Re: [certi-dev] Unable to create RTI ambassador

[Jan-Patrick Osterloh]

Am 31.08.2011 09:52, schrieb Eric Noulard:
> 2011/8/31 Jan-Patrick Osterloh <address@hidden>:
>> Am 30.08.2011 20:35, schrieb Eric Noulard:
>>> 2011/8/30 Jan-Patrick Osterloh <address@hidden>:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I'm currently developing a federate for X-Plane.
>>> Nice.
>>> May be you would be interested to know that a prototype X-Plane
>>> plugins already exists
>>> as a CERTI contribution:
>>> http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/applications/XPlaneHLAPlugin/?root=certi
>>>
>>> You could checkout the code from CERTI cvs repository
>>> cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/sources/certi co
>>> applications/XPlaneHLAPlugin
>>>
>> Yes, I'd know this, and I checked it out, too. But on the one hand, I
>> wasn't able to compile it (Windows), and on the other hand I didn't
>> understand what the plugin does. It seems very complex, and is not
>> documented at all.
> Yes we know that this plugins was a proof of concept and definitely
> needs rework and doc.
> The purpose of the plugins was to be able to plug XPlane as a federate
> on an HLA simulation.
>
> Other federate may subscribe to XPlane output and/or send command to XPlane
> through the "HLA bus".
> As an example we did use some phidgets (http://www.phidgets.com/) to control
> some XPlane inputs. The phidget controls were some other HLA federates
> which publish
> controls to which the XPlane plugin was subscribed to.
>
>> Beside this, I need a more flexible and configurable
>> approach. We have already implemented a configurable federate with a
>> very simple to use API for another Federate, and currently my intention
>> is simply to re-use this.
> Ok, I would be interested in knowing more about that, would you be able
> to publish some code (and may be some doc :-] ) concerning this work?

Yes, this should be possible. In short:
We are currently using two different HLA implementations. We started
with Pitch RTI, and are now going to use CERTI, because we can't force
our research partners to use a commercial RTI. We will use CERTI in the
D3CoS Project (www.d3cos.eu) for implementing a multi-agent simulation
platform. Therefore we will connect the cognitive architecture CASCaS
(as human agents) to different simulations (xplane, matlab). My main
work will be on simulation control, i.e. I will develop a framework to
define and run the simulation. We already connected successfully CASCaS
to CERTI (I have two instances of CASCaS exchanging information): As
CASCaS is implemented in C we needed a wrapper, which allows connection
to the C++ Part via a simple interface. This wrapper currently works for
PITCH and CERTI, so that we can share as much code as possible.
Especially the internal data management (we did not hard-code the SOM in
the Federate) is shared.

>>>> Do you have an idea, what the problem could be?
>>> Yes may be that in the context of XPlane plugin the rtia executable may
>>> not be found in the path?
>> In the process explorer I can see, that the RTIA is started up, but then
>> it is exits very quickly again. But I think too, that it could be
>> something in the path. I tested to put rtia and associated libs to
>> different paths, but without success.
> If RTIA is starting and dying rapidely may be there could be a DLL issue?
> RTIA depends on severals DLL.
>
> If you installed several version of CERTI (or other RTI) be sure that you 
> don't
> have DLL version mismatch.

I have only one RTIA and version of CERTI installed. I used the
Dependency Walker to check which DLLs are loaded by our wrapper, and
they are the same for CASCaS as well as for xplane. The Paths are also
the same. 

>>> By the way:
>>>
>>> 1) Which version of CERTI are you using ?
>> A CVS version with the patches provided by Christoph Läsche.
> Most of Christoph patches were merged in CVS HEAD:
> https://savannah.nongnu.org/patch/?7567
> https://savannah.nongnu.org/patch/?7568
>
> which one(s) did you apply?
> May be this one:
> https://savannah.nongnu.org/patch/?7566
>
> We need to fix the circular dep ref for good.
> Did you tried latest patch for:
> https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?30003
>
> We lack systematic Windows tester, would you be willing to help
> us to maintain a clean Windows build?

I will ask Christoph which patches are in the version he send me. He
send me a version that is able to be compiled on Windows/MinGW, so I
guess. I'm not so familiar with Cmake, but I can try.
As stated above, I will be using CERTI with Windows in our project, so
I've interested in having a usable windows version. I will have to
figure out how I could manage testing while maintaining a working
version that I can use in the project.

I will checkout the latest CSV version and try to compile it, later. I
will let you know.



>>> 2) On which platform ?
>> Windows XP
>>> 3) Did you compile CERTI from source or did you use some binary?
>> I compiled it from source with mingw (GCC 4.5.0)
> OK.
>
>> I will now check if the path provided within xplane is different from
>> the one I have normally.
> Check DLLs too.
>
I checked the DLLs, but everything seems OK so far. I can only imagine
that xplane is loading some DLLs that interfere with CERTI, but I have
no idea how to check this... the dependency walker just shows that
xplane.exe uses a subset of the DLLs that the wrapper uses, and these
are the same. I tried to copy the CERTI dll's also to different
locations (next to xplane.exe, as well as in the plugin directory next
to my plugin, but it makes no difference. I'm running out of ideas. If I
would know, which DLLs are missing/wrong etc, it would be helpful.

Kind regards
JPO



-- 
Dipl. Inform. Jan-Patrick Osterloh
FuE Bereich Verkehr | R&D Division Transportation
Human Centered Design Group

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