Re: [Flightgear-devel] Traffic 2020: Towards a new Development Model for FlightGear AI Traffic

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

Hi All,

On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 12:40 PM, Viktor Radnai wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This is a very interesting discussion and made me think about a few things.
> Mostly these are related to gliding but some apply in other situations and
> these may affect the design in the end.

<snip>

> If you have aircraft dogfighting, you probably want to have the exact same
> clouds for both. If you have several gliders flying in a competition, then
> you definitely want the exact same weather, including wind, terrain effects
> and thermals. If you are following tankers, you should both be affected by
> the same wind and turbulence -- but in addition, wake turbulence generated
> by the tanker should be affecting you. Thorsten, I hope I'm not making your
> head explode thinking about how to implement this :)
>
> Also having 100% identical looking clouds would be a requirement for display
> slaves, which might be considered another use case for sharing weather
> state. Although those also have the issue of the cloud billboarding to deal
> with, which means that it's probably impossible to generate seamless clouds
> with display slaves anyway.

In a HLA/RTI context the way to do this would be to have a weather engine
as an RTI Federate.

This would run any required weather simulation, and pass (very) local weather
conditions to each of the aircraft/tower/windsock in the simulation,
plus publish
position information on clouds for use by visualization engines.

I'm cautiously optimistic that I may be able to provide the start of a HLA
implementation quite soon, as one of the blocking factors may be resolved soon.
Watch this space :).

-Stuart