Trouble at EDDF-Triangle

[Bomber]

This is where 'flying by the rules of the arena is 100% required...

When flying with other people you have to accept that you're responsible for their enjoyment and them you.

Some servers should be declared as controlled... Others not...

Some WWI, WWI, 1950, 60.... etc. And only planes of that era allowed.

I can't believe that this isn't in fact how it's run now...

Simon.

[Rick Ace]

This is where 'flying by the rules of the arena is 100% required...

When flying with other people you have to accept that you're responsible for their enjoyment and them you.

Some servers should be declared as controlled... Others not...

Some WWI, WWI, 1950, 60.... etc. And only planes of that era allowed.

I can't believe that this isn't in fact how it's run now...

Simon.

It's already rare to see pilots on the MP. Adding segregated servers would turn the MP into a single player experience.

[Lydiot]

This is where 'flying by the rules of the arena is 100% required...

When flying with other people you have to accept that you're responsible for their enjoyment and them you.

Some servers should be declared as controlled... Others not...

Some WWI, WWI, 1950, 60.... etc. And only planes of that era allowed.

I can't believe that this isn't in fact how it's run now...

Simon.

It's already rare to see pilots on the MP. Adding segregated servers would turn the MP into a single player experience.

I agree. Segregated servers would be problematic.

[Bomber]

I've heard this argument before but to my mind it doesn't hold water.

The premise is that you'll only have the same number of pilots as now in the future and that having more dedicated era servers only divides those pilots into smaller numbers.

I stood up once in Rolls Royces jet engine design office, I was working on the Trent 1000 at the time and said I don't like jet engined planes preferring WWII era piston...

I want to fly with similar minded people, not those that are just flying to pass the time.

I can tell you that I've never had more immersion than flying a B17 fully crewed with gunners from around the world all talking away on intercom... Flying formation with other planes equally equipped and enemy planes attacking..

I don't fly airliners... So FG isnt attractive to me..

Having dedicated era servers for WWII with chain home radar would attract me.

Simon.

[Hooray]

To be fair, we used to have "segregated" servers for years, back in the CVS days, where it was common that the latest release would be running with a "stable" server, while experimental stuff (HEAD) would use a different port and fgms instance. It's not exactly difficult to set up, and even configuring this is now extremely straightforward thanks to the work that Gijs & James have done here.

Thus, having this discussion is kind moot and pointless, because setting up a new MP server is a matter of a few minutes.

But as mentioned elsewhere, the current MP system isn't very flexible and also not very efficient, so we cannot afford having hundreds of users for the time being.

I don't fly airliners... So FG isnt attractive to me..

FlightGear is the worst airliner sim I can imagine, even FS98 is better still. 90% of the features required to simulate airliners and airliner systems (glass cockpit stuff) is under-developed in FG, it's only since very recently that this is changing in some parts (especially due to Canvas). Otherwise, FG is still a very poor platform for anybody wanting to do airliners. And we don't exactly attract many people doing this kind of stuff - it's for a reason, our feature set is simply pathetic in comparison to what commercial sims have to offer, especially in combination with commercial addons.

If you're referring to the number of airliners in FG or the number of aircraft developers - that's what they're interested in (usually very young contributors), but more often than not, they have to face serious restrictions on the FG side of things.

As someone who's familiar with the glass cockpit side of things in FlightGear, as well as the bombable addon, I have to say that from a platform standpoint, our "combat support" is much better than our airliner support.

Having dedicated era servers for WWII with chain home radar would attract me.

a dedicated MP server takes just a few minutes to set up, which would give you ultimate control.
The way our MP system works, it is agnostic to scenery stuff like a chain home radar. So that is something that would need to be implemented.
But that's basically the restriction that we're facing with regard to environmental stuff like weather settings, or navaid failing.
Enforcing rules & restrictions is another thing that's not easily possible ATM

This will all become easier once HLA is adopted, but it isn't impossible to come up with plausible workarounds in the meantime, by making creative use of existing features.
The whole FlightGear project is a chain of compromises, and so is most software actually

[Bomber]

I'm not calling for it, I've far too much do on fdm's... Wouldn't want my noise ratio to get any larger.

What I'm saying it's that 15 years into FG development and FG doesn't have these functionalities...

MP is FG's 'shop window' to the world, bringing in new players / developers .....

Flying on your own, landing at an airport offline is all nice but doesn't come close to flying next to another human from somewhere else in the world.

I'll tell you a story... I was lead bomber on a 13 plane mission over Europe and there were a fair few pilots I didn't know, so I flew it real slow and easy, gentle maneuvering. Anyway we all get to target and back and not one plane has all it's engines working, some on two engines... Well I offer to lead the new guys down to the runway and one chirps up "I fly 747 cargoes for a living, if I can't land this I need sacking". I can tell you that with him sat on the runway my landing was the most nerve racking experience I ever had.

