100 lines
5.5 KiB
Org Mode
100 lines
5.5 KiB
Org Mode
* 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]]
|