Talk:FGCom (before 3.0)
FGCOM - feature request
Well thanks to some very hard work by some talented people and a clueless tester FGCOM has moved ahead a great deal in the past few days. Now it is cross distro and possibly even POSIX compliant, we have a possible Openal based system which should simplify things a lot and tie in well with existing work. Work goes ahead on implementing a PTT switch and appropriate muting.
However we still have a little way to go to realistically emulate VHF aviation comms. Because we are mapping frequencies onto conference call numbers (lets leave the range aspect alone for now), two or more stations can talk at once. This isn't how it works in Real Life, only one aircraft or ATC facility can talk at a time and if someone insists on talking or the PTT switch becomes jammed on, then there is not a lot that can be done about it. Nobody else can use that frequency until the pilot stops talking or his radio is switched off. There are good reasons for this, not least the dreadful sound quality of the original radios, the sometimes life-or-death nature of the information being transferred meant that having only one pilot or controller talking while everybody else listened was A Good Thing.
This is a feature request because, much as I'd like to, I can't deliver the necessary code.
I'd like to see this highly able asterisk system crippled so that only one caller can speak at a time - To get round possible abuse of this, any caller is only allowed a max of say 30 secs (more than enough for any realistic aviation comms) before their call is terminated and they have to rejoin the conversation (come back up on channel)
Is any of this feasible?
--Willie 06:51, 25 November 2007 (EST)
Voice Quality --its too good and its not good enough ;-)
At present we are having lots of echo testing. This may be down to extremely cheap, oversensitive mics at my end but in general it just doesn't sound like the real thing. We have distortion but its the wrong sort. Not sure how to sort this but a first attempt would be a tight narrow pass filter and possibly mixed with a white noise source to give that "radio" sound. Could get fancy and add a definite "click" as the PTT is pressed at the beginning of a call and also when it is released.
--Willie 06:51, 25 November 2007 (EST)
New FGCom require a lot of changes in documentation
FGCom was a separate project for many years, but now FGCom is integrated into FlightGear (even if the standalone is still available)
We need to differentiate the built-in FGCom and the standalone FGCom, that I usually call "FGCom-sa" (sa = stand alone)
It is also important to strongly suggest to use the built-in FGCom as many as possible.
FGCom-sa must be used only for those who want to run FGCom on a separate computer than the one who run the FlightGear session (this case is certainly extremly rare ! even enough rare to be ignored I think)
The question is: how to re-organize all the documentation about FGCom ?
My opinion is: FGCom standalone is destinated to be used only by OpenRadar and no longer destinated to be used with FlightGear. OpenRadar will be soon able to provide FGCom standalone into his package, that way FGCom standalone will be no longer a "required dependence" for OpenRadar. So all documentation about FGCom standalone will be no longer interesting for 99% of our users (FlightGear and OpenRadar). Only people who want run FGCom standalone (those who want run it on a separate computer certainly) will be interested by some documentation, I think the fgcom --help would be sufficient for these people who certainly have some computer skills if they want to use FGCom standalone "by-hand" (without FlightGear or OpenRadar).
As of today, the FGCom documentation looks like a big mess, not because the documentation is wrong (most of the documentation is correct) but because there is too many informations (often redundant), too many pages about FGCom, too many unrelated information with FGCom. All of this could discourage our users to read the documentation
F-JJTH (talk) 22:22, 20 October 2013 (UTC) Clément de l'Hamaide