Nothing beats online human interaction.

Simon.

[Hooray]

not disagreeing, but as I said previously, our existing MP system is too archaic to be a good foundation for this, and we're all kinda hesitant to really work with/extend it, simply because of the ongoing work in the HLA department which would basically make our fgms/MP system obsolete, including any efforts related to it. Most of us are not interested in possibly spending 50 hrs extending the system accordingly, just to see it all wasted ultimately ... turning the existing MP system into a "shared/replicated state" system would be the key ingredient here, and it would not necessarily be backward compatible. But fairly straightforward to do that way - anybody who knows C++ and how to build FG from source could probably do it in under 50 hrs of spare time coding, the key would be delegating state management to aircraft developers, by requiring them to use XML attributes to declare which state/properties are to be replicated - so that the C++ guys can focus on just the underlying infrastructure.

This isn't rocket science, but all of us who know how to do it, also understand that the way to do this "properly" is using something like DIS or HLA, technology stacks designed for such needs.
So far, there's a chicken/egg issue here, because HLA support is obviously progressing but nowhere close to being sufficiently complete, so we're kinda stuck - and have been for years.
Back in the day, we even had a discussion about re-implementing fgms/MP using scripting to make the whole thing more accessible (possibly using Nasal) - meanwhile, I do believe that would have been a smart move, given that we haven't see much progress in the MP department in more than 5+ years.

But MP always was a problematic feature in FG, at some point we had 3 different implementations, all incompatible with each other - and the main problem was not so much MP, but actually the way aircraft development is done, i.e. it is next to impossible to provide a sane MP environment as long as this perverted degree of aircraft development "flexbility" needs to be maintained. We never really formalized how to specifcy state properties, i.e. for things like animations, cockpit, exterior, interior state - and how to classify update requirements (initial handshake, periodic, on change, on update etc).

This is one of those cases where people actively tried to support backward compatibility, so that all aircraft can use the system, while it would have been much better to simply discontinue support altogether and come up with a new system that needs to be explicitly adopted & integrated by the aircraft developer, i.e. using a property map analogous to the flight recorder config file that's now required. That approach is so much smarter that it's almost embarrassing that this wasn't adopted earlier ...

[Bomber]

Sorry I don't beleive in backwards compatibility past a couple of revisions...

A rod for your own back..

Has the FG Dev community ever considered simply restarting from scratch ?

[Hooray]

You can easily answer that for yourself: Imagine we were to come out with FlightGear 4.0, which would have much more stringent hardware requirements, while discontinuing support for 95% of our aircraft, just so that we can "enforce" certain features (better multiplayer support, ability to switch aircraft at runtime, save/load flights, better performance etc).

Those are just some of the long-standing issues that could be "solved" by starting over with certain features/subsystems, at the cost of losing certain aircraft, but unfortunately also developers.
Some of our most active airliner developers are not too happy about the progress in the "glass" department, because it meant breakage for them, i.e. having to update/port their work rather significantly.

This has caused quite a bit of irritation over time - and those are not just random lurkers/forum users, those are people who used to be among the most active aircraft developers.
And obviously, nobody here would be too happy seeing their work being "discontinued" by the project.

I know what you are going to say next - but basically it's a contradiction, and in fact you have contradicted yourself recently, when you argued with Thorsten who stated that contributors are expected to update/port/maintain their own work. So I guess you can see where this is going. And I would not feel any different about it if it affected my own stuff. Backward compatibility is a necessary evil, and the project isn't even very good at it, but we'd lose some of our most important contributors by simpling ignoring their work. Which would obviously not be in the interest of the project. Even just phasing out support for legacy hardware (5+ years) old, without GLSL support, without FBO support, was controversially discussed around here.

And then, keep the "flying by mouse" discussion in mind, which is kinda about the same thing - it's obviously a fine line to walk, especially because of contributors like Thorsten (or even myself) who refuse to purchase a Joystick, but who happen to contribute in some pretty prominent way.

From my standpoint it would be awesome to start over with a few things, such as requiring certain hardware, and getting rid (discontinuing support) of all aircraft that happen to cripple more than 50% of the most important simulator features, i.e. stuff people expect to "just work", such as "save/load flight", "reset/re-init", "flight recorder", "checklists", "tutorials", but also MP.

