Route Waypoints

[MattW]

One of the things I offer in my VA are tours, so far so good. One of my tours has several legs but also includes the necessity to follow a certain set of waypoints in the air. See https://www.icefireair.com/ifatours/tours/9

Currently the only way for me to make these waypoints accessible to pilots is to attach a flight plan. But I cannot check (apart from taking a look at the duration of the flight legs) whether the pilot has actually flown the intended route.

 

Now you could say: If the pilot wants to cheat his way around, it's his own loss, because this whole simulator thing is about experiencing the actualy flying part, not about cheating an avatar to the top of the leaderboard. But you know how it is...

 

Now currently I'm restricted (as far as I can determine) to airports as "waypoints" for routes. Which basically means that a route will only be accepted as completed when the pilot has reached the destination airport of a tour leg.

I'd love to have a feature where I can add generic waypoints to a tour which will be recognized by ACARS once a pilot flies over it.

 

There already seems to be some GeoService class which, to a certain extent, is able to check against coordinates. But there'd have to be a lot more than that, e.g. a new type of destination, "waypoint", new completion checks for legs that only partly consist of waypoints, extended error handling, etcetc. And there'd probably have to be additional development on the ACARS client?

 

Seems to be a taller order than reasonable (for what it is trying to achieve), but maybe I'm thinking too complicated?

 

 

[DisposableHero]

A waypoint can not be defined as a "destination", that is a fact for flight planning and this can not be changed (not in real life, not in phpvms). What you can do in real life is using ZZZZ as your dep/arr airport and define coordinates in the remarks of your flight plan so the system (and Air Traffic Controller) understands that you will start/end your flight in a specific coordinate instead of an airport.

 

So, if you want to check your pilots fly over certain points (like a waypoint, vor, ndb etc. which have coordinates) you need to build up a listener working either with pirepfiled event or with pirepupdated events to achieve your goal. You may not like it but without knowing the coordinates of those points, you can not get a proper result. vmsAcars sends back position reports and they do have coordinates for you to use in your checks  

 

When you know the coordinates of your required point then it will be some amount of math and some coding (to calculate a radius depending how precise you wish to check and searching matching pirep position reports). If the point flown is found or close enough to your requirement then it can pass, else fail.

 

I am not sure if it will be possible, or practical to do these kinds of checks on vmsAcars side. Again you will have to define a specific point and some range for flexibility, use a custom rule to let it being checked live by vmsAcars.

 

vmsAcars checks will run on client side (pilot's computer) and it may not be effective and will be risky if you can not code the custom rule properly (fails, crashes, excessive ram usage etc.). Therefore I would suggest having these kind of deeper checks at phpvms side but in the end, it is up to you to decide and develop

 

Good luck

 

PS: While working on your website for developments, please check the license requirements of Disposable addons and apply necessary changes to comply with them  Right now you are violating license terms

 

[MattW]

I'm sorry. I really didn't see this, it's rather hidden at the end of the readme. No offense intended. I have removed your plugin from the installation since I (almost) have no use for its functionality, at least currently.