Comments on: Musings on CSLs

By: Anton

Anton — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:35:36 +0000

I've never experienced this first person, but given that X-Plane provides multiplayer capability alone (i.e.. without any plugin), I'd say that it should provide the core framework to retrieve and render "others" aircraft within your simulation by itself.

"Others" can be your peer connected directly to you over LAN (no plugins for that), or a massive realtime simulation environment like VATSIM (with a plugin like xsquackbox acting as interface between the two).

That would look like a sound approach to me.

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:19:32 +0000

Hi Y'all,

A few things:
- I can't start a discussion of ATC features right now, and generally I'd say please hold the requests...we've already taken in a huge amount of feedback re: ATC and are working on substantial features...so I expect if everyone starts asking for ATC thing we'll get a lot of dupes.

- Why not do this? The burdon is always positive (why do this)? The reason why not is that developer time is valuable, so the feature must be weighed against the opportunity cost. In other words, we can't do everything that is cool, only the most cool things.

- Dates: As always, I cannot make any announcements on dates or features of future products.

By: Dirk

Dirk — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:12:36 +0000

Let me turn the question around: what would be the advantage (if any) of not doing it? It seems to me to be the logical next step to have X-Plane do the rendering of objects that are provided by plugins.

BTW: when can we expect first alpha / beta code of the new ATC system? The plugin author who tried to tackle this last year is missing in action, so those of us who'd like a more realistic ATC environment are waiting anxiously to see something like that.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:09:48 +0000

It would be good if the new XP10 ATC could be turned off by a plugin so that a plugin could completely implement its own ATC logic.

I guess what I'm really suggesting is to give XP10 plugins the low level SDK capabilities to create/destroy and issue speed/alt/lon/lat waypoints to objects (such as aircraft with specific livery, ground vehicles, people models etc). This will allow developers to build sophisticated ATC and "living" airport environment addons.

If you give developers a powerful SDK then you will be amazed at what they can do! You can make XP10 far more "extensible" than FSX if you empower 3rd party developers via the plugin SDK.

Kind regards, MatthewS