0: takeoff!

hi,
today I’ll launch this website. Why today? I’ll have some exams in a few days, so stop asking!

let me give you a quick briefing what this is all about
I had to write a program that was able to listen to a flight simulator. This program should be the basis for some considerations of how to move some kind of flightchair controlled by software. The only thing I knew so far that there was FlightGear – an Open Source flight simulator. So I got ready getting my hands dirty, diggin around in tons of code – and quickly realized: I don’t have to! Thanks to the guys and gals creating it, FlightGear has the possibility to communicate through a socket to the outer world, just waiting for me to use it.
So that’s the story so far. You can skip the next few sentences and start with the tutorial by browsing to the following page, or read a little further to gain some more general informations.

how this document is organized
In the next sections I’ll give you a brief description about the output technique offered by FlightGear. Continuing by giving a general scope of the C#- Project, we’ll create somekind of server that listens to FlightGears output and handle the incoming data. Because I had a lot of fun playing ’round with FlightGear, there’s some bonus: a model connected to the COM-port, reacting on actions taken in FlightGear.

to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, take a look

Believe me: it was way more fun than it may look like! I shot this with my mobile phone so the quality is rather bad and: YES, the bridge-stunt was an outstanding success (not bad for one-handed flying)!

further notes…
Since I tried to save some time, I used iWeb for creating a weblog. I love my MacBookPro but the code generated by iWeb is, let’s say: Not that nice. So I moved the whole stuff right here…
Furthermore keep in mind, that I’m not a native english speaker, but since this should be a tutorial available for the majority of FlightGear users I decided to compose this tutorial in english.
Fell free to post your questions, suggestions, etc. on the main page.