With the new patch next week supposedly fixing simconnect, will this help speed up getting GSX in the sim?
It will surely be a required fix, since the last thing you want is to see your fps stuttering when you call GSX. However, we don't know if, in addition to the fix, the patch will also add some of the crucially missing features we need for GSX, since right now the MSFS Simconnect is still not functionally equivalent to the FSX version, and there are several things missing:
- There's no "Addons" menu, with the ability for 3rd parties to add entries and sub-entries.
- There's no ATC-like Simconnect menu, the one in with the various GSX options.
- Creating Simobjects that are not AI airplanes doesn't do anything
- GSX needs to read the airport data, but since many sceneries which are sold in the MS Marketplace are encrypted with DRM, there's no way for GSX ( or any other utility that needs to read the airport for any reason ) to read data from them, so Asobo has promised us a new Simconnect API that can be called to read protected airports without having to open the .BGL file itself.
Once we'll have all of this, getting GSX to work should be reasonably quick, since the bulk of the program is written in the Python language, which runs externally from the sim under our Couatl Python interpreter so, once Simconnect will be completed, it shouldn't be too long before we can have the full GSX working in MSFS.
We already have a new 64 bit version of Couatl compiled with the native MSFS SDK working but, it cannot do much right now, until the Simconnect API is completed to be at least functionally equivalent to the FSX version.