FSUIPC and Other Sims

[bnepethomas]

Just had a reply back from the Flight Illusion guys who make a very nice engine stack. (http://members.chello.nl/p.leerentveld/gallery2.htm) As they use FSUIPC interface, things are good for MSFS, my frustration is I also fly Lomac and Falcon4, and currently Flight Illusions are not planning to make an SDK.... bugger!!!

What I'm thinking of doing is making a S/W shim to convert data from those sims (obviously its only a tiny fraction of the info exported from MSFS!) to some that FSUIPC clients can read. (and NO I'm trying to make a competitor to FSUIPC!)

Is it a simple as taking values from Lomac/F4 and creating a shared memory file providing data at the correct offsets?

Ta

Peter

[Pete Dowson]

What I'm thinking of doing is making a S/W shim to convert data from those sims (obviously its only a tiny fraction of the info exported from MSFS!) to some that FSUIPC clients can read. (and NO I'm trying to make a competitor to FSUIPC!)

Actually, you are quite welcome to write a replacement for FSUIPC -- I need to consider retiring one day.

Interfacing other sims to the FSUIPC type of interface has been done before, for instance there's one for the 747 PS1 sim, and it was partially done for an earlier version of X-Plane. The latter interfaced to the FSUIPC interface to WideClient on the X-plane machine, to a free-standing WideServer replacement called IPCserver, whose job it is merely to maintain the store of data for Wideclients (and local apps) to handle. IPCserver effectively contains WideServer, an FSUIPC interface, and, as a bonus, GPSout as well.

For more details of IPCserver you'd need to contact Enrico Schiratti at Project Magenta, as the program was his idea and developed for him as a one-off job. I don't know if he'd be interested is some sort of licensing deal.

Is it a simple as taking values from Lomac/F4 and creating a shared memory file providing data at the correct offsets?

You can do it like that if you offer an interface compatible with FSUIPC, but this would only serve programs on the same PC. You'd then presumably be interested in a networking variant, which is effectively what WideFS provides for FS.

Regards,

Pete

[bnepethomas]

Thanks for the answers Pete, really appreciated. I didn't want to speed a large stack off money on an Dual Engine stack and then find I needed a black belt in coding to spoof FS200X for other Sims... off to find the credit card.

I hope your retirement is a long way off :), FSUIPC and associated tools are a great asset to the flight Sim community.

Cheers

Peter