* Xplane Streaming project with Combination of my PhD 

The Xplane WebRTC project takes inspiration from Google Stadia
for a streaming based solution for playing video games. But our
plan is to build one specifically for flight simulators. We target
Xplane 11 for being cross platform and completely offline dependent
on sceneries with reasonable documentation on usage of the SDK to use the game.
The novelty of the project being all aspects of the project will be completely open source.
There are already major segments of the project complete and have been tested which will
be mentioned in the appropriate section for the necessary details. I am also investing
in my PhD to familiarize myself to work with slim down kernels on HPC scenarios
(This will help me extend the Xplane to run on a distributed scenario). This
project is fun long term work and has no heavy deadlines but rather the art of
optimizing the current paradigm of how we use heavy workload applications.
The following above is a really high level abstraction description of the
projects and barely covers the depth of what the project intends to push forward. 

The big question is what parts have been rebuilt for the project and how they
contribute to the end goal of the project. The first property of the project is
that it should be able to run on a p2p network. P2PRC is a p2p orchestrator designed
to run applications in a p2p network using Containers initially. There are plans to
extend it to run on Uni-kernels and based on my PhD extend it to run on a Multi-kernel
paradigm as well. This will be our custom alternative to Kubernetes which will be used to
distribute and run on workloads on p2p effectively. This would make our entire run on
Anyone's machine which can reside behind NAT. 

We also intend to make an open source solution to distribute a slim down version of X Plane
so that nodes can quickly Spawn Xplane instantly with only the required scenery needed.
This will be in contrast to running the full scenery of the game which is around 55 GB.
Something novel that could be worked on here is a novel approach to only send the scenery
of the flight path when distributing the game. This will mean building parsers for the
Xplane scenery files and then finding techniques to only get a correct set of scenery
files needed in other machines. The techniques are expected to open source but since the
scenery files are proprietary they are expected to be public.

The streaming part of the project is expected to use the browser standard WebRTC sockets
with the corresponding sockets. This is because there is already massive development
of the chromium browser with GPU encoders and decoders for faster performance.
We have already built a prototype which has been tested and seems to work as intended. 

The PhD will be one of a long term novel approach which will support Multi-kernels with
TAG based architecture support for running C++ programs more securely. This might mean
most parts of the PhD might not be used. The Multi-kernel approach is definitely an
interesting area to experiment on to figure out how the project would use such an
approach and this open lot of areas of future research and hopefully better
performant flight simulators with better purposed algorithm to offload tasks to
devices such as FPGAs or potato machines in abstraction layer similar to speaking nodes in an network. 



** The short term plan: 
- [ ] To do a full review of all the work currently complete.  
- [ ] To set up clusters for testing Xplane 11.
- [ ] To set up nice documentation for setting up the Xplane 11 project. 
- [ ] To allow players to play around with the Xplane 11 game as Beta testers. 
- [ ] Plans for constant updates for the project broadcasted to the community. 
- [x] To sync with developers interested in the project and track how much potential contribution is possible from an external community. 
- [ ] Start planning ways to incentivize developers interested in working on the project. 

** Invested amount
 - Akilan & family (60,000 pounds) - Research and Development

** Released to market
 - Market release (March 2026)

** Invested projects
 - P2PRC (p2p orchestrator)
 - CHERI based memory allocators (Research for fast C memory allocators to be injected to Xplane)

** Release plan:
 - Testers version for Xplane single instance to selected people (1st March 2025)
 - Multiple instance of Xplane (1st April 2025)
 - Xplane UDP communication protocol (1st June)

** Business plan
The business plan for the flight sim project is initially self host
versions of the game where a user can pay 4$ a month to try running their
game setup on our servers to start with. We plan to gain traction
through our open source to create a framework to allow more developers
to spawn companies on top of the project such as:
- (1.1) White labelling to Airline compaines with maintenance as apart
  of a formulated contract.
- (1.2) Adding servers to the network to generate income (With P2PRC)
- (1.3) Legal firms to follow FAA rules to be built on top of (1.1)
- (1.4) Flight schools on-prem setup with remote learning.
- (1.5) Researchers using the platform to test flight models on the simulator. 

** Intermediate Release plan
This release plan looks into 3 parallel segments of releases. The one which is
P2PRC release plan, PhD work release and flight sim release plan. We intend
to have to this ready by the mid of march to present to researchers in Leeds
and Andre from Lyon.

*** P2PRC release
The P2PRC release consists of work done by me (Akilan Selvacoumar) and Jose Fernandes.

[[./March-plan.drawio.png]]

[[./Finance-plan.drawio.png]]
