FsP VA

[Drew]

btw - this post is going on for two years old

[Captain_Smith]

Drew wrote:
btw - this post is going on for two years old

Oh LOL.

I guess I'll have to take that back then, unless there is such a VA?

[JanniCash]

Ooops, missed that too.

Oh well, maybe we should take that as a hint then for how important the FsP team considers VA's.


Jan

[Drew]

JanniCash wrote:


Oh well, maybe we should take that as a hint then for how important the FsP team considers VA's.

This VA was nothing to do with the FsP team. It was just a member from this forum making it, and then abandoned the project for some reason.

[JanniCash]

Drew wrote:
This VA was nothing to do with the FsP team. It was just a member from this forum making it, and then abandoned the project for some reason.

So what VA does the FsP team have anything to do with?

What VA did ever receive any substantial support from the FsP team?

Please note explicitly that the primitive PHP script, allowing to upload and display the flights of several totally disconnected pilots on a website,
is not considered VA support in my book.

I would really like to move something forward here.


Jan

[Drew]

JanniCash wrote:


So what VA does the FsP team have anything to do with?

What do you mean by 'have anything to do with' ?
I know several of the mods are members of various va's, i have been in the past, but no longer.
Or are you referring to an official va for FsP? or a va created by FsP mods/admin?



Post Edited ( 09-28-07 00:31 )

[JanniCash]

What I really mean is, is the FsP team interested in VA's and how much?

Up to now, the only thing available to VA's is that flight upload capability. That functionality only allows to blindly upload flights of otherwise
completely isolated pilots. Each pilot is basically running his/her own little company with zero interaction or side effects at all. One pilots good
or bad results have no effect on anyone else at all. With all due respect, but calling that VA support is a gross overstatement by all means.

I have outlined how, even without any changes to the current FsP application, the mere disclosure of the file format of the FsP status database could
allow for far more than that. I do understand what keeps Dan busy and why he's not chiming in to the discussion at this point. Why not a single other
member of the FsP team is at least offering so much as a personal opinion ... you tell me.

A gut feeling tells me that nobody really ever investigated the true potential, a web data service combined with a local application, that is capable
of reading and writing the FsP status data, has. If designed right, I think this could become something much more than most imagine. What I can think
of is an FsP web service "protocol", that not only defines the interactions between a pilot and his VA, but also between VA's for example to rent or
sell planes between companies, do things like operating flights on behalf of another company, transfer pilots and all that. The local client would be
a standalone program for now and the functionality could later on be integrated into FsP.

Why don't we at least try to investigate "together" what the real potential and the risks of all this are? If there is any chance for this to happen,
we could have a complete proposal in form of at least a functional specification ready by the time Dan resurfaces from his FsPX hibernation.

So ... is the FsP team interested in VA's and how much?


Jan

[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

[crowebird]

Drew wrote:

JanniCash wrote:


Oh well, maybe we should take that as a hint then for how important the FsP team considers VA's.

This VA was nothing to do with the FsP team. It was just a member from this forum making it, and then abandoned the project for some
reason.

I didnt abandon it completely, I started somthing new... http://www.pilotsnetwork.com :D

[JanniCash]

crowebird wrote:
I didnt abandon it completely, I started somthing new... http://www.pilotsnetwork.com :D

I think you can abandon it.

JanniCash wrote:
So ... is the FsP team interested in VA's and how much?

Dan's response to this was deleted while I was typing my reply to his post. And since then there is only roaring silence. I can't help but think that
the FsP team doesn't have an answer to that question.

One of the early posts by Drew in this thread read "never took part in any kind of VA, so explain to me the basics. (apart from fly, land and
upload)". Well, Drew, the point is that a VA encourages good and responsible flying even more because if you screw up and damage a plane or your
reputation, it doesn't only affect your little local FS+FsP installation, your entire company and thus every pilot flying for it has to pay for the
damage. So FsP+VA would create peer-pressure (apart from your manager eventually considering to fire you someday).

Here we are, one and a half years later. FsP's functionality is still on the "fly, land and upload" level and all attempts to build a concept or a
prototype for something better are rejected as "vague dream" where Dan has to do all the work. So what do we conclude from that?


Jan

[Atlantic Airways]

sounds intresting... will join.. if it´s good!

[Drew]

JanniCash wrote:
[
One of the early posts by Drew in this thread read "never took part in any kind of VA, so explain to me the basics.

I joined Atlantic Sun Airways after that post. Did quite a few flights, but then didnt have the time to keep it up.



Let me let you in on a little secret, (which I thought was actually pretty obvious) moderators are exactly that, here to moderate the forums, not to
build va's.

Here we are, one and a half years later. FsP's functionality is still on the "fly, land and upload" level and all attempts to build a concept or a
prototype for something better are rejected as "vague dream" where Dan has to do all the work. So what do we conclude from that?

We conclude it is not in Dan's plans to spend time building a va system

[JanniCash]

Drew wrote:
We conclude it is not in Dan's plans to spend time building a va system

Where did I ask for that?


Jan

[Drew]

Its not difficult to understand - a fsp va is not a priority of Dan's. If it was, It would have been released within the last two years. Is it here?
Maybe you should take that as a clue.

If your so keen on an fsp va, well let me know when i can join up. I await the link.

[JanniCash]

Drew wrote:
If your so keen on an fsp va, well let me know when i can join up. I await the link.

I have explained (several times now) that a VA system, that consolidates multiple pilots FsP databases, can only be developed if the data format of
the FsP status data is known.

Where can I find those struct definitions? I await the link.


Jan