DCS vectors for motion simulators

Ok guys, It makes me VERY VERY happy to hear that you got the devs on board with making motion sim support better! I've got a 6DOF Stewart rig (seen in my sig) and I'm very interested in any improvements we can get the devs to make.

I do have a problem though, I can't follow most of the conversation in this thread. Severe ADD and lack of education are the problem here. Also my RL flight experience is minimal. About three hours of passenger flight in helicopters, thirty minutes of stick time in gliders with an instructor, and a handful of airline flights.

If any of those here who really understands this stuff want to work with me to get my motion sim working as best it can in DCS I would be happy to work with you. I can do voice comms, live streaming, etc. Also anyone willing to help who is within a reasonable drive of Scranton Pennyslvania, USA is welcome to come visit and play. =D

Please note, the video in my sig is one of my first DCS flights. Improvements have been made and more are in the works but I'm kinda flying half blind here trying to guess when it comes to tuning.

Also, all the talk I've seen here has been about SimTools and X-sim. I run Ian's BFF 6DOF motion software and a Thanos AMC1280USB. I'd try switching over if there is a better option for DCS. So far I've been told BFF is best for Stewart flight sims. Ian is also quite good about working with me to fix bugs etc. I was planning to try SimTools 2.0 and was trying to get it running but then was told that there is still no proper 6DOF math plugin available so I gave up fighting with it for the time being.

Any and all help appreciated and I'm also eager to help in whatever way I can, testing and such, within my abilities.

Hi,

 

I dont claim to fully understand all this, but i have a Simxperience motion sim that i use for sim racing. It would be nice to try DCS with it. Would this help the guys at Simxperience develop a driver that would make their motion sim work with DCS?

@Paddyman I'm not familiar with commercial motion sims, but I'm pretty confident you could just run your SimXperience rig on Ians BFF software (paid), SimTools (Free for v1), or X-sim (free) software and all three of those already have DCS support ready to go.

I doubt that SimXperience made it impossible to run their hardware on different software.

How many DOF is your rig?

hmpf, ok, standby, i check this out with andy from ed.

Any reply from Andy? I've decided to revisit this now that I have finished building a new PC and will return to working on my G-Seat off and on in the coming months as time permits (catch 22 of needing to work long hours to pay for expensive hobbies and then having no time to enjoy the expensive hobbies due to working long hours lol).

I'm planning to just use pitch, heave and sway until we sort this out. I can't use surge as I only fly helicopters and as you pitch nose down to accelerate having a surge force pushing against your back feels all wrong. It feels better when I reverse the output but that's not ideal and causes issues during other phases of flight. I also need to start looking at simtools v2 as well...

Ok guys, It makes me VERY VERY happy to hear that you got the devs on board with making motion sim support better! I've got a 6DOF Stewart rig (seen in my sig) and I'm very interested in any improvements we can get the devs to make.

 

I do have a problem though, I can't follow most of the conversation in this thread. Severe ADD and lack of education are the problem here. Also my RL flight experience is minimal. About three hours of passenger flight in helicopters, thirty minutes of stick time in gliders with an instructor, and a handful of airline flights.

 

If any of those here who really understands this stuff want to work with me to get my motion sim working as best it can in DCS I would be happy to work with you. I can do voice comms, live streaming, etc. Also anyone willing to help who is within a reasonable drive of Scranton Pennyslvania, USA is welcome to come visit and play. =D

 

Please note, the video in my sig is one of my first DCS flights. Improvements have been made and more are in the works but I'm kinda flying half blind here trying to guess when it comes to tuning.

 

Also, all the talk I've seen here has been about SimTools and X-sim. I run Ian's BFF 6DOF motion software and a Thanos AMC1280USB. I'd try switching over if there is a better option for DCS. So far I've been told BFF is best for Stewart flight sims. Ian is also quite good about working with me to fix bugs etc. I was planning to try SimTools 2.0 and was trying to get it running but then was told that there is still no proper 6DOF math plugin available so I gave up fighting with it for the time being.

 

Any and all help appreciated and I'm also eager to help in whatever way I can, testing and such, within my abilities.

Trip the problem, in a nutshell, is unwanted interaction between axis. For those with full motion rigs the output doesn't support 360degree rotations. For conventional platforms, be they 2,3...6dof once you pitch past vertical yaw and roll jump/flip 180degrees (instantly). If you do a roll, once passing fully inverted the angle output jumps from +180 to -180. This causes the platform to violently switch sides.

Do you have all 6dof implemented in DCS on your rig or just the three acceleration forces of surge, heave and sway?

I'm using all 6 DOF. I think it feels pretty good but ignorance is bliss!

I'm using all 6 DOF. I think it feels pretty good but ignorance is bliss!

That's interesting. If you preform a pirouette in a helicopter do you not get a sharp reverse in direction after the yaw goes through 180degrees? Could you share your export.lua file?

I'm pretty sure doing a pirouette will just cause the platform to:

1- yaw in the direction I begin turning

2- stay in the right yawed position or washout during the rest of the turn depending on settings

3- slightly aw in the opposite direction of the turn as the turn is stopped

I can give you the export.lua when I get to my gaming rig late tonight, but I'm pretty sure you will find this is a function of the motion sim software. I use Ian's Built For Fun 6DOF as it's generally considered the best one available for flight sims.

