Hooray wrote:Actually, we have previously talked about coming up with a simple "missions generator" in Nasal space, one where certain aspects of the mission would simply be variables, while other factors may depend on those variables.
For instance, let's say we have a simple SAR mission - the mission generator could ask for an airport to be used as the base for the mission:
KSFONext, it could support randomizing the location given a radius around KSFO
30 nmNext, it could ask for time-of-day to be used:
night-timeNext, it could ask for the weather settings:
CAT IIIAs can be seen, this would not need to be very difficult, but there is sufficient room to randomize things using some sane defaults.
A while ago, I came up with a simple wizard-like framework that would walk people through creating a custom -set.xml file, the same approach could be used for such a "missions generator":
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Aircraft_Generation_WizardThese days, I would suggest to use a native Canvas UI to do this, because it is much more flexible.
At this point, I guess it is more important to gather a team of people who know a little about Nasal coding, so that we can prototype a simple generator.
And as a matter of fact, rleibner's recent work on supporting "AI-ATC" via ground-controlled-approaches (GCA) could be considered the foundation for a multi-variable "mission generator":
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Implem ... GCA_systemAs can be seen, this is a simple Canvas GUI dialog, but it takes roughly a 10-12 parameters to configure the GCA, which could be considered "mission variables".
It would be a piece of cake to extend this for other purposes, turn it into an actual wizard and hook it up to some kind of mission/adventure system, possibly in conjunction with the spoken atc addon rleibner is developing:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Spoken_ATCAnd actually, once you think about it, using the checklists feature, it would be relatively easy to customize different missions for different aircraft semi-automatically, because the various V-speeds etc are part of the checklist.
I guess that's the kind of approach, I'd use to make sure that a single "mission" could be applied to different locations (airports/runways).
And yeah, I am volunteering to help with prototyping this, because it's something we've been contemplating to do anyway:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Talk:Tutoria ... gnostic.29So, my suggestion would be that the first "mission/adventure" is indeed a ground-controlled-approach, and make the whole thing sufficiently generic to support arbitrary aircraft/airports and weather settings, and then take it from there