Category: IT

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So what happens when sheer stubbornness, a glorified button box, Ace Combat and the Unreal Engine Scripting System meet? Pure magic. I got the game to spew out a constant stream of telemetry data and events in search for more immersion in my VF-1 inspired home cockpit. The approach is the very same that I used for X4 Foundations before: Side load lib Luasocket, get a network connection established and start dumping extracted game data to it. This is highly experimental and the result of hacking away for the last ~4 nights. This video demonstrates the results:

https://makertube.net/w/cbXJAveVgVTGVEi58akVTA / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50J-gjkgJxE

To be perfectly clear: I am aware that Ace Combat is not a “flight sim”, not really worth of an API, and I know that DCS or BMS does it better and in greater detail and even with realism. This is not the point. I started working on this just for fun and to satisfy my own curiosity to see *if I can make it*. This may be hard to believe but chipping rocks together until the computer does what I want is “quality time” for me 🤓

You may have noticed that I’m a Macross fan and that my SimPit is heavily inspired by a VF-1 Valkyrie and that I usually use a modded VF-1 plane in AC as well. This is my personal substitute for the lack of any decent Macross / Robotech game since Macross VOXP.

This said I usually fly Space Pew Pew games with this cockpit so everything you see going on is designed for _space_ and not for flight sim. This is also why I sometimes talk about “ships” or “docked”. This is wording found everywhere in my plumbing pipeline for telemetry. All games I play, that can use this, send their data over this. The idea is that I do not have to rewrite half of the connected systems for every game so I transform the data into a unified format before.

You can read more about this on the dedicated project website https://simpit.dev (and here, of course). I will soon update it with some more details for Ace Combat. If this looks like something you’d like to try let me know, I’d love to connect. I’m active on various social media. Please do let me know if you find this inspiring.

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The (demo) was sitting in my backlog for a while now. Last time I tried I was not able to really start but most of the menu navigation issues with joysticks are fixed now. In fact it accepted any joystick I threw at it.

Bindings menu listing a lot of connected input devices and offers remapping and calibration for each

It also supports ultra wide screen, runs smooth af and just works™ with Proton. There is really not much else I can ask of a space pew pew [indie]game in 2025. Well mayhap OpenTrack UDP support but let’s not nitpick 😀

Display menu with various ingame features like resolution, FPS lock and counter

Can’t say much about the story, since the demo doesn’t feature much of any. I got to see some neat features, like landing on a carrier, which required approaching through a virtual corridor until the carrier snagged me in. There’s also a path to follow during a jump adding a mini game to this procedure as well.

Some sort of fast travel, which is very colourful, requiring the pilot to stay within a specific path.

It also offers the genre typical shield and energy management, boosting and drifting, targeting of subsystems or missiles and counter measures so or players should feel right at home. This goes to my wishlist 🤓

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This is Project Wingman mission 01 Black Flag played on a Linux PC with Proton Experimental, OpenTrack with the Neuralnet Tracker plugin and my DIY HOTAS / rudder system based on Arduino Pro Micros replacing the original electronics in my Thrustmaster FLCS/Cougar gear:

Pick your poison: https://makertube.net/w/8MyoVSzDfwMuQR6bCqtbie / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0sihlgW_Y

I got Project Wingman on a sale months ago and I finally gave it a try. As an Ace Combat player I felt right at home. My initial experiment was with the XR glasses and woah that feels good in 3D and all but today I remembered that old Plasma TV in the basement. Got it second hand a year ago for dead cheap. Today I brought it upstairs to try it with the ViperPit and now I’m not sure what’s more awesome.

Well, that is if I feel like burning ~470W on top for that thing but hey this is for very specific gaming sessions only anyway 🤷

Guess I’ll spend more time in the ViperPit again 😀

AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning by Abdelkader Boudih (Seuros Blog)
After 10 years as an AWS customer and open-source contributor, they deleted my account and all data with zero warning. Here's how AWS's 'verification' process became a digital execution, and why you should never trust cloud providers with your only copy of anything.

This reads like a horror show and sounds like a worst of the worst case scenario. Tried to avoid cloud like Covid before thanks to a deep rooted distrust against big corporations, that can and will terminate accounts on a whim. This report is fuel to my trust issues but it’s far too easy to just yell “self-host” now. The admin tax is just too real and it sounds like you did everything properly. Thanks for this epic write-up Abdelkader and while Ruby isn’t my wheelhouse I love that you don’t let other devs bleed for the disgraceful treatment you experience. Best wishes for you and your future projects and keep speaking up!

RE: https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-deleted-my-10-year-account-without-warning/

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Played (closed) Alpha with my inspired . I’m simply in awe that I can replay missions from (or ) with more modern graphics and modern interface devices again. I spent _so many_ hours playing these games as a kid.

This is the heavily cut VOD of the live stream over at @bekopharm@live.famkos.net (pick your poison):

https://makertube.net/w/r1LRrqDWnhw4wRk92uNfzo /
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T2jxqT_5sU

This time I play with the native Linux version and my X52 Pro joystick (which means I actually have a chance of hitting stuff too). The following missions were played:

Historical Mission 2 / Wingmen Are Important
Historical Mission 3 / Sattelites Near Coruscant
Historical Mission 4 / Beating The Odds
OP 1: Destroy Imperial Convoy (Uncut)
OP 2: Reconnaissance Mission (Uncut)
OP 3: Fly Point During Evacuation (Uncut)
OP 4: Protect Medical Frigate (Uncut)

XWVM is not an official product from Lucasfilm Ltd. or Disney. It is not endorsed or authorized by either. It is a fan recreation of the game engine used to play X-Wing and TIE Fighter for the sake of accessibility and requires the original game assets to work.

