Re: [Flightgear-devel] FlightGear Headless Mode

[James T. <ja...@fl...>]

> On 2 Sep 2021, at 15:06, David Coventry <dco...@ma...> wrote:
> 
> You are correct the FDM would be in Simulink, so we would primarily be using flight gear as a visualization platform.
> I think the main use case would be that Simulink has the position and rotation, velocity, etc. of N aircraft at time t, and we just want send that position and rotation data to FlightGear to update the visuals. 
> 
> Having finer-grained visuals like gear deployment and control surface deflection for all N aircraft might be a nice to have, but not really necessary. 

Actually AI aircraft are perfectly capable of showing al of this and more : it’s a pretty rich system. Basically all ’non main’ aircraft you see in FG (multiplayer, AI, trow, chase, wingmen, etc) use this system.

> 
> The AI traffic idea is a great one! I did not realize the AI traffic was being received through a socket. 
> Because Simulink would be handling all of the dynamics modeling, I think this path forward would be viable as we wouldn’t need fine-grained switching of automated to manual control. Just to send packets of N aircraft to the fgfs.
> 
> Is there some reference material of the packet information for the AI aircraft / what it would take to inject packets from Simulink to FlightGear AI models? I’m experienced with the main aircraft net_fdm packeting,  but not with the AI aircraft.

There’s some options here:

- the low level AIAircraft have a C++ API. It might make sense to make a dedicated protocol to drive these, or extend an existing one.

- MultiPlayer AI aircraft speak our MP protocol format. This is very easy to send (over UDP), and is probably he way to go : in this mode, Simulink would appear as an MP server to FLightGear, and everything else would process as normal.

- THere’s also the example of our Vatsim integration via Swift : for this see the various files with Swift in their name, e.g. SwiftAircraftManager. This will give another example of driving AIAircraft values via network messages.

Kind regards,
James