Saving and possibly replay flights

  • I know I can show a slider to replay a flight in Aerofly FS 2. This is fine but I like to save the data on disk for further analytics. (Or replay on a different day.)

    I have not seen a function to store the flight, so I think of two options:

    Using the broadcast option:

    - What fraquence can I archive here? Since I do aerobatics a snapshot every 0.25 seconds are the absolute minimum, 0.1 would be better.

    Using external_dll

    - I guess this would be the better Option. What is the frequence here?

    Wish for Aerofly FS 2/4:

    - Flightpath recording on hard drive and replay in sim from different view points

    - Smoke for aerobatic planes

    - Multiplayer or at least watching other people flying sitting on ground or inside tower

  • I wrote a small recorder app that formatted the broadcast positions into KML for display in Google Earth.

    I found a fair bit of jitter in the positional data. I ended up doing a 8 point rolling average to get a smooth flight path.

    Now I was interested in glider fight path not snap rolls so sample rate was not an issue.

    cheers

    Stu

    i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz | ASUS Z170-A | 16Gb DDR4 | Samsung SSD 950 PRO NVME M.2 256GB | Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB | GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on GP102-A GPU | Oculus CV1 | Windows 10

    Edited once, last by lenidcamper (April 9, 2018 at 5:38 PM).

  • yes, this is what I thought, the broadcast option will not be the best choice.

    Wish for Aerofly FS 2/4:

    - Flightpath recording on hard drive and replay in sim from different view points

    - Smoke for aerobatic planes

    - Multiplayer or at least watching other people flying sitting on ground or inside tower

  • if you are interested in seeing what I have so far contact me directly. Email is in my profile.

    /Stu

    i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz | ASUS Z170-A | 16Gb DDR4 | Samsung SSD 950 PRO NVME M.2 256GB | Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB | GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on GP102-A GPU | Oculus CV1 | Windows 10

  • as soon as i find time. Thank you. :)

    Wish for Aerofly FS 2/4:

    - Flightpath recording on hard drive and replay in sim from different view points

    - Smoke for aerobatic planes

    - Multiplayer or at least watching other people flying sitting on ground or inside tower

  • See my original post for an example of a flight path record.

    Flight Path Record

    I used the free (and great) Eclipse development environment to build a small Java app.


    The core of the app is

    Open a DatagramSocket for port 49002 on localHost

    Reading the socket yields alternating lines of the form

    XATTAerofly FS 2,170.9,-17.02,3.62

    XGPSAerofly FS 2,11.6079,46.7867,1312.0,170.7,35.0


    The XPGS tokens are longitude,latitude,altitude,?,?

    Write the KML header to a file.

    Parse the XGPS events and write the coordinate values to the KML file

    Write the tail of the KML file when you stop recording.

    Load the KML into Google Earth

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

    <kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2">

    <Document id="root_doc">

    <Folder><name>flight_path</name>

    <Placemark>

    <Style><LineStyle><color>ff0000ff</color><width>4</width></LineStyle></Style>

    <LineString>

    <altitudeMode>absolute</altitudeMode>

    <extrude>0</extrude>

    <coordinates>

    11.511824999999998,46.868275,1324.2749999999999

    11.511849999999999,46.868199999999995,1323.8249999999998

    ...

    ...

    ...

    </coordinates>

    </LineString>

    </Placemark>

    </Folder>

    </Document>

    </kml>

    Most of the code was for handling exception conditions for stopping and restarting recording.

    Getting the curtain effect required a lot more fiddling to generate two line strings in the KML.

    I have experimented with the yaw, pitch and roll data in the XATT event but KML is a rather blunt tool for complex graphics.

    And I have yet to wrap my head around the transforms required to locate the wingtips in lat,long and altitude space starting with lat,long and altitude of the CG and yaw,pitch and roll data.

    cheers

    /Stu

    i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz | ASUS Z170-A | 16Gb DDR4 | Samsung SSD 950 PRO NVME M.2 256GB | Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB | GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on GP102-A GPU | Oculus CV1 | Windows 10

    Edited 3 times, last by lenidcamper (April 16, 2018 at 4:45 PM).

  • Cut and paste glitch on the link. Fixed now.

    Pilot error. Read flight manual BEFORE starting engines.

    i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz | ASUS Z170-A | 16Gb DDR4 | Samsung SSD 950 PRO NVME M.2 256GB | Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB | GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on GP102-A GPU | Oculus CV1 | Windows 10

    Edited once, last by lenidcamper (April 12, 2018 at 10:03 PM).

  • XATTAerofly FS 2,170.9,-17.02,3.62

    XGPSAerofly FS 2,11.6079,46.7867,1312.0,170.7,35.0

    The XPGS tokens are longitude,latitude,altitude,?,?

    The last two are geographic heading (in 0-360° not the magnetic indicated by instruments) and ground speed in m/s.

    With these you can easy write an navi app with eta etc.

  • I agree with your wish list, including:

    "My wish list for Santa Claus: Smoke for airshow displays, flight recorder to save and playback flights (and other things I don't mention... ok, multiplayer)"

    What I would like to be able to do is save the flight path info used to replay a flight segment in Pause mode and then be able to retrieve it from within FS 2 and play it again at a later time. This should be trivial. The data file needed to replay the flight in FS 2 would not be huge, because you are not saving a literal recording of the screen but rather just the parameters needed to replay the flight (aircraft, scenery and location, the lat and long of the aircraft throughout the flight segment, and so on). Then FS 2 just regenerates the flight by loading the data, and proceeding just as it would in pause mode.

    Now, if you want to post a YouTube video of the flight segment, then you need to make a video file of the flight. On the Mac QuickTime Player has the ability to record the screen as you replay the flight segment. It also allows you to do some some simple trimming and editing, and then save the result in a .mov file which uploads fine to Youtube. Depending on the length of the flight, this file can be fairly large. I made a 1080p60 HD recording from my 2560 by 1440 display that lasted one minute and 8 seconds:

    Flying the Golden Gate in Aerofly FS 2

    The file size was 359 MB. Longer videos can easily create files several GB in size. But the good news is the quality of the video is nearly identical to what you saw when you made the flight in FS 2.