Cockpit Display SDK

  • Hi there,

    In this thread it is mentioned that there's not a big demand for a way to program cockpit displays within the SDK.

    Is there, today, any timeline when this feature might be released?

    I'm a software developer, so I understand that this kind of exposure to external (rendering) code is currently probably not covered by the engine architecture at all. It would really be required for developing more complex (or modern) 3rd party aircraft, though. It might even open up ways to extend existing (default) aircraft. I believe zibo's 737-800 for X-Plane works like that, and I'd really love to have a try at extending the default Q-400 a bit to feature more accurate procedures and maybe a (very simple) FMC.



  • Unfortunately this may be quite some time. We have to prioritize projects carefully and we can confirm that though this would be great to have sooner rather than later, there's just far too many other items that need to be completed before we look at this.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.



  • Okay, thanks for the quick reply.

    I think, since you are a rather small team, making this thing as moddable as humanely possible is essential to compete with the big simulators. There's nothing wrong with a VFR focus, obviously, but since the engine, graphics and performance are so much better than X-Plane or P3D I really think Aerofly has the chance to become one of the big simulators within the next years.

    The default aircraft don't have that much depth in any simulator, so it's important to have a way for 3rd party developers to develop the complex aircraft.

    Anyway, thanks and have a nice weekend!

  • At the moment "making it moddable" would mean inventing some form of scripting language to draw your own lines on the screen which would make the rendering of the displays slow, or opening the code to the public which would probably mean that we have refactor the code so that we don't have to publish as little code as possible. And then again that code from the outside is always risky because we're not in control of what get's programmed. For all we know you could load up files during the rendering process which would slow everything down :D So yet gain, this could cost performance if not done according to our rules. So we have to find another solution, one that great in performance but allows outside developers to get their displays rendered in Aerofly.

    As mentioned in the old thread, if any developer is interested in creating their own aircraft for Aerofly please contact us and we'll give our best to find a good solution for all of us.