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Just a suggestion

Questions about the FlightGear organisation, website, wiki etc.

Do you think the other vehicles should be animated?

Yes
6
50%
Not sure
2
17%
No
4
33%
 
Total votes : 12

Re: Just a suggestion

Postby Hooray » Sun Oct 22, 2017 8:20 am

Yeah, but like Thorsten said - these various approaches have different shortcomings, depending on the circumstances - thus, it does make sense to play a little with what we've got and then have the discussion how to integrate the most interesting approaches; which in my opinion means (for starters) making the "Traffic Shader" work in conjunction with the 3D model based approach for low-altitude flights - apart from that, it would make sense to provide vector data (which is what OSM2City is using) so that your traffic can follow along pre-defined routes.

So, speaking in general, this isn't just about enabling an existing feature - it has more to do with doing a little research, documenting that, and working out a plan to make the most promising approaches work together.

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=25711
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=24594
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=9553
viewtopic.php?f=79&t=22841

As you can probably see by now, this is a rather long-standing idea and a popular feature request - however, what would really make sense is to summarize all ideas and feature requests and provide an overview - this would still have nothing to do with coding or programming, we do already have code doing these things, it's just lacking integration.

In other words, even if you were just to spend a few weekends working through these topics, you will have a much better understanding of what we have right now, and what we can do already - but also about the shortcomings involved in these approaches. While you could obviously still tinker with the property tree, XML and Nasal scripting - you would not need any of this while doing this "research".

Besides, this would put you in a much better position to actually make a feature request: while asking other contributors to develop a complex feature (like this one!) from scratch is a little far-fetched, reaching out to the parties/people involved in these different efforts to see who is currently around and who might be interested in unifying these approaches, would be much less work - and you would not even have to be a coder if all you want to do is motivate people to have a discussion if/how these ideas can be unified.

Obviously, you will have to do some legwork first (e.g. the research I mentioned), but other than that, people like Thorsten have already created the really difficult stuff - thus, what comes next is the debate whether this can be made to work in a more general way, possibly in conjunction with a scripted module to augment the Traffic Shader for low-altitude flights placing 3D modes.

Apart from that, you also need to keep in mind that most people around here are indeed contributing in their spare time - and that the project itself also has some other very real constraints (especially manpower, number of committers and reviewers, but also number of people involved in helping maintain various parts of the infrastructure, e.g. the wiki). That also means that people who are known to be "part of the solution" (rather than being part of the problem), usually show up on the radar of those shouldering much/most of the work - then again, there's events like FSWeekend or LinuxTag where most long-term contributors will be rather busy with preparations for the events - which means that even if they might be interested in your idea, they may not have much time to actually comment on it (same goes for the release schedule).

Finally, starting a topic that is poorly named "just a suggestion" isn't likely to attract the right people who are interested in "scriptable AI ground traffic" - this is where it really pays off to do a little research first, because you can use the right buzzwords - for instance: Nasal, AI, scriptable, Traffic Shader - which would convey to the reader that you have indeed read up on what we have right now...
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
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