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
- parson as JSON 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.txtfile. - 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 the XPMP2 lib as a GitHub submodule. To properly build, you need to also checkout the XPMP2 submodule, 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:
| Options | Windows | MacOS (universal) | Linux |
|---|---|---|---|
| Github Actions | Visual Studio 2022 | XCode 13 | Focal |
| Docker | Mingw64 | clang, SDK 12 | Focal and Bionic |
| CMake | VS 2022 / NMAKE |
XCode 14 / ninja |
Focal and Bionic / ninja |
| IDE | Visual Studio 2019 | XCode 14 | - |
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 dockermake
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
cdinto 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.