understand scripting?

Every couple of months I tell myself I'm going to learn this and I come back here and access the AAO manual and take 3 swings (all misses) and go back to the dugout and sit on the bench for another couple of months.

 

A simple exercise: I wanted to get the LED's on my X-Touch Mini to light up when my landing/runway/taxi lights are on. I just can't grasp the concept. The two pages in the manual just don't explain the process well enough for me. 

 

Can any of you provide a link or other resources for an old man to grasp the scripting challenge?

 

Thanks in advance for any insight you might provide. 

4 hours ago, Flypops said:

Can any of you provide a link or other resources for an old man to grasp the scripting challenge?

This is actually not a scripting challenge, it is a MIDI challenge. You have to send a specific message to your MIDI device so it turns on the LED - that is how Behringer made it. The parameters for that message are potentially different on every computer and they depend on what mode your X-Touch is in.

Long story short, this is actually a very complex thing to do. And that is not by fault of the AAO app, it just is what it is. We are all using a piece of hardware here that was never intended for flight sim use. The Behringer X-Touch is a controller device for Digital Audio Workstations = for producing music. That is why everything is unnecessary complex. The thing can have a different ID on every computer. The configuration of the hardware can be altered with an app by the user, so you can never be sure about its internal state (if you aren't sure, a reset would be in order).

To my best knowledge, there are a couple of videos out there about the matter, but they may be in German...

The concept isn't all that difficult. But the implementation is. You query the simulator variable that tells you if your landing lights are on or not. Those variables can be found in the SDK documentation of the simulator. Most of them are also in the variable lists of AAO (=the button "Insert sim var". Depending on the value of that variable you send the appropriate message to the Behringer device. What MIDI ID, what Channel, what note - that depends on how your hardware is set up. You have to figure that out on your computer, no video can help you with that. 

But the biggest pitfall is, that with MSFS you don't have any guarantee that the simulator variables even work. Aircraft developers have become very creative (=they disregard all SDK standards at their leisure) so you never know if for example (A:LIGHT·LANDING,·Bool) will actually tell you that the lights are on or not. It could also be an LVar. Or the variable is indexed for this plane (A:LIGHT·LANDING:1,·Bool) etc.

My general advice is to go to flightsim.to and download a ready made Behringer X-Touch Template, for the aircraft that you want to use it with.

And, if your really need support with the actual coding, make sure to provide a concrete example (=how you tried to do it) and the information what simulator and aircraft we are talking about.

Also this:
Reverse Polish Notation (flightsimulator.com)

RPN scripting hasn't been invented just for AAO - it has been around in the MS flightsims for at least 20 years. Any resource that you find about MS flight sim RPN scripts (largely) applies here.

 

Edited March 28, 20233 yr by Lorby_SI