FsP VA

[JanniCash]

DanSteph wrote:
Thanks for kind words...

Any time.

DanSteph wrote:
Did you thought 5 minutes how you would do this *practically* and not as a vague dream where I will do alone what was never done in
the whole gaming world since 20 years even with 200 peoples & more team ??

I indeed thought a lot more than 5 minutes about the issue. And I think you misunderstood my intentions.

I never meant that you would implement much of what a VA would need. As a matter of fact, I stated several times that my plans would work to
some degree even without a single bit changed inside of FsP as it is. They'd work all the better if so, but let's put that discussion off until we
agree that this is worth anything at all.

DanSteph wrote:
So, *practically*, what's the idea ?

I'll tell you my idea a little later. Let me tell you what I know so far:

Your FsP Database directory contains a few files. The FspDb.db being the most interesting of them, since the FspFb.db is just a 99 byte short version
of the pilot specific (based on his internal pilot ID) detailed flight record file. The last two being just fixed length record flat files.

The FspDb.db file consists of a 6 byte header, containing 3 short integer counters. The first being the number of companies, the second the number of
pilots, and the third I guess was intended to be a plane counter, but you never got around to actually normalize your data schema and move the
aircraft outside the company record, so it is still unused. That 6 byte header is followed by X byte long records per company and Y byte long records
per pilot. I spare the remaining audience the exact scrambling technique of the data bytes that attempts to hide the clear text information when
looking at the files in a hex editor. I also don't tell X and Y at this time, since there are script kiddies reading along.

I could go on and describe the company and pilot records in more detail if you ask me to, but I don't think this is really necessary at this point. I
can assure you that I could take the FspDB.db file and edit it so that my pilot has any rank I want or remove the damage of any part of an aircraft
(gear=1, wings=2, engine=4, cockpit=8, ...), modify the company reputation or cash or whatever. But all that isn't the point.

Let's get to the real idea:

The idea is to have a web based data service, that manages a consolidated form of the FsP status database for a VA in a real database. I am a core
team member of the Postgres database development team, with about 20 years of expertise in data migration, data warehousing and data mining, so if you
excuse me, I do roughly know what I am talking about here.

I think of a system, where a Pilot of a VA has to checkout (lock) an aircraft for a flight, perform the flight and report the results back to the VA
server using a specific tool (somewhere in the future that tool may be FsP, but not necessarily now). The tool will allow to allocate the flight, thus
locking the plane and the pilot record on the central system and synchronizing the local FsP database with the current status of the central DB. After
performing the flight, the local tool will extract the flight and the relevant changes in the company and pilot status records and transmit them to
the central VA system as deltas. The central VA system will validate the data and on success, add the flight and adjust the company and pilot records
accordingly.

The company manager will have special functions to overwrite more of the company, aircraft and pilot specific data in order to do aircraft
maintenance, buy or sell aircraft and so on.

All this, the whole tool I am talking about, depends on one thing. Being able to read and write the FsP database files! So far I can read and write
enough of it for my personal taste. But as said before, I still consider the data format your intellectual property, so I won't share meaningful
details here or anywhere else.

I'll have some rather boring 15 or so hours on a flight back from Hong Kong in about two weeks. I'll be busy reading agendas and proposals all the way
to there, unfortunately. But I'd rather spend the time on the way back thinking about the FsPVA protocol than watching stupid movies all the time. I
agree to consider the database file format confidential until you say otherwise and feel bound under a standard NDA. And don't get me wrong, I don't
try to get a piece of your pie. I am fully aware of the fact that whatever software a VA would have to install on a web hosting service will
necessarily be open source, because it probably will have to be PHP scripts. I am not doing this for $ profit, I want to do this because the VA I
joined some time ago is about to die, and I think I could turn this around by changing some fundamentals in the underlying IT structure of it. Those
changes would require all pilots to purchase FsP ... d'oh ...

All I'm asking for at this time is that you send me the header files that define those database record structs. And don't worry, the 4 years of French
I took in school still let me understand about 75% of French programmers C comments or variable names


Jan