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Developers Question - Concept Possible?

F

flightsimstudios

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unitedstates
I'm posting this here as well as I know scenery designers have experience with this stuff, in terms of date coding scenery...

I've been developing freeware stuff for FS since the days of FS4.0 and I've been working on a retro AI flight schedule...

It led me to a couple of thoughts and I'm wondering if anyone has investigated attempting this yet....

Is it possible to code a traffic.bgl file in a similar way that we can code scenery objects so that the objects only display when a certain day,date,year or range of dates are met?

One example is the Fireworks in Las Vegas, it is coded only to display at a certain time of year.

I'm wondering, following this logic, can we do the same thing with the AI traffic BGL header and make it so that traffic.bgl flightplans are only loaded when the dates are set to a certain date...

Here's the main idea I'm driving at... I've got a 1973 timetable for Ansett Australia and will be compiling the file for a retro AI package... If it were possible to date lock the BGL traffic, then we could have multiple AI traffic packages built around schedule sets...

i.e. Winter 1993 aircraft and flight plans are loaded when the FS date is set to winter 1993... But if you change the date to Summer 2005, the summer 2005 schedule and aircraft (coded of course in the BGL's) are called and displayed...

I would be somewhat surprised if it were not possible to code the AI files in this way, but I'm not sure if anyone has attempted this feat yet...

If we can do this or if we can see about getting the next version of FS to incorporate dating the traffic.bgl's that would be something phenominal... It would require a system to keep track of different era aircraft paint schemes and fleets on our end but it would be so cool to backtrack to a different era for different AI experiences...

What would be cool is that as time goes by for example the MRAI flight plans could be produced with the dates already set for the data, so when the next dataset comes out for the next season, you just drop it in to the FS folder without having to clean out the older dataset... Say you're in the mood to head back in time, no problem, change the date in the sim and you can go back to see the old scheduled services and paint schemes...
 
Hey,

I am not sure about the seasons, but I know that the AI flight planning allows for flights to occur on only certain days. You would have to read up on the traffic tools manual to see the exact values but I do know for sure that yoy can select Su M Tu W Th F Sa.

David :teacher:
 
Yeah, this is kind of a different step, it's along the lines of what is done with scenery BGL's...

Wish I wasn't at work so I could run some tests...

Dean
 
Hi Dean,

I think you can not set a year in your traffic BGL, but as David suggests I would have a look at the TTool documentation (it's too long ago I used them myself).
 
Nah traffic tools won't let you do it... I think I need to decompile my traffic BGL to XML code and take it from there. Traffic tools only operates on flight plan algorithms and they don't have any code in their stuff for date based scenery calls...

Let me look up my traffic.bgl real quick and see what info I can extract from it...

{edit} I'm determined to crack this one :):):)

:wave:
 
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I don't think you can make a XML file out of your traffic BGL. It is not the type of BGL that BGLComp can create from a XML file. So I am afraid you are limited to the options TTool gives you.
 
:rotfl: one work "hack" :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

Actually it shouldn't be too different from a dynamic scenery BGL... Am going to check now...

Sorry harrowing couple of days, a co-worker (one of our news anchors) was killed in a car accident two days ago, and tonight my tyre/tire blew out just a short distance from home.. No jack handle to change the tyre, lol and my friends phone appears to be disconnected, so I had to limp home....

It's been an adventure tonight... I'm going to try a few things, like find out which scenery header the BGL uses and then confirm what I suspect that the BGL2XML won't decompile the traffic bgl...

After that a few more discussions with a few other developers like the ones who are working on AI Separation and AI Smooth and who know the code of traffic files... ;)
 
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Okay, here's the preliminary results....

BGL File Info: D:\Flight Simulator 2004\Scenery\World\Scenery\Traffic.bgl
ID:1
Latitude: 90.0000000 to -90.0000000
Longitude: -0.0000000 to 0.0000000
File Size: 52078114
Data Types:
Synthetic (01-06)
Airport/Facilities Directory (20)

File contains 0 runways
File contains 0 taxiways
File contains 0 polygons
File contains 0 roads
File contains 0 highways
Click to expand...

Okay better than I expected... It is listed as a BGL with an airports and facilities directory... Will tryn crunching it through BGL2XML now as I suspect it will read the data and assume it's just a regular scenery file...
 
Okay, BGLXML said it was an invalid XML file... Time to chase up a few leads like the author of BGLXML and the AI Traffic Serparation authors, and see what we can come up with :)

The challenge will be finding a decompiler that can decompile the traffic.bgl successfully... I'm guessing it's still based on old scasm type code...

Once it's decompiled into a format that can be tweaked it shouldn't be hard in theory to create the season variable into the code...

The header information has all the lat and lon data, so it shouldn't be too hard to create and recompile the source data back to a BGL with the code...
 
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flightsimstudios said:
The challenge will be finding a decompiler that can decompile the traffic.bgl successfully... I'm guessing it's still based on old scasm type code...
Click to expand...

What's wrong with TTools? That is the decompiler that can read traffic BGL files.

The traffic files are not based on SCASM code either, as you can not create new ones with SCASM (calling it SCASM code is sort of nonsense already, as you can create the same BGL file with BGLC, it about the commands used inside and how old these are).

As far as I know TTools is the only tool that can produce new traffic files.

flightsimstudios said:
Once it's decompiled into a format that can be tweaked it shouldn't be hard in theory to create the season variable into the code...
Click to expand...

The only assumption you make in that case, is that FS is able to understand these conditions in a traffic file. And I am not that sure about it. I think the traffic files just store the traffic information in a special format and you can not add new information (like conditions) to it, as FS will no longer understand the files in that case.
 
Traffic Tools only compiles data from a proprietary format. There's been a lot of development work on the AI side of things...

Traffic Tools only decompiles the data contained in the BGL not the header information and such that shows the extent of the traffic scenery file...

In discussions with AI developers theyhave confirmed the format has basically not changed since FS2002, and a few people are working on the data contained within the AI scenery enginem as well as the coding...

Traffic Tools will only output the flightplan, airport, and aircraft details *not* the header information. It's the header information that needs to be tweaked as basically the AI traffic files from what several people have looked into are basically glorified dynamic scenery files...

:wave:
 
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