stuart wrote in Sun Oct 20, 2013 11:33 pm:...We don't need the interior or instruments for AI/MP aircraft. Removing those elements would reduce the graphics card occupancy to 2MB, and save additional model loading/animations. (Actually, there's a subtlty here that I'm ignoring - we have code to defer loading for model files until they come within range, so a well designed aircraft with suitable LoD set up shouldn't load instruments until you get close)
We already have a mechanism to do that: Models under AI/Aircraft.
So, I think the answer here is for aircraft developers to create AI-specific versions of their aircraft. It's pretty straightforward , doesn't require any core development, and has the significant advantage of meaning that users don't need the full aircraft installed to see other flyers using the aircraft in the MP environment.
We have touched this a couple of years ago. Though I did not do anything with the information I got, this topic was a bit of an eye opener to me, due to being the first time I heard of that use of AI/Aircraft: Extreme lagg with multiplayer.
I had to use Google to find that topic, using the search string "multiplayer AI models site:www.flightgear.org/forums", since the forum wont let one search for either of "AI" "aircraft", "model" or "models", probably due to the size of the search database would then have.
I did one thing though: Moving some data/Aircraft/<aircraft> directories to data/Aircraft/Aircraft (disabled)/<aircraft>. It is reversible, which can be useful for events and such.
EDIT:
I think this possibility is something that only very few of the aircraft developers are aware of or are made aware of; it seems to be fairly undocumented, quite possibly requiring reading through the source to to get a grip on.* For example I seem unable to find anything on it in data/Docs/AI_doc.html or README.multiplayer as well as on the wiki, except for briefly in Standard aircraft structure#Multiplayer Notes.
* In another context, mapping MP aircraft to an ICAO type designation for use in OpenRadar (sorry Wolfram for getting sidestepped so long ), I remember trying to figure out what bit of information the multiplayer system used for identifying which aircraft to show. The only clue I got was these two sentences in a PM from Wolfram:
wagnerw wrote:...I am not completely sure how this information is created. It is a path and ends with '.xml', but there is no '-set' in it...
It took many fruitless hours of looking through various data/Docs/README.* files befor resorting to looking through various source files for about two hours before figuring out that the multiplayer system did not use data/Aircraft/Aircraft, neither Aircraft-set.xml (which I thought would be obvious till I saw Wolfram's comment above) or <description>Aircraft</description>. Instead a path to an xml file with animations and a path to the model(s) or the path to the .ac (or other file format) model directly is used. In other words the contents of <model><path>Path</path></model>, which seems a bit relevant in the current context, as that path is the one to be used by an AI model for use in multiplayer (if I am right, though I have not checked the source yet ).