How to do Formation Flying over the Internet?

[CaptainSpaulding]

Formation Flying with other people that are not on your LAN is quite a challenge on X-Plane.

To achieve that, in the past I've used many time IVAO and VATSIM servers. If you spawn in areas far from the big airports, like the web of inlet in British Columbia, you can use those server just to see your buddies.
BUT... there are couple of problems.
A part that it's quite a nightmare to setup, especially if you want to see the right plane, the major problem is that it has become nearly impossible to create an account on those sites.

I've had many friend that were not able to sign-up on either. Different problems, starting with "the account already exists" (not true) and ending with a series of complex questions you MUST answer if you want your login on their server. Lukily I didn't had to go trought all of this when I signed up quite a decade ago.
I've tired to contact them, even via Twitter, nobody replied.
So, I can say that IVAO and VATSIM are not an option for free formation flying. At least not at present, not until they fix their sign-up procedures.


Is here any other option out there that can be used for this purpose?
Any suggestion?
Thanks in advance...
Cap.S.

Edited January 13, 2021 by CaptainSpaulding

[fehrster]

The best solution would be JoinFS (https://pmem.uk/joinfs/), it´s free and you have a higher update rate than on IVAO or VATSIM

[CaptainSpaulding]

6 minutes ago, fehrster said:

The best solution would be JoinFS (https://pmem.uk/joinfs/), it´s free and you have a higher update rate than on IVAO or VATSIM

Thanks @fehrster for the suggestion.

It looks interesting but, unfortunately, it appears to work natively only on Windows, through wine on Linux and not available for Mac.
I am on Linux and I must say that I have no idea what to do with the '.msi' file that I've downloaded there.
I haven't found where to download the usual '.xpl' plugin for X-Plane.

 

[fehrster]

oh...that´s bad...it´s only a windows installer file. And i don´t have any experience with mac or linux.

Another network would be POSCON. But thats in beta and nobody knows when it goes public.

[CaptainSpaulding]

2 minutes ago, fehrster said:

Another network would be POSCON. But thats in beta and nobody knows when it goes public.

What about peer-to-peer connections?

In your knowledge, are there any plugin for X-Plane that allows to share data between to X-Planes over the internet?
Basically the same thing that XP already does for LAN, but over Internet...

[fehrster]

Never thought about that. You can make private LAN´s over Internet via Hamachi (https://www.vpn.net/).

Up to 5 private connections are free. To set this up is a little pain (when you never done it before) but this could work. Then you get a new IP- adress, and with that you could connect to other pc´s.

Let me know if this worked out.

[CaptainSpaulding]

This can be a solution:

 

[CaptainSpaulding]

 

[InitiatedAunt74]

That's really cool.   I assume that however it's updating AI aircraft positions I might be able to write a script to make an AI aircraft do a formation pattern that I could attempt to fly and follow.