This project started because we have (hopefully) temporarily lost our crossfeed host!
FlightGear, a 'free' flight simulation program has a multiplayer network. That is the fgfs app can be started connected to one of the many multiplayer servers (fgms) around the world, and it will report your aircraft position, to the connected fgms.
One of the possibilities of the multiplayer server is that is will forward all udp packets received to a running crossfeed client.
This crossfeed client can set up a http service on a particular ports. We had this set up on http://crossfeed.fgx.ch (now down), and you could receive a jason encoded list of pilots active on the multiplayer network.
The beauty of this simple feed is that is can tracked on a javascript map.
Here is a map that does a similar thing using an 'alternate' active flight feed, using the mpserver15 tracker API. Of course it can only 'track' flights on multiplayer servers that are connected to the tracker.
Well for perhaps a day, crossfeed was configured to write the raw udp packets to a log file. A zip of this log can be downloaded from here
This cf-log project uses the content of that log to simulate a crossfeed feed.
As did the original crossfeed it sets up a http server, using the mongoose library, and will respond to json requests.
If running in a localhost, then that would be http://localhost:5555/flights.json
So this code will not be useful to many. It is just an example of using mongoose library to provide a simulate crossfeed http server, feeding up json (or xml) active flights.
The log will run for MANY hours, and when the end of the log is reached, all current flights are expired, and the log restarted from the beiginning.
This utility was started to analyse a raw log of catured FGFS MP packet output.
It was recently updated to handle the new protocol version 2 output, which packs strings byte-by-byte, instead of the previous use of 4 bytes for each character, and can also packs many other property ids into to a single 4-bytes transmitted. This packing effectivel reduced the previous standard length mp packet from 1192 bytes, which would truncate some properties when a chat message were included, to about 880 bytes, allowing chat messages to be included without any truncation.
After extensive testing have tagged this as v1.0.0.
Enjoy.
Geoff.
20170412 - 20140920
;eof