where your airplane currently is 
(ground, air,...).

I uploaded the patch (created with fg-submit) to 
http://www.ramforth.com/flightgear/Nasal.diff.bz2 and I hope that I am 
not the only one to find having more versatile background chatter a nice 
feature.


Regards,

Tobias Ramforth


PS: I appreciate suggestions, comments, bug reports on this patch, very 
much!