Kudos to the XWVM team, they are doing a stellar job here.

The dedicated project website for the Macross inspired SimPit is https://simpit.dev

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Played (closed) Alpha with my ViperPit and with glasses. I’m simply in awe that I can replay missions from (or ) with more modern graphics and modern interface devices again. I spent _so many_ hours playing this as a kid.

This is the heavily cut VOD of the live stream over at https://live.famkos.net (pick your poison):

https://makertube.net/w/hW6cJeqBY42YoryJL1gRg5 /
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8at4P5rf-gE

I go over the input settings and show it’s capabilities to connected various joystick devices, demo the Proofing Grounds and showcase mission 1+2. In the end I go over various settings for the XWVM engine and how the machine hardly sweats displaying the gorgeous cockpit.

XWVM is not an official product from Lucasfilm Ltd. or Disney. It is not endorsed or authorized by either. It is a fan recreation of the game engine used to play X-Wing and TIE Fighter for the sake of accessibility and requires the original game assets to work.

The game was played with Pro XR running in Side-By-Side mode thanks to ReShade on a Linux PC.

Kudos to the XWVM team, they are doing a stellar job here.

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So I was asked if my head tracking approach of reading the IMU data from my Viture Pro to OpenTrack and SBS (side-by-side) mode with ReShade would also work with StarCitizen.

Guess it does 🤷

Pick your poison to watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWUC2Y3TRh4 / https://makertube.net/w/8L7gVN8NnLvjhQCPGNmd6W

I start Star Citizen via Lutris (and not with Steam), which requires slightly different settings once ReShade is installed:

Enable Gamescope: ON
Output Resolution: "3840x1080"
Game Resolution: "3840x2160" (set this also ingame!)
Custom Settings: "--scaler stretch"

Can this get you banned? Who knows 🤷 Jury is still out on this. Do I care? Nope. I won’t miss my puny starter pack.

YMMV.

The proof of concept code to read the IMU data can be found at https://github.com/bekopharm/xr_to_opentrack (pending changes).

It works with the Breezy GNOME xr_driver: https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop (but the Vulkan one works probably too but that’s untested). It should also be compatible with other glasses that have IMU for Breezy available.

There is an unlisted SBS version of this video linked in the description. You will need XR glasses that do FULL SBS though to watch it!

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Until now I used OpenTrack with my DIY IR tracker or the Neuralnet tracker. I knew that my XR glasses feature IMU data though and the xr_driver of the Breezy Desktop project allows to access the data via IPC on Linux PC. So I did what Linux user do: I wrote a script to access the IMU data and forwarded it via UDP to OpenTrack:

Pick your poison to watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njuumLUvqrM / https://makertube.net/w/2bNyxJhdyydTeFq17onikv

This reminded me that I also wrote a proof of concept to implement the FaceTrackNoIR (or OpenTrack) protocol into FreeSpace 2 Open on Linux PC ( https://makertube.net/w/7VtfAjW7EiAUS5aiPwG7if ) so I gave it a spin to test the data bridge. That was smooth sailing!

The mod is Diaspora: Shattered Armistice, still awesome today: http://diaspora.hard-light.net/ (Warning: This may fuel a desire to re-watch the BSG series again 😀).

The bridge code can be found at https://github.com/bekopharm/xr_to_opentrack (pending changes).

It works with the Breezy GNOME xr_driver: https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop (but the Vulkan one works probably too but that’s untested). It should also be compatible with other glasses that have IMU for Breezy available.

Update: hodasemi wrote a Rust connector based on the idea that works without Breezy: https://github.com/hodasemi/xr_to_opentrack_rs – comes with a systemd service file so it can run in the background. Once installed the only step left to do is fire up OpenTrack 🤘

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I know most of you won’t care or see why this is of interest but I got another game, this time No Man’s Sky, working in (side-by-side) mode using [on Linux PC] 🤓

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VGv_h097mI

Steam start parameters are a little bit different though, once ReShade was configured for Vulkan:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3dcompiler_47=n;vulkan=n,b;vulkan-1=n,b"  gamescope -h 2160 -w 3840 -H 1080 -W 3840 --scaler stretch -f -e -- %command%

Apparently there is an open bug for ReShade and Vulkan via Proton but frankly I didn’t quite get the details – it just worked for me: https://github.com/kevinlekiller/reshade-steam-proton/issues/6 – YMMV.

As usual: Viture or XReal users can probably just press fullscreen after switching into SBS mode to watch this. Others may need an external player to sort it out – I sure love delivering to the absolute niche of the niche [of yet another niche] 🤷

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I know most of you won’t care or see why this is of interest but I got another game, that I like a lot, working in (side-by-side) mode yesterday using [on Linux PC] 🤓

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWnFRPkomzQ

Steam start parameters are a little bit different though, once ReShade was configured for DirectX11: 

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3dcompiler_47=n;d3d11=n,b" gamescope -h 1080 -w 1920 -H 1080 -W 3840 --scaler stretch -f -e -- %command%

I’m considering to start an extra channel for the SBS stuff since this probably just annoys most people. In fact downvotes started to pile up but is it my fault that YT (or PeerTube for that matter) doesn’t support this in any sane way? I know about frame packed versions now but that only results in badly automated out of focus Anaglyph 3D videos nobody can enjoy.