Force Feedback Support in FlightGear

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Force feedback.

Background

Force-feedback is the correct term for any "control" of a joystick. What you do with it is something else entirely. So you could use it to implement a stick-shaker. But it would still be force-feedback. And usually when you mention it, people assume you mean a full implementation - pressure on the stick when the aircraft is not trimmed, vibration during take-off roll and landing, etc. But doing just a stick-shaker or a full implementation has the same basic amount of work - an interface for each joystick with FF for all OSs. — macnab (Nov 26th, 2013). Re: . (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

Motivation

can FG have force vibration for flight sticks please (maybe as an option on the wiard) — pilot (Oct 22nd, 2013).  vibration. (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

Anyone seeing this yet? http://sourceforge.net/p/hapticsforfg/code/HEAD/tree/ It would be very interesting to have Force Feedback on FG,since I don't know any sim in development having FF. — Poomklao Teerawattanaprapha (Dec 29th, 2015). [Flightgear-devel] Feature commit request:Force feedback. (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

That's usually a pretty hardware-specific feature that require special code for different operating systems. at the moment, there's a pending feature request to map USB-HID devices into the property tree: https://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bugs/issues/detail?id=619#c1 from a technical standpoint, that would be the prerequisite to get other USB devices (and special features like FF) supported at some point — Hooray (Oct 22nd, 2013). Re: . (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

Status

For the last few days I have coded force feedback support for FlightGear. It currently works, I have implemented control surface loading (for jsbsim), pilot g forces and stick shaker. Currently the system is so that I have external app which uses SDL 1.3 to handle the ff effects, so it should be portable quite easily. That program communicates with FG through telnet, and some nasal/xml magic on FG does the rest. Here's a screenshot of the configuration options (from which most do not yet work, but you get the idea): (see the linked image) I will support: multiple devices, autocenter, control surface forces, pilot g forces and stick shaker at least. And all effects can be disabled, or disabled/enabled on some devices, and also axes should be configurable. Now, the problem is that telnet interface is way too slow, the forces are updated once every 1 or 2 seconds, which is awfull. But I still don't know beforehand which properties to pull, so generic I/O is not good either. Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve this? — Zan (Dec 19th, 2011).  . (powered by Instant-Cquotes)