Since Flightbeam announced their new manager system and moved away from the current addon manager and Coualt engine. Will FSDT consider doing the same?
Flightbeam under-used the Addon Manager and, especially, the Couatl scripting engine so, they decided they wanted something simpler for their needs.
We made it, and use it for basically everything: how else could have been possible to entirely change the memory management strategy of ALL our sceneries, to have them behaving differently under P3D V4, without changing the sceneries themselves ?
That's because they are not "just" sceneries, but programs that can be changed very easily at any time, and behave differently depending on the simulator used, to turn on/off features at any time, without requiring an external program that would require to exit from the sim.
The whole of GSX (and XPOI) are programs written in the Stackless-Python language, which is a special version of Python optimized for low-latency and multithreaded games, and Couatl is a custom interpreter for that language that we adapted to interface with the sim, which also does some of the most complex calculations in C++, and it does all of this without taking away ANY cpu cycles from the sim, since it runs on a separate CPU core, thanks to the automatic core allocation strategy of the OS and, since FSX/P3D are known for leaving a LOT of unused cores when flying, thanks to Couatl, we can do lots of code without taking away any resources from the sim.
That's how GSX can perform, for example, a pathfinding operation of vehicles finding their way through the airport, without slowing down the sim.
That's how you can walk with the Avatar INSIDE the Control Tower at KMEM without falling down, because Couatl is performing an entirely custom collision detection in fast C++, in the background, and how once you get there, you can hear sound effects with full positional audio (which is used by all GSX vehicles too), because Couatl is calling OpenAL audio and not wasting any memory from the sim by trying to load waves using the sim own sound engine, like an in-process airplane .GAU/.DLL file would do-
That's how we can interface GSX with SODE to have jetways fully integrated with it, because Couatl and SODE use a common API we designed together, so SODE jetways, even at non-FSDT airports, when used with GSX, can benefit of the GSX internal airplane database, and the easy to use GSX airplane configuration editor, to obtain precise data about the airplane doors.
That's how we have *hundreds* of parkings that are populated automatically at KMEM or KCLT with animation of human characters that, even if they could fill in memory (they might, only on 64 bit), would have slowed down the fps to an halt. Because Couatl, in the background, is using its own collision engine and checks the airplane speed too, so these scenes won't appear unless you are inside the parking, and not taxiing or flying.
That's how we have Dynamic Lights at KCLT not impacting fps, because Couatl in the background is making sure that only the dynamic lights on the side of the terminal the airplane is parked will be displayed, so there aren't more than 5-6 dynamic lights displayed by the scenery, because due to the forward rendering method used by P3D, more of them will just kill the fps, especially together with antialiasing enabled.
The P3D V4 SDK, which is were the future is, is capable of extremely powerful things that we haven't even started to use. Some of them were already available in V3, but it didn't make much sense working on them, because the kind of new possibilities they open up, wouldn't have fit in memory of a 32 bit application anyway, that's why you didn't really "see" much difference between P3D and FSX: because
developers used it as it were FSX...but V4 changes everything, and we can finally start to use such features, and the most interesting are only possible with the native PDK (Prepar3D Dev Kit), which can be ONLY accessed from a C++ in-process .DLL, like the Addon Manager which, incidentally, it's already made as a PDK plugin, in 64 bit.
So, if someone thought that, with P3D V4, there wouldn't be any need for support software ( "because we have all the memory we need, and the sim provides some interactivity features" ), that's just not the case.
In fact, the need for such support software will be even more obvious with V4, as soon as we start to released the "real" native P3D stuff, which won't happen until the new KORD remake.
So, really, asking FSDT if we could not use the Couatl engine, is like asking if we could do a Windows program, without Windows...
