fsuipc vs netpipes

[ochnap2]

Hello Peter,

I'm totally new to FSUIPC (and to MSFS also), but I need to build a software to get some information and control some properties of the FS externally. So I've been looking for ways to do it.

I've found that FSUIPC lets me do everything I need, but I've found also that I can do it with the official NetPipes SDK (or that's what I understood from the documentation, as I did no test yet). So I don't know which one to use... May I ask you to compare them? Would you highlight the points where you think FSUIPC is better? (and the opposite too, if it's not too much to ask :)).

Some additional comments:

- Which do you think is faster? (the NetPipes SDK uses named-pipes as a medium to exchange information, I don't know if they are fast enough).

- I believe that FSUIPC was developed by reverse engineering some MSFS internal structures. While that alone speaks volumes about your capacity, it concerns me about it's safety and/or future compatibility. How trustable is FSUIPC? I know FSUIPC is used by many MSFS addons, so I guess this question answers itself, but anyway I would like to know your toughts.

- For this projects I'm interested in FS2004 only, so compatibility with previous versions is not a plus for me.

Thanks in advance for any comment.

[Pete Dowson]

I've found that FSUIPC lets me do everything I need, but I've found also that I can do it with the official NetPipes SDK (or that's what I understood from the documentation, as I did no test yet). So I don't know which one to use... May I ask you to compare them?

Sorry, I've never used NetPipes. There wasn't any such thing around when the IPC interface was first invented.

How trustable is FSUIPC?

I'm sorry, I don't exactly know what you mean. If you mean would I deliberately make FSUIPC tell lies, give you false information, then, no of course not. If you mean is it bug free, then I'd have to answer of course not, no non-trivial software is ever bug free. But it is supported with regular updates and I fix bugs fast once reported and reproduced.

Regards,

Pete

[flypfc]

I have tried to use netpipes and what I have found there are ALLWAYS 1-2 sec lag on the receiving end sometimes up to 30 sec depending on how much information I have also talked to a few of the programmers from Microsoft and they are aware of this problem but it is not top priority for them to fix

FSUIPC in my experience has no such problems and Pete is always improving it and is also open to suggestions for new features

[airforce2]

I wrote a few netpipes test apps and noted the same...widely variable lag and jitter. It was unuseable for any real-time IPC needs.

Regards

[ochnap2]

After some experimentation with the NetPipes SDK I found it really inconvenient to use. This tests helped me very much to decide... to use FSUIPC!

Thanks for your comments.