Abstract

PC Flight Simulators are appropriate for pilot training and research. One important feature of a PC Flight Simulator is the possibility to run the simulation with multiple players simultaneously. There are professional flight simulators such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 that is quite realistic and is not limited to one player. But the problem with commercial flight simulators is that they do not offer features to enable users to make modifications and/or add new functionality. Other disadvantages are the price and the platform limit.

Flight Gear is a sophisticated multi-platform open source flight simulator framework for research, development pursuit of other flight simulation ideas. As Flight Gear is developed under the GNU Public Licence, it is freely available and everyone may modify, extend and recompile the source code. Flight Gear does not have a complete multiplayer engine yet.

In this report the development of our Flight Gear multiplayer engine (MPE) will be described. A prototype of our modular MPE is implemented in Flight Gear and the results are described. The source code as well as the specification will be freely available on the Internet.