durk wrote:In essence, you want to be able to simulate an AI aircraft to perform aerobatic manouvres.
That's also my understanding, but in addition to that, he also wants the track of an AI aircraft to be based on flight data that was previously recorded in FlightGear, for example by using the generic protocol system or the replay subsystem, both of which may provide said data.
So, if I am not mistaken, Sharrif wants to turn a recorded flight into an AI traffic "flight plan", so that the previously recorded flight can be replayed by AI traffic system, instead of having to manually create a flight plan?
Such a feature sounds pretty interesting because it would allow users to easily contribute AI traffic in the form of recorded flight paths so that any flight could be used for AI traffic purposes eventually.
The problems for using the AI traffic system in its current form for this idea is the fact that AI traffic does not (to my knowledge) currently provide or handle all the data (or at least not at the needed resolution) that would be required for high fidelity playback of recorded flights (think fast maneuvering, dog fighting, formation flying etc).
So it's not just aircraft attitude/orientation that would need to be additionally exposed and handled by AI traffic system.
But, given that this would mean that users could use any FlightGear aircraft for recording AI traffic flights, there would also need to be a way to handle those (aircraft specific) properties that are not normally used by the AI traffic systems (such as for example custom animations).
For instance, imagine a scenario where the user starts a flight using the bo105 and wants to save the flight as an AI traffic flight plan in order to fly in formation with the previously recorded flight.
Thus, the AI traffic system would need the capability to insert any installed aircraft model as virtual traffic and also animate it properly (like the multiplayer system mostly does).
durk wrote:Of these, AccelTo, ClimbTO, and TurnTo are used by the current waypoint based flight plans. I don't seen any principle limitation as to why there couldn't be instructions in a FlightPlan that would feed the PitchTo, RollTo, or YawTo, functions. This would probably require some modification of the xml code that reads the flightplans and that does the waypoint following logic, as well as some modifications of the performance database.
Yes, that sounds like it could work pretty well.
However, just exposing these properties to the flight plan XML format would still not provide a migration path for users between the data from the generic protocol/replay systems and the AI system itself.
In other words, there would still need to take place a conversion to the flight plan format that is internally used by the AI traffic system for the saved data (no matter if the data is coming from the generic protocol system or the replay system).