SimConMan

Experiments with getting SimConnect-based plugins to work with newer flight sims

Overview

The core idea is based on the following:

• I have a force-feedback enabled flight yoke.
• I was using Prepar3D as my flight simulator.
• I was using the FSForce plugin.
• I switched to the FlyInside Flight Simulator but it doesn't (yet) support FF yokes.
• FSForce doesn't yet work with FlyInside.

The solution I chose was to write a "shim" layer that translates between the plugin and the flight sim:

• create a standalone server acts as the bridge between the sim and the legacy plugin
• use the FlyInside SDK to create a new plugin that hooks into the sim and talks to the bridge
• in the bridge, implement a subset of the SimConnect API
• configure the legacy plugin to talk to the bridge

Although the main goal is to bridge the specific force feedback plugin with the FlyInside simulator, the SimConnect code in particular may be useful in other projects, and the overall approach could (in theory) be used for other legacy plugins.

Currently a little bit of hackery is required to get FSForce to not talk to the sim.

Basic Usage

Currently requires Python 3.6 or so. This is still very much a work in progress but for now:

• Run python patch_fsf.py <path to your FS Force install dir> (Note that you may need to run this from an administrative command prompt. Also, it makes copies of the files it modifies)
• Put Startup_FSForce.chai in <path to>\FlyInside Flight Simulator\Data\Scripts
• Create a ~/Documents/SimConnect.cfg text file with the following:

    [SimConnect]
    Protocol=IPv4
    Address=127.0.0.1
    Port=10000

• Start the sim
• Run python ffs_fsforce.py