LiveTraffic

LiveTraffic is a plugin for the flight simulator X-Plane to show real life traffic, based on publicly available live flight data, as additional planes within X-Plane.

It came into being when I was looking at plugins simulating additional traffic in X-Plane and thinking at that time: Why do they try to simulate traffic and invent flight models when there is flight data available online which brings yet another piece of reality into the simulation? Why can't one just read the data and display the aircraft?

Well...turned out it's not that easy ;-)

Please see GitBook for further documentation on Features, Limitations, Requirements, Installation, Configuration...

Download

Available on x-plane.org.

License

MIT License, essentially freeware.

For license information on included code and libraries see docs/LICENSE_*.txt files.

Credits

LiveTraffic is based on a number of other great libraries and APIs, most notably:

• X-Plane SDK to integrate with X-Plane
• XPMP2 for CSL model processing
• CURL for network protocol support
• FMOD Audio Engine: FMOD Core API by Firelight Technologies Pty Ltd.
• parson as JSON parser
• metaf as METAR parser
• libz/zlib as compression library (used by CURL)
• ImGui for user interfaces
• ImgWindow for integrating ImGui into X-Plane windows
• IconFontCppHeaders for header files for the included icon font

Thanks go to

• Sparker for providing imgui4xp as a testbed for ImGui integration and for accepting my additions to it.
• Crbascott for compiling and providing the model_typecode.txt file.
• Dimitri van Heesch for Doxygen, with which more and more parts of LiveTraffic's (and all of XPMP2's) code documentation have been created.
• FontAwesome for the icon font fa-solid-900.ttf

Build

Please note that LiveTraffic includes XPMP2, parson, and metaf libs as a GitHub submodules. To properly build, you need to also checkout the submodules, e.g. on the command line by doing

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/TwinFan/LiveTraffic

There are four options to build from sources:

Github Actions

LiveTraffic builds on Github, see .github/workflows/build.yml.

Docker Cross Compile Environment

Locally, LiveTraffic can be build for all platforms using the Docker cross compile environment twinfan/focal-win-mac-lin-compile-env. Tested on Mac as a host, should work the same way on Linux.

• Install Docker Desktop and start it.
• cd docker
• make

In the first run only, it will download the necessary Docker image. The actual build takes only a few seconds. Results are written to build-*/*_x64 folders.

For more background info also see docker/README.md.

The Makefile also builds the doc target, ie. the Doxygen documentation. That will only work on a Mac. Otherwise, you may want to remove doc from all.

CMake

Given a proper local setup with a suitable compile, CMake, and Ninja installed, you can just locally build the sources from the CMakeList.txt file, e.g. like this:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G Ninja ..
ninja

This is precicely how the Mac and Linux builds are done in Github Actions.

IDE

Mac OS / Xcode

MacOS is the primary development platform. Open LiveTraffic.xcodeproject with Xcode. In the project's "Build Settings" you find one User-Defined setting at the very end, that will require changing: XPLANE11_ROOT defines the root path to your X-Plane installation. The build process will install the plugin also into $(XPLANE11_ROOT)/Resources/plugins/$(PROJECT), so that it is right away available in your installation after build.

Windows / Visual Studio

• Install Visual Studio
• Open the project folder, typically LifeTraffic, using File > Open > Folder...
• Visual Studio will use the provide CMake setup
• Build from within Visual Studio

Results are in build-win.

Doxygen Documentation

Newer files come with Doxygen-style documentation. All file headers are updated already so that the file listing in the resulting Doxygen documentation should be appropriate. But many older, while having many explanatory comment, are yet missing proper Doygen-style format.

To build the Doxygen documentation

• install Doxgen
• cd into the project's main directory
• run doxygen docs/LiveTraffic.doxygen, e.g. on a Mac run /Applications/Doxygen.app/Contents/Resources/doxygen docs/LiveTraffic.doxygen

The resulting documentation is written to docs/html, open docs/html/index.html.