SimConnect Ground Info

User Support Hub SDK
1

I am looking to get the ground normal vector at a given point. I see that P3D’s SimConnect has this functionality built in as: SIMCONNECT_DATA_GROUND_INFO.

I’ve been reading through the 0.8.0 SDK documentation and I could not find a similar structure or any way to return the ground normal at a given point. I know that we don’t currently have full functionality but I wanted to check and make sure that I had not overlooked something.

This is the missing piece of data that I would need to interface my own helicopter flight dynamics code running in a separate application with the simulator. Essentially I want use the same process as Level D flight simulators where the flight dynamics code and the Image Generator code are two distinct programs that communicate over a network. I’ll just use SimConnect as the protocol instead of CIGI.

Thanks for the help.

1 Like
2

I can’t find it either in the MFS simconnect SDK documentation.

Couldn’t you instead create a SimObject and then-> SimConnect_RequestDataOnSimObject ?

not shure if that would work, just an idea

3

Thanks for the idea. I’m just not sure how I would get the appropriate data out of the SimObject.

4

It will definitely be useful if MSFS can provide the elevation data (including normals). Our (Majestic software) Q400 addon is using this data in order to feed to the exterior flight dynamics engine, and the only other possibility for us to get this data is to create 3 invisible simobjects which are “moved” on the ground so that we can query the elevation on each of them. I hope SDK teams considers adding something like

SimConnect_RequestGroundInfo

mentioned above