Further Notes

even in an "offline scenario", FlightGear could internally use a local/loopback multiplayer server (fgms) and run the AI traffic component in a separate thread or process to feed in traffic - this would be reliable and keep things very straightforward, because FlightGear could make the assumption that a running fgms instance is always available. Similarly, other global state could also be managed and propagated using such an internal fgms instance. This would simplify the design quite a bit.

basically, this is already possible without making any modifications to the FG MP protocol: simply by using a dedicated UDP connection for each AI traffic client, instead of directly writing to the FG property tree in order to spawn new AI traffic instances.

at some point, private (local) fgms instances could by default allow arbitrary AI traffic to be published, while standalone (public) fgms instances should probably be configurable to enable/disable AI traffic propagation from possibly untrusted clients.

Talk:Decoupling the AI traffic system