flight following add-on for p3d

[Jason Fayre]

Hi all,

I am totally blind, and use flight simulators with a variety of add-on products including FSTramp, Ideal Flight, and sometimes Multi-crew experience.

A few years ago, many blind people who used flight sims used an add-on called It's Your Plane. This add-on was a voice recognition add-on for flight sim, similar to what Multi-Crew Experience is today. Sadly, this add-on is no longer being developed and is no longer available.

One of the cool things that It's Your Plane had was a feature called "flight following". This feature would read out cities along your route as you were flying. Given that we can't see the simulator screen as totally blind people, this feature added a nice bit of realism  to the system that we don't normally have.

I'm wondering how hard this would be to put together with something like a lUA plugin? I asume It's Your Plane did this by reading the scenery around the aircraft on-route. 

If Pete is reading this, I'm fairly sure he will know how this was done.

Thanks for any thoughts!

 

 

[Pete Dowson]

15 hours ago, Jason Fayre said:

One of the cool things that It's Your Plane had was a feature called "flight following". This feature would read out cities along your route as you were flying. Given that we can't see the simulator screen as totally blind people, this feature added a nice bit of realism  to the system that we don't normally have.

I'm wondering how hard this would be to put together with something like a lUA plugin? I asume It's Your Plane did this by reading the scenery around the aircraft on-route. 

If Pete is reading this, I'm fairly sure he will know how this was done.

I've no idea how it knew what town or city was nearby. Airports, yes, that's an existing data base which can be generated and referenced.  But i don't know of any easily accessible digital gazeteer with Lat/Lon coordinates which could be searched.

Pete

 

[Jason Fayre]

Hello,

I found this:

http://planeman-fs.blogspot.com/2012/04/fsgeonavi-geography-navigation-for.html

Could the text output of this add-on be sent through microsoft text-to-speech using Lua?

 

[Pete Dowson]

12 minutes ago, Jason Fayre said:

Hello,

I found this:

http://planeman-fs.blogspot.com/2012/04/fsgeonavi-geography-navigation-for.html

Could the text output of this add-on be sent through microsoft text-to-speech using Lua?

 

If it is using the normal SimConnect facilities for the text display, and it looks like it is, then a Lua program can capture such text (using event.textmenu).  To do this on the P3D PC you'd need P3D4 and the latest version of FSUIPC5. On another PC you'd use WideFS and the Lua would be run by WideClient.  You could do that with P3D3 as well, though P3D4 is far superior.

To then send it to the speech synthesis part installed into Microsoft windows is another matter. You'd need to research that as I'm unfamiliar with the interfaces used there. There are facilities to play sounds from WAV files in the Lua library, but nothing specific for Text-to-Speech.

It might prove useful for the Lua libraries to include a Text to Speech section,  but looking briefly at what's involved it is nothing trivial. I would hope there are other prograns or add-ons which could be called to do this, spearately from withing the Lua plug-in itself.

But, for Lua support, sorry but this is a separate research project -- maybe something to be looked at for the future.

Pete

 

 

[aua668]

Hi,

I have programmed some time ago a small LUA program, which reads for me checklist items. I used the program saystatic.exe , which can be found on GITHUB:

https://github.com/albertly/Say/blob/master/SayStatic.exe

With the following function I read text, which I provide as parameterto th function:

-- read string via sound device
function readItem(lvString)
	ext.run("C:\\Program Files (x86)\\WideFS\\SayStatic.exe", lvString, EXT_HIDE)
end

Maybe this helps you.

Rgds
Reinhard

 

[Pete Dowson]

1 hour ago, aua668 said:

I have programmed some time ago a small LUA program, which reads for me checklist items. I used the program saystatic.exe , which can be found on GITHUB:

https://github.com/albertly/Say/blob/master/SayStatic.exe

Excellent. I thought there must be such a program somewhere! Thank you!

Pete

 

 

[Jason Fayre]

Awesome! I was thinking of a solution like this!

Does anyone have any functions that could read the geonames csv files and give nearest cities based on direction of flight and the aircraft gps coordinates?