As far as I can tell,
Stuart is the only one to have been working on HLA/RTI integration via Mathias's
SimKit framework. For the time being, HLA/RTI must still be considered "pie-in-the-sky" unfortunately, and given the state of the existing AI code base, HLA/RTI isn't going to affect it anytime soon.
https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... /35478493/FSWeekend 2016 Discussion Minutes wrote:Ask Matthias to release SimKit so Stuart can release his HLA code.
From an IPC standpoint, the most relevant development we've seen in FlightGear recently is Richard's Emesary framework, which Stuart has been using to implement a moving-map type GPS device (the FG1000, based on the Garmin G1000) in a decoupled fashion using message-passing to separate things in an MVC fashion.
Given the restrictions in the current codebase that Durk summed up so nicely, it seems most likely that the next incarnation of the AI system in FlightGear will be designed to work along the lines of the multiplayer system, possibly in conjunction with an IPC mechanism.
Other contributors are regularly pointing out that these days, certain AI system features (think AI scenarios) are being supseded, i.e. the hard-coded AI system really only used to instantiate objects - but all the high-level logic lives in scripting space:
AI-ScenariosThorsten wrote:I have the feeling they;re a bit of a legacy feature. The AI system is pretty limited in what you can do, so AI gets replaced by more versatile Nasal solutions.
Compare tanker.nas with the AI aerial refueling demos - you can call the Nasal-spawned tanker everywhere when you're out of fuel, it interactively can provide you instructions to reach it, it automatically selects the tanker apprpriate for what you're flying,...
Compare the thermal demo with Advanced Weather - the AI thermals are on pre-defined locations, so there's just zero element of surprise in glider flight, you have to do a lot of preparation up-front in order to get gliding in a different location - Advanced Weather just generates them anywhere in the world, merged right into the other weather patterns,...
Nasal in static models makes them interact with aircraft, no need to pre-define AI or pre-load anything.
So if not for the Carriers, I think we could safely get rid of the AI scenarios - Nasal-driven Wingmen would be far superior in interactivity.
think fgms + Nasal scripting, which would mean that the whole thing could trivially be made to work inside fgfs (running in a background thread), as well as standalone (without fgfs) - because that's what fgfs is already doing. At that point, you could run all sorts of 3rd party addons directly on the multiplayer server (it being fgms-based or not) - think having a multiplayer server running Bombable on it, as well as some kind of shared/synchronized environmental/weather simulation.
(with some bindings to the networking/multiplayer (XDR handling) code, Nasal itself could even run the equivalent of fgms.nas using a subset of the existing C spaghetti code)