[Suggestion - AITrackerX] Dispatch already existing AI aircraft

[glider1 90]

Hi Lorby

No stress, was wondering about a possible feature.

Would it be possible to right click on any AI under simulator control that already exists and dispatch it under one of the control methods your app uses like dispatch by flightplan, waypoint or binary?

I know it is a weird feature request, but the reason is simple.

The AI towplane in the flight sim for gliding cannot be controlled. It just flies straight out and I doubt that will change for a very long time even with P3Dv4.

It would be neat to be able to call the towplane, right click on the plane in AITrackerX and assign it to a flightplan or waypoint list before it takes off towing the glider.

Maybe better to be able to dynamically control the AI plane instead?

No stress, just thought I'd ask.

Cheers.

[Lorby_SI 2,036]

HI,

flightplan, no, doesn't work. Waypoint recording is no problem. But I am not sure if the tow plane will accept that, it already is under special simulator control.

Are you willing to test it, if I implement the logic? That takes a lot more time than writing the code...

Edit: tried it myself. Doesn't seem to work with the tow plane, the simulator takes back control immediately.

Sorry!

Best regards

[glider1 90]

Thank you for trying Lorby! Even proof of concept takes time. I guess it would have had limited application anyway even if it did work.

The situation is that the gliding community especially UKVGA gliding club is slowly but surely getting stuck in no-man's land. Our beloved CumulusX is no longer supported and the towplane feature is broken. That means we are loosing options to tow gliders into the air. We are going backward not forward with 64bit.

CumulusX was able to control the towplane in FSX SP1. I have no idea how it did it. The feature was called "smart tow". You could select via a menu whether the tug take a left pattern, right pattern or fly straight out. The tug was aware of thermals and after leaving the pattern would tow the glider toward a thermal location. After release the tug would fly back to the field.

It sounds great but in practice the tug would often not be able to make it back to the airport and then fly off into the distance polluting the multiplayer servers with AI traffic. It didn't matter too much and in single player it didn't matter.

No worries, thought I would ask.

There is a space for a new GliderX app that I can say. The way to go with it would be not to write thermal code, but to make AI gliders and the towplane aware of whatever thermals are injected into the simulator via other apps like CumulusX or AS16 etc. Otherwise do the lot including the thermals! You could then make it so that glider pilots could compete with AI gliders or just have AI gliders follow the same glider task.

Cheers