Kind: Notes

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Roaring AC mono block in the room but having to attend video conferences with talking? makes short work of background noise. Just run that neat little app, it’ll plug in right into your (default on most modern Linux PCs) and add the noise suppressor to the input device. To actually “listen” to the effect enable the monitor on the button on the bottom right. Tune it until no noise is picked up any more and test if talking still makes it to your headphones.

And that’s it. Video conferences without having to turn off the AC during the dreaded hot summer weeks.

(Also set a hotkey to mute mic system wide and learn some mic discipline but that’s another topic).

Unexpected: is looking for testers:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2375780/discussions/0/4757578278664103829/?tscn=1779131011#c845132259930409642

(The Beam Eye Tracker is software that turns standard webcams or smartphones into PC eye and head-trackers. It eliminates the need for expensive hardware or wearable gear. Works apparently even with [some] glasses but I wouldn’t know. Did apply for a Linux beta tho đŸ€“)

Edit: yay, beta key arrived today 🙂 Now I can test this out.

Got myself a little downtime here. Not sure what’s going on but the system SSD threw IO errors and the LVM switched to read-only as a result. I’m kinda amazed that the system kept chugging along like that at all. Anyway, a long SMART self-test came back clean and the system reboots fine. Just to end up in read-only again after a few hours. Sadly disks are really very expensive currently so I grabbed an older SSD 840 EVO from the pile and set the system up again this morning. That’s also not a disk designed for 24/7 but that doesn’t really matter for my use-case here. Biggest headache was Debian renaming network interfaces *yet again* so I had to figure out what was going on when no link could be detected.

Data is fine. That’s all stored on thicc SAS disks powered by ZFS and has various backups going. Just the system disk isn’t. This is because it’s connected to another SATA controller that was designed for CD-ROM usage and can deal with only one device on it’s bus. This is mostly because the system was initially configured with a hardware raid controller by HP and getting that to boot is a pain in the ass – and also doesn’t play nice with ZFS. That thing is out of the equation though and set to pass-through for years but I still like to separate the concerns.

I was not kidding when I added this disclaimer to the page: +++ This is a backyard hosted website on 2nd hand hardware, which means it sometimes goes offline. Please hold the line. +++

So anyway, everything should be working again – here is to another 4 years or so đŸ€“

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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 đŸ€“

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 worksℱ 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 đŸ€“

Let’s see. Hope ActivityPub works again as expected. I guess I’ll live without the Redis cache for a while to see if everything works again as expected. The admin tax is too real đŸ˜©

Oh.

Starting November 15th, 2025, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock and all its DLCs will no longer be available for purchase on any platform. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/544610/view/570395033724780780?l=english

It seems to be currently on sale on GOG so mebbe grab it if you don’t have it yet: https://www.gog.com/en/game/battlestar_galactica_deadlock

That was one of the better space fleet pew pews. Sad to see this going. Guess their license expired. That leaves `X4` BSG mods and `Diaspora` (`FreeSpace 2 Open` mod), of course. Speaking of: There isn’t much talk about `Diaspora` but apparently they are cooking another campaign behind the curtains.

List of menu key bindings from a PC game demonstrating various bound buttons with an ungodly long menu entry for each option

Looks like has a broken Input.ini parser resulting in my mappings to be gone on restart. The problem is that some special characters, like a comma, break the INI format used by their controls implementation [/Script/Engine.InputSettings].

Have an example what the game writes to AppData/Local/ProjectWingman/Saved/Config/WindowsNoEditor/Input.ini


AxisMappings=(AxisName="Pitch Axis",Scale=-1.000000,Key=Joystick_ThrustMaster,IncF-16FlightControlSystem_2_Axis1)

The name for the key is something homebrew the game produces based on the controller type (Joystick_ or Gamepad_) and the HID device descriptor name. This example mapped fine ingame but breaks on reload of the game resulting in only ThrustMaster for each mapped control – and that joystick can not be found, of course.

The “fix” is to manually edit the file and add quotation marks for the key:

AxisMappings=(AxisName="Pitch Axis",Scale=-1.000000,Key="Joystick_ThrustMaster,IncF-16FlightControlSystem_2_Axis1")

Now the game finds the proper joystick and all controls are mapped to something like ThrustMaster,IncF-16FlightControlSystem_2_Axis1 again, as expected.

Needless to say that the file should probably be write protected after that – or at least saved again under a different name, because any change to the controls will overwrite this fix again. This problem does probably also happen with other special characters, like the © sign that some vendors are known to use.

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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 đŸ€·

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