[Flightgear-devel] AI Traffic airport usage information

[Durk T. <d.t...@xs...>]

Hi All,

I just committed a small patch to gitorious that allows the traffic manager to 
collect aircraft usage information for a given airport. The reason for this is 
the following: The traffic manager itself is a rather slow, low priority 
process, that updates positional information at a very slow rate. As a 
consequence. It may take a few seconds, up to a couple of minutes before all 
the traffic near one's current position has been initialized. The current 
patch collects aircraft usage information, such that one point is awarded to 
each aircraft that is found to be parked at the airport where the user's 
aircraft is located. When FlightGear is shut down, the collected statistics 
are saved into a cache file (currently a simple plain text file, but I'm open 
to other suggestions).

When flightgear is started a second time at the same airport, the already 
collected statistics are read, and the the aircraft with the highest point 
scores are loaded with priority.  During the next session, additional 
statistics are collected, and added to the existing ones, so that we get 
increasingly more effective loading times.

Admittedly, I only tested this feature only very briefly, but felt that the 
improvement in initialization was dramatic enough to outweigh possible 
problems. If you do run into anything, please a) let me know, so that I can 
fix it ASAP, and b) run flightgear by using the --prop:/sim/traffic-
manager/heuristics=0 command line option. 

Cheers,
Durk