On 12/12/06, Martin Spott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
.... errrm, and, at least some of them don't even dare to think of
using current versions of FlightGear. I was told they're afraid of
running into the hassle of reworking half of their interface with every
new version of FlightGear, because the interface actually is not what
people would call a stable protocol.
The biggest issue is that people with proprietary software on one end get
locked into a specific version of FlightGear because as FlightGear evolves,
their proprietary tools can't or don't follow very quickly.
That said, the most recent version of the aerospace blockset for simulink
supports multiple versions of FlightGear including v0.9.10. However, some
people don't or can't upgrade because of the software costs.
Actually this matches with the result of an experiement that I did
earlier. I picked a few network packets with the network analyzer and
fed some of them into a running FlightGear instance on the same
platform as the packets were generated (FreeBSD/i386). I managed to
'move' the aircraft by manually tweaking some bytes with the hex editor
and returning the captured packets to FlightGear on the same platform,
but it didn't work by feeding the same, "hand-selected" stream to
FlightGear neither on Linux/AMD64 nor on IRIX/N32.
Work was done to improve the NetFDM structure prior to v0.9.10 so if you did
your experiements earlier than that, the picture has most likely changed.
Mathworks actually tested their tool on quite a few different platforms
(including Mac OSX) and made a few recommendations to improve the situation
which we followed up on.
Don't get me wrong: I don't intend to shoot you about inabilities of
this network protocol - well, I once was attepted to do so several
years earlier, but this is another story ;-) - but we might save
people valuable time if we make sure they don't get mislead.
No, say whatever you like, joking or not, and I'm not offended. There isn't
a single one-size-fits-all communcation protocol. That's why we have
several mechanisms available in FlightGear. The NetFDM is perfect for
certain situations and applications, and completely the wrong approach for
other situations.
There is some work (moving very slowly because involved) to create an xml
specification for a binary protocol so an external application can feed
flightgear an xml file to produce binary output matching exactly what that
external app wants and expects. Kind of like the "generic" protocol only
the underlying data is transmitted in binary form.
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson - University of Minnesota - FlightGear Project
http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/ http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
http://www.flightgear.org
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