SceneryDesign.org For some while already I wanted to learn a bit more about SimConnect and this week I found a good reason to do so. I wanted to try if I could connect FSX to CIGI. CIGI stands for Common Image Generator Interface and this is a common way in professional simulations to talk between the simulation host and the image generators. At work we also make use of CIGI for this.
What I wanted to do is try to use FSX as an image generator with our simulation host, so for that I needed to connect FSX to CIGI. This is where SimConnect was very useful, after some hours of trying I am now able to control the user aircraft with the CIGI interface and I can also add other traffic (AI) and control them from CIGI as well. This is a nice demonstration that the concept works.
Until now I only tested it with the host emulator that CIGI delivers, so a next step will be to attach it to the real simulation at work. Should be interesting. Of course I am not ready yet, as other things like the weather should still be connected as well.
I guess such a CIGI connection might also be very useful for ESP, it would open a lot more possibilities in the professional flight simulation world. Sounds like great fun to play with that some more at a later time…
This is what I have been looking for, for some time. We are developing our own A330-200 flight simulator and sometime in the future we are hoping to pass simple eye point data to a PC running the MSFS so that we can view the Out The Window visual scene from the prespective of our own simulated aircraft.
previously the interface to MSFS seemed to be awkward, and we started to look at other possiblities such as X plane and Flight Gear.
Do you believe that the FSX will allow a simple ethernet packet connection to drive the visual part of the MSFS only? The Ethernet package contianing a simple eye point data structure?
Hi,
With the FSX SimConnect interface it has become a lot easier to pass that kind of information on to it. It does not directly accept an ethernet package, but you can very easily write some code that with a few of the SimConnect API calls sets the data you want to set. If you want you could connect that to the ethernet as well of course, but that is outside of the scope of SimConnect.
Hi
did the same last year for x-Plane and it worked fine. I also connected it to several simulators successfully. Its called xCIGI and you can download it at http://www.hans-born.de. Just look under Flight Simulation
Hans
Have you had issues with the OTW scene being steppy. We are doing something similar with ESP, and we can not get the OTW to be smooth. There does not seem to be a way of synching the Visual update to the update of the ownship position. Are there any ways of synching the two?
Hi Mark,
We are still optimizing that more, although it is quite smooth already. What we are trying to do is update for every frame of ESP itself (while our simulation does in general run at a higher rate).