OpenRadar FGFS ORCAM

Work in progress This article or section will be worked on in the upcoming hours or days. See history for the latest developments.

Introduction

OpenRadar got a new feature lately, that will be published in next update: It can interact with a running Flightgear to make it act like a tower window, or a airport surveillance camera. That means, with only some minutes of setup, you see the aircrafts moving on the ground, starting and landing. You can define a couple of camera view presets (location, angles and zoom factor) and you can follow a contact as long as he is close to your airport. For that you should have a second monitor. It should display the Flightgear window, the view out of your tower, while you have OR as your radar view on the main monitor.

Forwarding of multiplayer data To avoid that flightgears multiplayer server get plenty of new ATC view only clients, OR got the ability to forward all received MP packets to the view only flightgear instance. It acts like a half MP server, by transmitting what it gets from the server. The packets that the view only flightgear instance sends to OR will not be forwarded to the MP server. This reduces the load on the MP servers and reduces the bandwidth usage of your internet access, and removes the need for confusing additional pilots in flightgears pilot list. On the other hand, it makes your vieew instance of flightgear realy invisible and makes it impossible to send any data from there to other multiplayers, even while you see them. This is wanted, as flightgear is reduced to a window to the airport. All actions are done from and in OpenRadar.

Configuration

(1) Download the aircraft orcam

At first you need the flightgear aircraft orcam. That is a modified ATC aircraft. All that has been added are less lines of code, to be able to disable the aircraft tracking via the interface. It is not perfect yet, there could still be a pilot list in it and a display, which contact it is following and some controls to move the camera up and down, but it is already pretty usable.

Download the file from Todo: URL to ORCAM and extract it to your flightgear Aircraft directory. The same directory that contains all your downloaded aircrafts.

(2) Write a fgfs startup script

We suggest that you write a small script file that starts your orcam instance quickly and without effort. You can also couple it into your OpenRadar startup script, if you like to. The script can look like this:

#!/bin/bash --
fgfs 
--aircraft=OR-Cam \
--callsign=_ \
--airport=LFSB \
--telnet=,,100,,5010, \
--multiplay=in,100,,5010 \
--multiplay=out,100,localhost,5010 \
--fg-aircraft=/data/fgdata/Aircraft

The parameters

parameter	Note
--aircraft	This tells fgfs which aircraft to load
--callsign	The callsign of your view instance. Unimportant for other multiplayers, as you are invisible.
--telnet	Configures the connection between OpenRadar and Flightgear to exchange data, like setting the camera location and angle, set the contact for follow mode or read the current camera orientation etc.
--multiplay	flightgears interface to the multiplayer servers, this example is set to send the outgoing data to the computer that runs this flightgear instance. This is, what makes ORCAM invisible.
--fg-aircraft	An optional parameter to define the location where you store your aircraft, if they are outside of your flightgear installation directory. You can omit it.

Note: You may add all other flightgear parameters too. This is an example only.

It is a good practice to start this flightgear instance before you start OpenRadar, because flightgear initializes the view position based on its tower data, often starting inside buildings. OpenRadar will restore the first camera preset at start, healing this.

(3) Configure OpenRadar

The known startup dialog of OpenRadar has got a new tab:

todo: picture

These settings define the other, controlling side of the setup.

Field	Example	Content
Checkbox Enable FGFS Cam Control	checked	Main switch, turns camera control line in OpenRadar on or off
Client host	localhost	Computername or IP address of the computer running FGFS OR Cam
FGFS telnet port	5010	the TCP port, defined by the --telnet parameter in the FGFS startup script above
Checkbox Enable MP forwarding	checked	Turns forwarding of multiplayer packets to the view only FGFS instance on.
FGFS MP Port	5010	The UDP Port of flightgear that will receive the forwarded multiplayer packets.

These settings exist two times, prepared to enable a second window to the airport. (WARNING: You might need a strong computer!)