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ATC positions awareness

ATC-pie is a radar air traffic control simulation program for the FlightGear multi-player network.

ATC positions awareness

Postby mickybadia » Sat Feb 14, 2015 11:41 am

Hello,
Here is to inaugurate the forum with a request by email that I am pushing here to turn it public, with the Captain's consent.

CaptB wrote:I'd like to suggest a feature, not a burning request but an idea for the future.

One of the nice things in Euroscope is that I can see which ATC stations are online. It is a great tool that provides awareness of the surrounding ATC which unlike the real world, in our simulated environment can change dynamically. Without being aware of who is online it would be difficult to build a structure that works together hand in hand in regards to handoffs and coordination.

Here are my thoughts:

Use/scrape fgcom.flightgear.org frequency/station data.
Filter out data based on a relevant frequency list, and...
Filter out data based on callsign suffix ( _AP _TW etc. to exclude pilots )

By the way, shall we move this discussion to the forum, or stay here?


For me there are two pieces of answer, depending on what part of the "Euroscope" sentence is addressed.

see which ATC stations are online.


Unfortunately the FGMS protocol will NOT allow such thing, by design. It only sends you packets from the other connected clients that are in your 100 NM range. The workaround I see would be to interact with the mpserver12 tracker or something. Such feature could be useful for clearance del's, knowing if an airspace on the way is controlled or not, or to suggest destinations to pilots wanting ATC interaction...

Yet arguably:
- sessions announced on lenny64 are more appropriate;
- ATC-pie is a realistic radar first, things requiring full world knowledge are better addressed using online tools (mpmap02, mpserver12...).

To be discussed.

tool that provides awareness of the surrounding ATC


Now if you are only interested in SURROUNDING controllers, my answer will relate to WW's strip exchange server, enabling what he calls "FPL handoffs". Connected ATCs' positions are known so the server can inform them of ATCs in their 180 NM range if I remember well, enabling a minimum of 20 NM for hand over.

I have always promised handovers in ATC-pie, and so far considered that WW's server was the way to go because probably the only reasonable solution to allow ATCs to work together regardless of their software choice. So that would give you the feature you want.

Yet for this to happen, I need to work out the interaction as O-R/ATC-pie philosophies are a little different w.r.t. strips. You can see my detail comments on the project wish list page but in summary: WW's server has the notion of "ownership" of a contact, OpenRadar then preventing taking ownership of a strip if it is owned by anyone else, whereas ATC-pie lets ATC manage his/her strips and link them to radar contacts freely. So I need to work out a design and check with WW (perhaps he'll as happily discuss this here) against the actual behaviour of his server before releasing anything.
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Re: ATC positions awareness

Postby henrikp » Sat Feb 14, 2015 11:46 am

Unfortunately the FGMS protocol will NOT allow such thing, by design. It only sends you packets from the other connected clients that are in your 100 NM range. The workaround I see would be to interact with the mpserver12 tracker or something. Such feature could be useful for clearance del's, knowing if an airspace on the way is controlled or not, or to suggest destinations to pilots wanting ATC interaction...

The simplest solution to that would be the client reporting to the webiste every some interval, that they are still there, just like IRC.
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Re: ATC positions awareness

Postby CaptB » Sat Feb 14, 2015 1:49 pm

You do not need the protocol to handle this. If you have a local list of relevant ( to your own position ) ATC positions/frequencies ( key:value ) then you can filter them accordingly based on what you know is online from fgcom.flightgear.org data.

Of course this is not realistic compared to real life, but in real life you'd expect all positions to be online, not so in our case ( VATSIM or IVAO included ) In my view it would be a reasonable compromise and a more convenient one than looking around a map to see who is up, especially if you have delivery, ground/apron, approach,final approach/director, departure for one airfield.

Besides, if you're aiming for realism on multiplayer then there's a lot, lot more to do on the education front first anyway ;)
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Re: ATC positions awareness

Postby mickybadia » Sun Feb 15, 2015 10:51 am

Hello.

Sorry, both answers were a little confusing to me. If I were to summarise I would say I see two distinct goals here: (1) know who is online at a given time, in view of flight planning for example; (2) know ATCs in reach, in view of coordination.

(1) is easily solved with live tracking, but arguably lenny64 sessions are more suitable.

(2) is the more interesting one, but I am not planning on implementing any "approximate list" feature, as I was saying it will be covered by strip exchange anyway (under progress)

I am presently very interested in discussing strip exchange, and I think this post should follow up on it, as issues remain if we want (and we do!) to offer continuous coordination with OpenRadar. If you are interested, please read my thoughts on https://gitorious.org/atc-pie/pages/Wishlist and come back here to share yours.

EDIT: cross-out obove, as text has been removed since

See y'around.
Last edited by mickybadia on Wed Feb 18, 2015 11:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ATC positions awareness

Postby mickybadia » Tue Feb 17, 2015 1:15 am

OK, I finally managed to sort something out to implement strip exchange with OpenRadar interoperability, respecting both philosophies as much as I was able.
It still needs a little touch up but it is now being tested and should be released soon. This will be a serious milestone I think.

CaptB, I think this feature to come covers most of what you wanted in your initial post. More talk can follow anyway.
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