Falcon 4 Plugin?

[Bruceaust]

Just a quick question.
Is there a Falcon 4 flight sim plugin for Xsim3 ?
I would like to extract gauge data from Falcon to drive my own hardware gauges.

Thanks if anyone can help.

Bruce

[sirnoname]

The falcon plugin is marked as not verified out of X-Sim 2.
It is always up to the community and a tester to verify all the details.
This means not only to start the plugin and say "hey it works", the tester must verify the values and their true result to the game.
Also missing parts should be worked out.
For now noone has done this and if you like to do this job I can send you a plugin for this test.

[Bruceaust]

Thankyou,
I will be pleased to test the plug in when I get my sim finished. I was looking ahead to see what values can be extracted from the game.

[sirnoname]

Now look, we are a little bit accurate, so we do not only search for someone who will test, we search for some detailed help. The tester have to write a setup guide and have to verify a well true result. A simulator is not needed but the knowlege about the logger tool and knowlege about what is behind a value name.
If you think you can offer the time I will send you the plugin and you will make the first install describtion.

[Bruceaust]

Maybe you will need someone with more experience the Xsim software. I am a novice user. Having said that, I am very interested and want to learn how it works and all fits together,
I tend to stick at things until I find solutions. If you point me in the right direction I am sure I can figure things out and make a contribution.

[hraanan]

Hi All,

Is there any news with the Falcon 4 plugin?
Maybe beta version?

Thank you
hraanan

[crs2012]

I don't do any flight sim gaming, but I figured I could still help to shed some light on this question and hopefully answer future plugin questions.

Doing a quick search online....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_4.0
Falcon 4.0 is a combat flight simulator video game released on December 12, 1998 by MicroProse.

This flight sim was released nearly 15 years ago. In order for a plugin to be created and tested, it requires a few things.

Someone willing to put time into gathering enough necessary information in order for the plugin to be functional and complete.

SDK from developer of game, or code samples for X-sim to gather telemetry data from game. Feedback from developer of game.
The base game, demo or owned by the tester of the plugin.( This game can only be found through 2nd hand on line merchants. No demo exists. )
So, someone that already has the game would probably be required in this situation.

http://www.graphsim.com/ - the current producer and license holder - has a newer version of this game called Falcon 4.0: Allied Force.
So someone with this game or interest in the original 4.0 could try and contact this company and see if there is any help with Telemetry output SDK or information. There is no demo for this newer version either.

http://freefalcon.org/index/ - FreeFalcon Open Source Project or (FFOSP), a Falcon 4.0 restoration project under a BSD 2-Clause License

Is probably another place to try and see if anything exists with that community in order to get the necessary information required.

The falcon plugin is marked as not verified out of X-Sim 2.
It is always up to the community and a tester to verify all the details.
This means not only to start the plugin and say "hey it works", the tester must verify the values and their true result to the game.
Also missing parts should be worked out.
For now noone has done this and if you like to do this job I can send you a plugin for this test.

So basically in order for this to continue and finish, someone with the game and desire is needed.


Then you can do this...



...just adding this as another place to look
http://www.viperpits.org/smf/index.php
Seems to be a DIY cockpit community for flight simmers, interesting stuff.... wonder what they use to interface the software with...

[crs2012]

Okay, so I was curious to see what this sim was all about, seems like it's probably the most popular combat flight sim ever made.

So after a little bit of reading their forums I came across....

http://www.viperpits.org/smf/index.php?topic=7125.0

Topic: Falcon BMS Movement data Extraction (Read 10661 times)

Forum user Falcon00 asked...

Could you please tell me if can we extract a complete set of plane (At least 3 DOL) movement data in order to implement a movement control system with it?

If so, which software we can use for make the data capture?

Thanks in advance.

Forum reply from user Taipan

I can confirm it is definitely possible

Some time ago I used xsim to do this...

It comes with a native package for reading falcon force data, as well as a large number of racing sims, but I found their native package/config file did not work. It is very easy with X-sim to build your own config file when you open the shared memory area of falcon and access the appropriate data items you need individually.

To do this I made sure I used the header file from the source code of lightnings shared memory reader to start with. After that I had to calculate the size in bytes of each of the data items in the header that I wanted ( not difficult ) and then point the x-sim reader to the addresses I wanted in the Falcon shared memory map file.

If I still had the config file I would gladly share it but I haven't seen it for some time. If you want to have a go at it and get stuck, give me a yell and I will see what I can do. The only trick is to know the accurate size in bytes of each of the data items, remembering that they will all be different lengths in memory depending in whether they are integer, short, long, bytes etc. I can't recall the data items in his code off the top of my head, but I think it only took me a few hours to get the hang of it. I'm not a C# coder either, but as long as you have a basic understanding of data structures you will be ok.

Thanks

so I did a little search on the web and found

https://subversion.assembla.com/svn/lightningstools/

which contains source code for memory reader and compiled dll which that user mentioned. Also many other utilities.

http://www.viperpits.org/smf/index.php?topic=3376.msg45525#msg45525

Someone who has the game & interest in making their sim work could contact this guy or maybe the code author - lightning,
who seems to be the creator of the MFD extractor software used in that video with the hardcore sim for more details/help.

[Bruceaust]

I am building an F16 cockpit sim at the moment. (and another racing sim!) And yes the BMS (Benchmark sims [url][http://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/content.php?s=5bade4b0a55f1afa46b77b36952c284c/url]) is still being updated and improved. It is really a fine development of the Falcon 4 sim. the guys at BMS have done a wonderful job. I do not have the expertise at the moment to extract the relevant data from the shared memory to run a motion setup - but maybe in the future I will have the time to learn.