Re: [Flightgear-devel] possible solution to online flying (VATSIM)?!

[John Wojnaroski]

Major A wrote: John, Interesting... I'm about to delve into XPlane and have zero understanding regards how the third party plugins or datarefs work. I'm afraid I can't say much more than that at this point -- the only source I have myself is http://www.xsquawkbox.net/xpsdk/phpwiki/index.php But it does look a bit more orderly and sensible than with FSUIPC or its new free competitor (forgotten the name). I've just checked, and all the relevant parameters appear to be there. There's even a "override_planepath": "Set item 0 to '1' to turn off x-plane's flight model." -- very handy. Just for the record, here's what information I think will need to travel between FG and X-Plane: FG->XP: -- position -- attitude -- time derivatives of position and attitude -- NAV frequencies -- transponder settings -- PTT (we might be able to use XPLMCommandButtonPress() and XPLMCommandButtonRelease() ) Certain of the first four, will have to poke around in the code for the transponder.  PTT ??  push-to-talk?  I don't think there is such a function in FG. XP->FG: -- weather (we can generate a METAR to the plane from all the weather parameters? I can't see a direct METAR parameter) FG has a real-time weather fetch capability from metar stations.  Are you aware of that? Audio will be handled by X-Plane. OTH I can do FG in my sleep. Perhaps there is any opportunity for some common sharing and help. One other thought -- it might be better to use X-Plane on Linux, maybe plugins can even be built using gcc? according to Austin that should be possible.  In fact, I'm banking on it for some of the work planned with XPlane. So I'll code up a network protocol to send the above selected data from FlightGear to a XPlane plugin if you would take a crack at doing the plugin.  Regards John W.