I'm pretty sure doing a pirouette will just cause the platform to:

1- yaw in the direction I begin turning

2- stay in the right yawed position or washout during the rest of the turn depending on settings

3- slightly aw in the opposite direction of the turn as the turn is stopped

 

I can give you the export.lua when I get to my gaming rig late tonight, but I'm pretty sure you will find this is a function of the motion sim software. I use Ian's Built For Fun 6DOF as it's generally considered the best one available for flight sims.

I'm familiar with Ian's work (I purchased his shaker card and built one of his bass shakers for x-plane). I'd love to see the export lua as if it is the same/similar to that which the rest of us use for x-sim or simtools then he has figured out a way to solve the issues we are all having within his own 6dof driver in which case I'll give him a call. He didn't support dcs the last time I had contact with him but that's a few years ago now.

The current lua output most of us are using outputs -180 to 0 to +180 on yaw. Once you pirouette to +180 degrees and continue to turn the output flips to a value of -180 and goes back to zero as you complete the turn. The result on a 6dof Stewart would be an abrupt deflection from full right yaw to full left yaw after turning 180degrees. If you continue turning it would go back to the neutral position then the process repeats.

Please do share the file when you get a chance.

I will do that, but also it might be a really good idea to try out the free trial version of Ian's BFF software.

I will do that, but also it might be a really good idea to try out the free trial version of Ian's BFF software.

No need to upload Trip. I found it on his website. :thumbup:

@frusheen Let us know how you make out with that once you've tested it.

Heads up again,

the last posted code won´t work in lua...but this new one may do!!!

This is kinda badass scripting anyway.

To be honest i don´t have a clue what values come out of it.

Export.lua

This is progress guys.

I have also discovered from Ian's BFF lua code that we can get velocity vector, angular velocity and vertical velocity with:

local velocityvector = LoGetVectorVelocity()
local RotationalVelocity = LoGetAngularVelocity()
local VerticalVelocity = LoGetVerticalVelocity()

Wow that's great!

checked the output:

velocity vector gives Velocity.x Velocity.y and Velocity.z

angular velocity gives RotVel.x RotVel.y and RotVel.z (expressed as radians per second).

I would love to express the angular velocity as a g-force and try it with my g-seat build in place of roll, pitch and yaw.

Will see what we come up with.

Brilliant find there Frusheen! (And of course FSF_Ian!)

(Kudos on the killer PC too.)

Also the new Export.lua that vJaBoG32 posted is perfect as it shows the matrix code for resultant vectors with applied rotation and scalars.

Much test flying ahead.

Update: BrassEM find out the new Matrix delivers the same values like the old LoGetPitchBank Lua Vectors.

But also i got a suggest from ED how to creat Pitch with more then 90°:

"Thing is, if you want to have pitch like, say, 95°, this simply means you actually have pitch of 85° and 180° of bank. But you can have AOA more than +/- 90 though, if this is what you want - just take a dot product with your velocity vector, normalized, and your forward-looking axis (X), from the orientation matrix (like (m.x.x,m.x.y,m.x.z) )."

Don´t know what this means :music_whistling:

Hey guys. My motion sim was apart for about three months so I haven't flown. Last night I got to fly and was working fine in offline mode, but when I loaded into multiplayer server there was a problem.

When I get into an aircraft in multiplayer the motion sim pitches up or down and stays that way. Motion continues to work, but seems a bit laggy and the "center" of motion is pitched at an odd angle.

I was only able to try it with the Huey so far, to test with other aircraft I need to know a server I can get on that has player export turned on.

Any idea what is causing this or how to find out where the problem is coming from?

PS- Three months ago it was working fine on the big WWII servers.

Hi Trip, i´ll check this out this week.

Thank you sir, that would be very much appreciated!

I´ll checked out on a dedicated MP Server with fixed IP, no cheating opt aktv. , export on and standard template.

Bank works fine, also no delays.

But pitch first did´nt work...just violent movements up or down.

I checked the axis-option "use automatic maximum adjustement" in x-sim, for a new alignment.

Afterwards one looping, pitch worked fine. So reason clould be, that the pitch value are now *1000.

If you use other interface like x-simulator, there´s maybe also a auto calibrationen option to solve the problem.

But this dosn´t explains your motion-lags, anyway.

Thanks JaBoG32, that helps a lot. The lag may have been something else.

I use Ian's BFF motion software, so I need to understand the problem. Are you saying the pitch values are much higher than they should be and need less sensitivity?

Trip

Yes, most DCS output values must be modified to fit for a Motion Software. E.g. convert radians in linear vallues or negative degrees to positive.

In case of pitch i had to multiply with 1000 to get full integer values.

Depending on your Software (BFF), you may have to change some seetings.

But maybe BFF support can do this for you in the DCS Plugin.

Yes, most DCS output values must be modified to fit for a Motion Software. E.g. convert radians in linear vallues or negative degrees to positive.

In case of pitch i had to multiply with 1000 to get full integer values.

Depending on your Software (BFF), you may have to change some seetings.

But maybe BFF support can do this for you in the DCS Plugin.

Thanks I'll check it out. Do you know why it works perfectly in single player mode, but has pitch problem only on multiplayer servers?

No, not at the moment. Maybe running some scripts that could block the export values.