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TwinFan / LiveTraffic

LiveTraffic is an X-Plane multiplayer plugin, which fills your sky with live air traffic based on public flight tracking data.
https://twinfan.gitbook.io/livetraffic/
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Feeding data to LiveTraffic: Add dedicated "LiveTraffic" channel #232

Closed devleaks closed 2 years ago

devleaks commented 2 years ago

Current Situation / Problem

Currently, livetraffic uses RealTraffic AITraffic format (AITFC) to receive data from custom feeds. The AITFC has limitations. There is hope to move towards RTTFC which allow for more information. To feed you own traffic, you have to enable RealTraffic data feed in LiveTraffic.

Suggested Solution

Isolate custom feeds into a "Custom Feed" LiveTraffic channel, independant of all other channels. The Custom Feed format would allow for all LiveTraffic specific needs and options, to better exploit all its possibilities.

Alternatives

Wait to see if RTTFC has less shortcomings than AITFC.

Benefits

Independance of external format. Ability to exploits all LiveTraffic possibilities. Easier to feed your own data. Easier for LiveTraffic to interpret, since format would require specific data without the need for LiveTraffic to translate or approximate external formats. Provide some error reporting in case of invalid data in feed. The LiveTraffic Custom Feed Format would be the reference for other feeds.

Additional context

It is easier to generate additional traffic (aircrafts, ground vehicles, ATC software...) with external software, and then "inject" those aircrafts of vehicles in the simulation through LiveTraffic, rather than integrate a complex, closed software like Traffic Global or alike.

TwinFan commented 2 years ago

Support for RTTFC is already implemented as per #229 in addition to AITFC and will be published with the next release of LiveTraffic.

RTTFC has a lot more fields (see RT documentation), though LiveTraffic does by far neither need nor use most of the new fields. But LiveTraffic does benefit from:

Please note that the meaning of gnd is reversed compared to AITFC's Airborne.

The next release will also allow to configure the input network port number.

LiveTraffic processes any message type on any port, even mixed. Actually, it decides line by line which format a record is in and processes it accordingly. So you could even send mixed formats in one UDP message...

There are no plans to support two streams in parallel. This would also not be necessary as this is UDP multicast. You could send your artificial data parallel to RealTraffic sending real data...in any format you like.

devleaks commented 2 years ago

OK. Thanks. Got it. Looking forward to the next release then. I made a app that "generates" ADSB messages for aircrafts and ground vehicles (a kinda "traffic generator"). As a X-Plane simmer, I found it amusing to feed those generated tracks into LiveTraffic. It works like a charm, but I struggle a bit with ground vehicles (I use ZZZA to ZZZY to distinguish their model/type.) Please do not neglect the isICAOhex to prevent looking up for aircrafts that do not exist in real life. (I generate random 24bit addresses...)