There is clearly a tight budget for vars to be passed from a SimObject to its
AI-clone in multiplayer, and this area of the sim is likely to see some
development. TWO suggestions: (1) Make the exterior light vars (e.g. A:LIGHT
WING, bool) available to the exterior model XML. The data is already somehow
triggering the light effects on AI-clone aircraft in multiplayer so no
additional data should need to be sent. Having those values in the XML makes
them available for much more general usage, including triggering effects much
more generally than the lights circuits. This enhancement would not need to
change the existing use in systems.cfg. (2) Add a fixed number of vars that
can be used for custom purposes, available to the exterior XML. Even one or
two vars would be a huge help, currently we don’t seem to have ANY vars sent
across multiplayer that can be used for animations or effects. Note that given
the extremely limited information that can be transmitted over multiplayer,
devs will always need to re-purpose vars that otherwise are not needed on
their sim aicraft. A full-word simvar is much more valuable than a boolean
because it can be used to encode many more actions. Please, please, do not
fall into the trap of believing you can hard-code into the sim any animation
or effect developers will need, i.e. I currently cannot animate my retractable
engine/prop in multiplayer but the solution is not to provide a (A:ENGINE PROP
RETRACT, percent) new simvar. Multiplayer animations can, of course, be far
smoother if they are animated locally rather than sending a varying value from
the IS_USER_SIM aircraft across multiplayer, but most devs will not be aware
of this. I.e. a door can most effectively be opened and closed with a boolean.
It would be useful if THIS was the main example given in the SDK for the model
XML, i.e. how to smoothly change an animation simvar towards a target. would
actually work if that could be limited to the not IS_USER_SIM aircraft but
currently that property applies to the whole animation and may not be suitable
for the IS_USER_SIM aircraft.
There is already an idea proposal among those lines here:
https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/t/3808 Best Regards, Raul
I decided that original post is more about L: vars, which are shared between
similar SimObjects within one player’s sim. It might simplify things if we
don’t conflate that issue with propagating SimObject vars across multiplayer.