freebirduk

A good point about bare bones. It's rare for me to fly without 5-6 add-ons at least so I quickly forget what it's like flying the out-of-the-box product. What you say about unexpected behaviour is rather what I was anticipating. I guess I was hoping for a test-harness which could "do what SimConnect does" in various scenarios without the overhead of the full UI. Without this I think I'll take a layered approach using Lower level functions which have no regard to the machinations of SimConnect. These can be unit tested in the usual way. A "talks to SimConnect" layer which, from what you say, will be something of an iterative process as I see how the API responds in real time. Thanks for your input - Really useful.

I'm doing some feasibility work on the development of a new add-on for Prepar3d v4. I've not developed for this platform before and I'm concerned about the time overhead of running tests connecting to the sim when the sim takes many minutes to load and stabilize. For sure much can be done by referencing SimConnect in the add-on via dependency injection and then mocking it's behaviour. Most of the unit testing will be done this way. However for integration testing I'm concerned that constantly loading up the sim to run tests will be prohibitively slow. I wonder therefore if there is some kind of SimConnect test harness or emulator available which allows realistic and predictable behaviours to be generated without loading the full sim? I can see that this wouldn't be true integration testing but I suspect it would save hours watching the Sim UI load and settle. Any pointers gratefully received.