GPS logger

[Dozer_EAF19]

Hi folks, I'm quite new to Devicelink. It looks quite exciting - I've just connected a second monitor to my PC and am thinking "Well, how can this be useful in FB?". Plus, I'm an aerospace/mechanical engineering student who'd like to work in the simulator construction business after graduating, and this kind of stuff might be helpful for that!

I know a little bit of C++, and I'd like to improve my abilities with it. I wanted to write a program which would act like a GPS logger, recording a track of your location which can be overlaid on a map. From all I can see, though, Devicelink doesn't give positional information like that at the moment. Is there any way to extend Devicelink to provide some equivalent to lat/lon coordinates, or should I go away and think of something else to do instead?

Thanks for providing this!

[IV/JG1_Oesau]

Do mean to log where you are on the map, or all aircraft?

There is a lot of information that is kept about aircraft position and there was a application that was used by some a couple of years ago that provided information on all a/c positions.

Now I say some had it, becauase it was basically a cheat and once it was found to be used there were a lot of unhappy people.

[Dozer_EAF19]

Oh, I only meant for the player's aircraft.

Il-2 lacks the capacity to show you exactly where you flew after your flight, as a line on a map. That's all I wanted to do - log the position, alt, and perhaps where you are firing your weapons, so they can be displayed on a map (or with a real-world GPS-logger track viewer) after the flight.

But if there is the capacity to log the position of EVERY flying aircraft, that gives the possibility to make some sort of rudimentary radar simulator, which could be used by squads in co-op missions...

[MaXMhZ]

I have seen UDPSpeed using Devicelink plotting a flown mission some years back on SimHQ forums. Devicelink does not woek online, and so is of no use here.

AFAIK the abovementioned "Radar" utility read out the game's log file to plot aircraft positions on a map. In that respect it was of not much use as it did not contain real-time data but only things like "Player took seat in... fired guns... shot down... etc. An aircraft just flying happyly along was invisable as-such

[WWSensei]

"An aircraft just flying happyly along was invisable as-such"

Unless they did something like turn on smoke or if in bomber changed gunner position. However, that exploit had nothing to do with Devicelink. Devicelink only knows about the primary aircraft.

The MLR program could "trace" a flight but it did so by running an rcu file script that would rapidly toggle smoke on and off every ten seconds or so to help plot your flight.

[MaXMhZ]

Quite correct Sensei. I don't know how exactly but UDPSpeed or UDPGraph did at one point use devicelink to accomplish a trace of where the plane had gone. I assume they calculated the track using plane speed and heading together with ascend/descend indications.
There was a post on SimHQ some years back, but they're in the process of updating the forums and are down so I can't search there.

In principle it should be possible to make a GPS tracker on some maps. You'd need to transform the map coordinates to r/l GPS coordinates which in principle could be done for some maps (any deviation in the map would be very visible though - I'm not too shure how accurate the maps are, although they have a very high coordinate resolution (1cm I believe)

[WWSensei]

Within devicelink itself there just isn't anything stating your current position or where you are on the map. Actually, tyou don't even know what map. What you can do is record the stuff you mentioned and plot a general flight path, but you'd have to overlay that on top of a map and match up the starting point to where you know the mission started. UDPgraph does display a flight path graph showing how the aircraft bored through the air, but you didn't have anything telling what air that was.

You'd have to combine a program parsing the log file that does track several coordinates and the "black box recording" from Devicelink to do a true flight path recorded. Certianly doable.

[MaXMhZ]

I must confess I have been playing around with the idea. It could grow into something even more usable than nettrack recordings if people would be able to record and share their data after a mission, projecting this on a 3D representation of the map in question
It would be usefull for analysing what happened in a dogfight, or an airrace-type game. 3D data could be compiled for each map by placing objects that "fall" to level ground (tanks e.g.) on it in a grid pattern, and gathering the altitude data from the mission file. Overlaying this 3D grid with the map as texture should give quite a good representation of the actual landscape It would be quite a big project though to make it. Still it's a fascinating idea. This way you could incorporate the fantasy maps too that don't have real GPS equivalent data. I know Sailors of the Sky, a soaring simulator, has the possibility to export GPS data from in-game to a connected PDA and plot the flight on the PDA's map software.