Hey all/any P3D veterans.

Does anyone have any detail on what it takes to develop an addon for P3D? - v5 specifically.

I'd quite like to port 

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin

Over to it, but really don't like the FSX style development environment, I see they have a $10 a month for a developer licence - does anyone know what this provides and who to talk to for more detail? Is it anything more than you get for X-Plane for free?

 

Well, I would surely welcome AutoATC in any platform - have you guys looked at the Potential of that App?

I wish you could also cooperate with ED and bring it to DCS World . they're seriously in need of a good ATC robot, even if just for the non-military component of the play, but ED's development SDK is very expensive and subject to contract 😞

Every time I bought P3D v4 to test a new release it was through a monthly dev license which allows for install of the sim and SDK in two rigs. I drop it in less than a week usually because I am yet to be able to use it properly for the visuals of Aerowinx PSX, and all other use I can give to it is useless ( it's still the good old MSFS FDM in the core ... Blahhh! ). Which brings yet another idea - AUto-ATC for PSX ?  But again, an expensive platform to invest in should you be interested in giving it a try - check the Aerowinx Forums at

http://aerowinx.com/board/index.php

I would also leave the suggestion of a contact with the developer of yet another very promising platform IMO - Deadstick Flight Simulator.

And... last but not least, ELITE IFT would also gain significantly from the kind of functionality your App offers, and the ideas I've seen described at some of your threads.

 

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by jcomm

18 hours ago, mSparks said:

I see they have a $10 a month for a developer licence - does anyone know what this provides and who to talk to for more detai

The developer license gets you two copies of the sim that you can install on two different computers. They are identical to the "Professional" simulator version, execpt for a watermark. The SDK is free either way. The requirements depend on what you want to do, but for making programmatic addons, you need VisualStudio. Other than that, you just do what you do in every project - read the spec, decide on the architecture, then type away. Links to the SDK download and to the spec are here https://www.prepar3d.com/support/sdk/

I don't think that a port will be possible. It is rather a new development of the same app. The APIs are too different from each other. It is also entirely possible that some things that you could do in XP will be (actually or almost) impossible to do in P3D - and vice versa. 

Best regards

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by Lorby_SI

12 minutes ago, mSparks said:

If "rich set of resources" is a licence to use their sim on two machines... well.. I don't really need to use the sim on any machines since I build everything to spec.

The big words usually mean the SDK itself. Which is free for everyone, regardless of license.

You are not planning to do any developer tests? Curious. The two licenses come in handy when you have a development PC and a laptop and are using both, or when you are writing multi-user applications. 

Afraid that "to spec" will not get you where you want to go. Almost inevitably FSX/P3D development ends up in trial&error at some point.

Best regards

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by Lorby_SI

2 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

You are not planning to do any developer tests? Curious.

its in testing with ~5,000 people now. I would expect unit tests and spec that the engine will abide by. Firing up the sim and making sure everything works pre release is the very last thing to do and should take a couple of months at absolute most.

Developing on sim is a road to nowhere filled with nothing but pain.

Other option I considered is

^ which shows the kind of tools I would expect as a minimum for $10 a month (given they are free).

1 hour ago, b737800 said:

I wrote it you mean?

Yes, you wrote/said you thought there was pity.

Pretty sure pity doesn't include include finding who I am, stalking me,  downvoting reddit posts and 1 starring phone apps, trying to get me banned from forums and telling people to ignore me.

xbots are just the nature of the internet and a corporation with failing products and a large marketing department, like mosquitoes in the jungle, you just deal with it, squash them, and move on.

They are also the number one reason so many good developers left windows (google is mostly linux in house for example - even have their own distro)

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by mSparks

I found

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv5/LearningCenter.php

and

http://cloud.prepar3d.com/SDK/Prepar3D_v5_SDK_Setup_5.0.21.34709.msi

that one looks interesting, but I dont have anything that can open msi files to hand. is there a zip anywhere, else I'll have to try and extract it next time I'm near a windows box.

7-Zip will unpack msi files

You may also want to check out FSUIPC as an interface...it enables some standardized high-level functionality that works across the various ESP-based sim versions (FSX, FSX-SE, P3Dv2-v5).

 

 

34 minutes ago, w6kd said:

7-Zip will unpack msi files

I did think as I wrote it one of those probably would... Been a while.

34 minutes ago, w6kd said:

You may also want to check out FSUIPC as an interface...it enables some standardized high-level functionality that works across the various ESP-based sim versions (FSX, FSX-SE, P3Dv2-v5).

So thats what that is for "Flight Sim Universal IPC" I presume - makes sense.

That's... a steep learning curve, but this Pete Dowson guy looks pretty decent.

What does a distribution using that look like? Any success stories?

I wonder if its worth handing over that kind of dev to a 3rd party (if they would take it - which isn't yet) - this was actually one of the reasons I open sourced the XP plugin.

