I like to make race courses but I was wondering if there was any guides
available on how to set them up so it will have a timer and course limits.
Using the tools added within the SDK? I feel more people would be creating
more race courses if there was more info and a guide on setting it up.
This would provide additional information on what’s possible in MULTIPLAYER.
The SDK support for multiplayer doesn’t really exist at the moment. I think
that omission won’t be fully understood until we do have comprehensive
support for multiplayer and people realise what innovations that will bring to
the platform. The entire cloud-managed structure of MSFS make it perfect for
multiplayer but the single-player legacy from FSX is delaying that evolution.
Simply showing the 6D positions of other players is valuable and looks great,
but it’s maybe 5% of what you’d expect in a proper multiplayer game. The EA
Battlefield series has an incredibly basic real-time API for communicating
generalised ‘events’ all of which ASSUME you are going to want to know the
player name and location (for MSFS that would be Xbox name, TAIL NUMBER, and
lat/lng/alt). E.g. even a player sending a “chat” is an event which contains
the chat message and the name and location of the player. Or a player “kill”
event contains the name and locations of both players and the weapon used.
Other basic events are player “join” and player “leave”. These ‘events’ are
separate from the basic movement of the players so it’s relatively efficient.
With that simple API it’s relatively simple to add great multiplayer
functionality, e.g. in MSFS we could announce a player crossing a finish line,
or tasks involving multiple players could communicate success/failure (e.g.
dogfight, but there are many other possibilities). FWIW the pre-existing
‘chat’ mechanism (you can send chat messages to just your team, or all the
multiplayers in your ‘instance’) turned out to be a viable ‘real-time
messaging’ hook sufficient to communicate these events. If we had a chat
system in MSFS with an API, we’d probably have already hijacked that to
implement the stuff I’m describing here, but hopefully Microsoft/Asobo are
aware of what multiplayer support should be capable of and are planning it
more strategically.
You can create race courses, pretty much the same as in FSX. I haven’t really
tested it a lot and there is not much recent information, so you have to kind
of figure it out on your own. You can take a look at propmission.xml in the
propdefs folder. And have a look at the FSDeveloper
wiki,
it provides more background on mission development. But the racing part of the
sdk is not really worked out And you can look at the old FSX SDK mission
samples. But there is not a built-in HUD for displaying position or time, so
you’ll have to create your own UI (same process as making a toolbar panel).
There are tools in the sdk for positioning gates and stuff like that I found
how to place a gate but couldn’t work out how add the timer. there is alot to
it but not any info on how to set it up. I feel it might be above my ability
right now as I’m all self taught during covid lockdowns with 3d modelling had
only done basic add-ons till then.