Note that "getting rid of" is not quite accurate here, as it would just entail having to follow instructions to update those aircraft accordingly.
But we've seen how the airliner guys responded to the glass cockpit stuff being revamped

[Jabberwocky]

Slow down a little: First of all, while other sims maybe have some things here and there more on the jets, the jets in FG are not that bad. I know, I know, I'm new and so on, but by all means, I almost fly exclusively jets. And I know we have every eday in MP a majority of jets. I see two, three, up to five F-14s, maybe an occasional WWII warbird but a lot of Boeing and Airbus. So, maybe Hooray is right and the "combat support" is better, but the jets are not that bad either, especially for players like me who work their way into all the details step by step. So, sorry to contradict you Hooray, but the jet people seem not too unhappy to me
Second, segregated servers, all technical problems aside, don't solve the problem of ATCs and controlled space at all. The WWI and WWII servers would have no OpenRadar to begin with. All the tools, ATCs are used to have to wait for the next what twenty years on such a server. I can't imagine how that would solve the EDDF problem at all. Second thing is, sometimes people WANT to fly together with different age models. The jet fighters actually do that all the time. I was a week or so ago in the San Francisco area and people were happily landing Zeros, F-14s, an A-8 and what not on the Nimitz. Of course, lag was terrible but people had fun and it was interesting.
Having said that, for certain historical events, maybe there could be something like a temporary refuge or something. If people want to play the Battle of Britain or something, one server for the duration of that event blocks non-area planes. I don't know whether it's possible, I don't know the server software. But maybe that's a way to think about this.

J.

[Bomber]

that was the way I was thinking about it....

But I was also thinking that the original poster is upset because 'He got there first' and the airfield is his or 'their are rules' and in his eyes someone is abusing them.... and he's calling for this person to be boycotted or he'll boycott pilots that use him...

What I'm saying is in an 'open arena' even if you say it's got rules and I'm the ATC here, unless you can back that up with login restrictions and assigned times when you're on duty... then you really do have an open arena like it or not...

People designed the ATC code... but didn't think that someone might come along and poo in their sand box ?

When I stated that T4T wouldn't allow mouse pilot control, it was all about this situation, where a person is responsible for other enjoyment... Thorsten is just an over-educated academic that thinks that he should be able to fly online in a combat situation and not 'play by the rules' of the arena.... not withstanding that the planes would have had gunners, navigators and bombaimers all which could have been mouse control...
I also state that where a person in a competitive situation can get an edge over an opponent then he will do so..... So what we'll see without rules is a person flying a spitfire with a F18 flight model behind it... to all intent and purposes everyone see's a Spit but it aint,

If you're flying the battle of Britain then only those planes should be available.... if you want to fly jets go fly in an arena with jets, don't complain that the arena is empty and you should be able to fly where you want when you want as 'FG is Open Source'.... that has nowt to do with it.

I'm just having a chat here, I'm not bothered that much as I don't see FG fulfilling serious combat sim pilots needs anytime soon, so there's no serious expectations from me... but that said if there is a server that has control ATC then only allow players with certain permissions to access the required data to perform the role.

Simon

[Lydiot]

I think this is getting fairly off-topic. How many players play MP at an ATCd airport? Not that many usually. Setting up dedicated servers would serve them and however many currently potential players are NOT playing MP because of the problem Jomo is talking about.

But really, just how often is it a problem, at what airports, who is the ATC when it happens and who are the people Jomo refers to?

I think it's worth discussing separate servers but not in this context because it won't be the best solution to this problem in my opinion. Anyone else find it curious that the OP posted twice only in this thread after having made all that noise? You really don't see the issue here?

[Bomber]

However you don't seem to mention what in your opinion the best solution to this problem is ?

[Lydiot]

However you don't seem to mention what in your opinion the best solution to this problem is ?

If "this" is what Jomo posted then I did indeed respond to it in this thread and in a thread called Considerations for ATCs... discussion or recommendation..

I think the response was telling.

[Jabberwocky]

Lydiot,

that was you ATCing in Phoenix while also the B-1 was online there? Okay, so my 747-8i and that B-1 could be considered different eras. Still you did a great job to ATC us both at the same time, it was fun and I learned something new. So from my point of view, it was a good experience (not like my 2 fps Falcon in KSFO ). I think, that is how it should be normally. Era discrepanices are usually not the big problem as long as it flies.
The original ATC post is partially related to that subject only. I haven't tried to ATC yet and God helps the poor pilots if I do, but I imagine two ATCs in the same tower without the abilites to either work together or beat each other on the nose as a problem. Because technically two people sit "somewhere" and try to catch the pilots from each other. Now, as much as I would appreciate common sese from both to sort that out, this is the Internet, so chances it will happen are small. And that starts the whole login discussion and therefore discussion about what a login system should do or don't. Thisd is like one of those old carebears for children. You remember those? There is a tiny piece of wood stuffing looking out and when you pull on it, the next comes. And then the next, it never ends. So, because of that effect, discussing before doing is in my opinion the way before going down that road and find, everyone is unhappy.

J.