Flight Gear Multiplayer Engine Project

Preface

The gradiation project of Jeroen Boogaard and Leon Otte contains the development of our Flightsimulator Multiplayer Engine and the research involved with during our traineership at the Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) group of the Delft Universitity of Technology. One of the projects of the KBS group, called the Intelligent Cockpit Environment (ICE) project, for which we develope the prototype
‘Flight Gear Multiplayer Engine’.

Project description

The goal of our project is to study the the posibilities of a mutliplayer engine for an open source flight simulator and develop a flightsimulator multiplayer engine prototype that can be used to add ‘bots’. The prototype can be split up in two major parts:

a network module to exchange data between the players;
an interpretation module that will use the data for the visualization of multiplayers.

Project overview

During this project we will

make a design of a multiplayer engine;
study the multiplayer possibilities in Flight Gear;
develop a prototype that can be implemented in Flight Gear;
test the prototype and describe its possibilities and limits.

The development of a perfect multiplayer engine is very difficult especially since Flight Gear is an addition to a very advanced flight simulator that provides different airplanes, flight models, wheater circumstances, etc. It’s also difficult to create the possibility to play via the Internet since involved workstations can have big differences in network speed. So our prototype will only provide a basic functionality at which further adjustments can be add.

Multipilot Project

In 1999, Oliver Delise and Curt Olson started the development of the 'Oliver Delise multi pilot networking support'. The project result was an incomplete non-portable module. Instead of completing this module, we use this module for study while developing our own multiplayer engine.