Announcing F4Panel/KeyServer

Update: The term "KeyServer" is a registered trademark, so I had to rename mine. Details and an updated version here. The download link in this entry is no longer active.

 

I've been a fan of the F-16 combat flight simulator Falcon 4 for a long time. As with most flight simulators, situational awareness (SA) can be a bit of a challenge - flying a flight simulator where your only view is the computer screen has been described as like trying to drive while looking through a drinking straw. Well, when I finished FlexWiki, as a reward to myself I bought a TrackIr. It's a head-tracking device that lets me change the view by simply moving my head. It's very intuitive and freakin' awesome - it's hard to imagine flying without it anymore.

 

The problem with using TrackIr is that you start living in the 3D view. That's a problem because in Falcon 4: Allied Force (F4AF), many of the gauges don't work in the 3D view. The biggest problem, though, is that the cockpit isn't clickable. So you wind up bouncing back to the 2D view all the time to toggle this or that with the mouse, which is slightly annoying.

 

I thought about building some sort of USB device (this sort of activity is called "cockpit building", and people spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on it), or maybe buying something, but everything I could find was either a bit on the expensive side or was going to stretch my extremely rusty electronics skills. And was going to take a hell of a lot of time. But wait! I'm a pretty good programmer! I can solve this with software. Hence were born F4Panel and KeyServer.

 

The basic idea I had was to transform my ancient PDA (it runs Pocket PC 2002 to give you some idea) into a touchscreen device that would emulate the major instrument panels in the F-16. It's not an original idea - you can buy a much nicer-looking version of what I wrote for $30 at http://www.pocketmfp.com/default.htm. But it requires Pocket PC 2003, and my device is so old it doesn't support that.

 

To make a long story short, I wrote my own. Here are some pictures of it:

 

 

It works great, and I thought other people might like to make use of it, so I've posted a zipfile here.

 

There are two parts: F4Panel runs on the PDA, and KeyServer runs on the PC. Install F4Panel on the PDA by copying the appropriate F4Panel.cab file to your PDA and clicking it. KeyServer doesn't need to be installed - just run KeyServer.exe. When KeyServer starts, it'll put a very boring icon in the system tray. Right click it and choose "Load Profile". I've included a profile for F4AF, but the syntax is pretty simple and you should be able to figure out how to change it. Once you've got the profile loaded, go to the PDA and run F4Panel. Click Tools->Connect and enter the name of the computer where KeyServer is running. You'll obviously need to the PDA to be connected to the same network as the PC somehow - I just keep mine in its USB docking station.

 

The two programs communicate by means of a very simple HTTP-like protocol: F4Panel sends something like "CLICK ICP1" and KeyServer looks in a profile file for a command called ICP1 to figure out what keys to send to the foreground application. If it sends them okay, it returns "200 OK". I mention this, because I intended KeyServer to be general enough to be used with other games (or whatever) - you'd just need to write the PDA bit that sends "CLICK <commandname>" and the appropriate profile file that maps <commandname> to some sort of key sequence. The socket code is extremely simple - you can look at the F4Panel source to see it.

 

Because this was a fun-time project, and because quite honestly I'm momentarily burned out on full-scale open source projects, the zipfile is just a dump of the source and binaries. I'm sure you can cope. :) Consider it MIT-licensed, so feel free to go forth and improve it.

 

Update: The term "KeyServer" is a registered trademark, so I had to rename mine. Details and an updated version here. The download link in this entry is no longer active.