Any Way To Map Arbitrary Input Device to FS2004 Controls?

[westes]

Pete, I'm looking for some very low-cost way to tie in real world devices to act as controllers for actions in FS2004. I'm discouraged by the high prices that the various cockpit makers charge for their plastic avionics panels and various flip switch boxes, and I want to see if I can find some generic I/O boxes with turn gauges, and then tie those into FS2004. What support for this kind of thing is there in FSUIPC? Is there any way you could provide a non-programming interface to such things, or is there just no generic interface in Windows that lets an I/O device provide its name, the control's name, and the action that was provided with the control, in an abstract format that you could watch for and present for mapping to FS2004 controls?

[Pete Dowson]

What support for this kind of thing is there in FSUIPC?

None. How can there be? There's no way to predict how someone will rig up the hardware connections to his PC. You'd have to write the driver for it, dealing with the I/O on the COM, Parallel, USB, firewire or PCI/ISA board you rig up to connect the hardware through, and interface to FS through FSUIPC. That's what FSUIPC is for, an interface into and out of FS.

Is there any way you could provide a non-programming interface to such things, or is there just no generic interface in Windows that lets an I/O device provide its name, the control's name, and the action that was provided with the control, in an abstract format that you could watch for and present for mapping to FS2004 controls?

Yes, actually, there is such an interface -- the Windows joystick interface. The generic interface you need to present is one of a Joystick. With a USB one you can have 6 analogue (axis) inputs, a POV hat, and 32 buttons for each defined 'device', with up to 16 devices. The Direct Input spec supports much more than this, but FSUIPC uses the simpler Windows joystick API which is limited.

Of course with a joystick interface you could program many things directly in FS's Options-Controls-Assignments in any case.

This is for input/control only. For displays I don't know of any standard. Maybe there is one defined in DirectX someplace, but display support isn't provided in FSUIPC in any case.

I do also support input from GoFlight's equipment, using the GFDev driver, and of course EPIC via my EPICINFO DLL (that's for both input and output). The EPIC support I provide pre-dates FSUIPC by several years.

Perhaps you wil find something closer to what you are looking for with FS-Communicator? I'm not sure what types of hardware it supports, though. There's also FS-Bus which involves hardware I think. Sorry, but I am very familiar with these alternatives.

Regards,

Pete