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MSFS20 SimConnect + Unity for virtual sextant

christophdoe

christophdoe

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3
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germany
Hey,

I‘m currently building a (bubble) sextant simulator in Unity. So far I got accurate simulation of stars and the sun and you can take sights of those from any location and time on Earth. In my first few tests it was accurate to the minute.

I planned this to be kind of a companion app to MSFS, so you have to run it simultaneously to the sim and it’s not directly integrated. I think it’s much simpler to get a sextant simulated in Unity, then in MSFS. However, I’m stuck in getting SimConnect into my unity project. I‘ve seen a post here and searched the MSFS forums, but I didn’t managed to make it work and it seems nobody has. Unity always says type or namespace FlightSimulator doesn’t exist in the namespace Microsoft.
I tried to add the DLLs manually, upgrade Unity to .NET 4, used VS to compile everything. Nothing works.

So for now I‘m using a SimConnect Wrapper I found on GitHub, which saves SimVars into a JSON. I then read the Json from Unity. This works great, but in the long run I would like to integrate simconnect directly, or at least only run a helper in background which gets the simvars for me. The wrapper I found comes with a lot of DLLs and files and I want to keep it simple once I publish it, and I don’t want users to start multiple apps or dealing with a lot of files.
I tried to merge the wrapper into one exe, but the build always fails - I’m not experienced developing for windows sadly.

I only need the local sim time, date and longitude, latitude of the player.

Has anybody any idea how I could get SimConnect to run in unity? Or what other options might be?

Thanks!
Ps: that’s the wrapper I’m using: https://github.com/smairo/Smairo.MSFS2020.SimConnector
 
Yes!
I was able to build the Json program with Visual Studio now, it’s runs as a separate app. so the setup is working, but would be much nicer to build simconnect directly into unity.
 
I thought Unity was a game engine... i.e. a graphics engine with an API so that it can be used inside another application. How are you compiling the program? What language are you using?

Also, a lot of people are asking how to do things with SimConnect in MSFS2020... well, the answer is: the same way it was done in FSX. The FSX SimConnect documentation and example projects are perfect sources for the answers of all the basics. The Prepar3D v3 SimConnect SDK can also provide a great deal of the same information, though there are some Prepar3D specific variances.
 
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Yes unity is a game engine. But not like an API, it’s a standalone game engine. Code is written in C# and unity has its own compiler. You can also add assemblies or other third party code via .dll, but unity fails to compile the simconnect dlls. Might be that it doesn’t support the .NET framework version or something.
 
Let me chime in here. I tried to compile sample code straight out of the FSX SDK (yes, FSX) and get the same message. If I try to compile ANY CS script that has "using Microsoft.FlightSimulator.Simconnect", I get the same error. What is REALLY odd is that the CS plugin in NPP can read the dll and populate intellisense list.

1662315508061.png

But the compiler chokes:

1662315552171.png


A few hours later... just in case there are any other intrepid FSX warriors:
You have to include a reference to the actual dll. for CLI, I copied the SimConnect dll to my working directory to make it easier:

1662320513869.png


If you don't want to copy the dll, you can reference it in DAC:

C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\Microsoft.FlightSimulator.SimConnect\10.0.61259.0__31bf3856ad364e35\Microsoft.FlightSimulator.SimConnect.dll
 
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