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

[Thorsten R. <tho...@sc...>]

> Since version 2016.4.3 has the thermal model been improved? However, as  
> described, one can not fly a competition with several gliders. Each  
> computer has its own weather environment.

*with a due sense of futility*

This is a feature that could have been there at least four years ago. AW  
is nearly made for efficient sync over MP, because once you give it a  
dedicated random number generator, all you need to send is tile  
coordinates, a handful of meta-data variables and a random seed, and it'll  
get identical weather across multiple instances. No need to send thousands  
of cloud positions (which never shares the thermals anyway) - you can get  
the whole tile structure identical for hardly any transmission cost.

All it really takes is someone who cares about multi-instance sync and has  
some Nasal experience to get up and code it. It's probably less than 300  
lines of code added to the AW tile manager.

But we're moving in circles - every six months someone remarks it'd be  
nice to have, I write how it can be accomplished but that since I'm  
neither interested in MP nor have an MP test setup won't do it myself (you  
don't seriously expect me to develop something I can't test? myself), I  
offer my help with the AW internals to everyone who wants to have a go -  
and nothing happens, we repeat the exercise half a year later.

So the offer still stands - I believe synchronizing AW over MP is not very  
difficult, I'll help with the task, but it has to be done by someone who  
has a setup to actually test it.

* Thorsten