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by mSparks

For a long time, FSUIPC was the only game in town...it started out as an unauthorized third-party hack into the internal data structures of FS98, and grew more sophisticated and capable over time.  Nearly all of our advanced add-ons used it until Simconnect emerged.  After Simconnect was released, a lot (most?) of the reverse-engineered internal hooks were replaced with Simconnect calls. 

Because it exposes the sim internals in a standard way, the software that uses it is able to remain fairly agnostic to sim version changes...for example I have been using Radar Contact v4 ATC software via FSUIPC from FS9 to FSX to multiple P3D versions through 4.5, and most likely will continue with P3Dv5 the same way.

 

8 minutes ago, w6kd said:

For a long time, FSUIPC was the only game in town...it started out as an unauthorized third-party hack into the internal data structures of FS98, and grew more sophisticated and capable over time.

Gotcha, that's quite the journey,

14 minutes ago, w6kd said:

Because it exposes the sim internals in a standard way, the software that uses it is able to remain fairly agnostic to sim version changes..

if only others adopted such good practices..

So is this a buy addon + buy FSUIPC type deal? Or do the addons come with FSUIPC in their installer?

4 minutes ago, mSparks said:

So is this a buy addon + buy FSUIPC type deal? Or do the addons come with FSUIPC in their installer?

I think there's a way to license it for inclusion with an add-on...you'd have to ask John Dowson about that.  Parts of the interface are provided free (the dll is freely downloadable, and the purchased key unlocks the full set of features).

 

15 minutes ago, mSparks said:

if only others adopted such good practices..

So is this a buy addon + buy FSUIPC type deal? Or do the addons come with FSUIPC in their installer?

I suggest that you take a look at the SimConnect API first. To my best knowledge, since a couple of versions FSUIPC uses it too (the hacking days are over?). You would just add an additional level of complexity by introducing a custom API built on the official API.

You want to develop "to spec", right?

Best regards

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by Lorby_SI

32 minutes ago, w6kd said:

I think there's a way to license it for inclusion with an add-on...you'd have to ask John Dowson about that.  Parts of the interface are provided free (the dll is freely downloadable, and the purchased key unlocks the full set of features).

 

Sounds promising.

25 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

I suggest that you take a look at the SimConnect API first.

TBH, this

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv5/sdk/simconnect_api/references/general_functions.html

and

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv5/sdk/simconnect_api/c_simconnect_project_tutorial.html

Looks very much like what I was reading re FSX development 3 or 4 years ago. Makes VBA look well designed....(Or, being unbiased, the Android VoiceRecogniser) and backwards compatible at the off sounds more interesting.

This, however, is more like it

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv5/sdk/pdk_api/samples/pdk_samples_overview.html

Is VR new to V5, or did that come before?

 

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by mSparks

18 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Looks very much like what I was reading re FSX development 3 or 4 years ago.

It looks like what we have been reading 12 years ago. Which is the point of the SimConnect API. An addon built on the API alone could remain almost unchanged through all these years. A developer could recompile his addons with the updated libraries for any version of FSX and P3D that came out, but strictly speaking, that was unnecessary. A SimConnect client communicates with the simulator using the IP stack. Doesn't get a lot more "independent" than that. Personally I feel this is a pretty good track record when speaking of "version agnostic" addons. Plus, SimConnect is still there in MSFS too, or at least the basics are.

And hostely, what does it matter what it looks like? I don't have to love the hammer that I use to drive the nail in. 

The PDK has been introduced with P3D V4. Native VR as well, IIRC, has been around for a while.

Best regards

Edited April 18, 20206 yr by Lorby_SI

20 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

what does it matter what it looks like?

lol.... Try telling that to the xbots.

More seriously

If its gonna be

21 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

like what we have been reading 12 years ago

In 12 years, I'd prefer not to spend that time making my eyes bleed. It's also a support issue, should be able to look at code and have a good understanding "why" it is doing something without needing to spend hours parsing through documentation or recalling details of everything under the hood.

e.g. even in those samples - why the __declspec for storing a simple string in

class __declspec(uuid("{3F3B2498-7E88-420B-A46D-C9EEF6BB59D0}")) SimpleCar

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/declspec?view=vs-2019

Quote

The extended attribute syntax for specifying storage-class information uses the __declspec keyword, which specifies that an instance of a given type is to be stored with a Microsoft-specific storage-class attribute listed below. Examples of other storage-class modifiers include the static and extern keywords. 

Sure, I can go away and find out. That adds time to development and support, which adds cost, when all I want is a pointer to a simple car object that does exactly what it is designed to, Who owns it? do I need to destroy it? are there side effects? how long until Microsoft breaks it and what will the alternative be then.

Something I'll come back to, have a nice threaded Lua plugin to put up tomorrow and a new version of the plugin.