Add AI Lerp Features to Simconnect

Currently the only ways to drive AI aircraft smoothly are to:

  1. Set waypoints. Which are not accurate enough for driving aircraft to specific locations. You can also only control the aircraft after its gone through its takeoff phase. If a plane were to go directly into a nose up attitude immediately after coming off the ground this would not be able to happen. The plane would have to complete its takeoff phase then can take instructions from waypoints.

  2. Update the AI aircraft using linear interpolation every frame. This method is a big performance killer when trying to update multiple aircraft.

  3. Put AI into slew mode and calculate velocities. This method doesn’t allow animations such as landing gear and flaps.

Some sort of method similar to waypoints but having the aircraft fly to the exact location instead of calculating how it needs to turn to make the next waypoint would be amazing. Basically a built in linear interpolation function where you can set the location and how long it should take to get there. The sim would then automatically calculate each frame instead of having to do it externally. An example of where this would be useful is when injecting an AI aircraft of another player only from its location data at set intervals. Simlar to VATSIM software.

It seems VATSIM has managed to do that.