Stand Alone ATC Control Development

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Revision as of 09:59, 22 September 2010 by Hooray (talk | contribs)
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Last updated: Sept. 2010 Status: Discussion


This wiki is created upon the fired up debate and forum talks to create a centralized idea-bank, so the development proposals/goals can clearly be identified. All users are welcomed to contribute to this entry with their real or virtual world experience and simulator environment requirements for a stand alone ATC client for FlightGear Multiplayer Network.

Minimum set of required features

  • multiplayer support
  • display a radar-like screen
  • display data tags (altitude, callsign, course, sqwk code etc)

Other features and ideas

Customizing Atlas for use as an ATC client

In the scope of the ATC discussion, we have also talked about extending Atlas to use it as the foundation for a standalone ATC client, concentrating on a maximum degree of code reuse.

It seems, that most of the existing atlas features could be used for ATC purposes, too. While only very few new features would be needed that would require changes to the C++ source code. This would make it possible to generalize the atlas code some more, so that using Atlas for ATC purposes would merely be a different "mode".

For the time being, the most important new feature for atlas would be multiplayer support. Most of the other changes would be about making atlas features either more configurable (i.e. moving hard coded defaults out of the C++ source code into configuration files, plain text or XML based), or about provididing an option to completely disable other features.

Required enhancements

  • multiplayer support
  • possibility to customize appearance for typical ATC use

Open questions

  • should atlas connect to fgms as a server (relay?) or a client (observer), or should it just poll fgms for updates?
  • how about reusing data that is already sent to FlightGear (that would require a running FlightGear instance)


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