Archived — this app is no longer maintained. Details preserved for reference.

Mainly developed by Tomas Stenarson in 2004.

HLAXP is a plugin for X-Plane flight simulator to provide the ability to participate in HLA federation executions. HLA (High Level Architecture) is a standard for distributed simulations. HLA was developed by the US Department of Defense and has been approved as an open standard through the IEEE (IEEE standard 1516). HLAXP is currently using the former HLA 1.3 draft standard.

HLAXP has been tested with X-Plane 7.30 on Windows XP using the following RTIs: DMSO RTI-NG1.3v6 and MäK RTI 2.1.

Only a Windows version of HLAXP is available because there is no RTI that supports Macintosh (April 2004).

Download

HLAXP is available as an evaluation version (HLAXP v0.95). This beta version of HLAXP will automatically resign from the federation three minutes after joining.

Windows version: HLAXPv0.95.zip

Installing

1. Download the HLAXP distribution file and unzip it in a temporary folder.
2. Copy the file hlaxp.xpl to the plugins folder in X-Plane.
3. Copy the files hlaxp.ini and hlaxpexp.ini to the X-Plane preferences folder.
4. Check the hlaxp.ini file to set your desired federate name, federation name and path to your fed-file (as fed-file you can use the bundled hlaxp.fed).
5. Done!

Using HLAXP

Before using HLAXP you need an RTI installed, see your RTI documentation for specifics.

HLAXP adds a menu to X-Plane. Three menu items exist in v0.95:

Join

HLAXP tries to join the federation (and maybe create it if specified in the file hlaxp.ini). This may freeze X-Plane a couple of seconds depending on your RTI. HLAXP then creates the user aircraft in the federation.

Resign

HLAXP removes the user aircraft from the federation and tries to resign from the federation (and maybe destroy it).

Create Ownship

HLAXP creates the user's aircraft in the federation. The aircraft is removed when the user has crashed.

HLAXP receives the interaction StartResume and sets the date and time according to the parameters. When a MunitionDetonation interaction is received, the DetonationLocation and/or TargetObjectIdentifier + RelativeDetonationLocation is used to calculate if the user's aircraft was hit. The following DetonationResultCodes are considered as a hit when close enough (currently 100 m): EntityImpact, EntityProximateDetonation, Detonation, AirHit, AirBurst.

General configuration

HLAXP is configured using the file hlaxp.ini, the syntax is simple and straight-forward: <Parameter name> <value>.

Configurable parameters:

AUTOJOIN

1 = YES, 0 = NO

CREATE

1 = YES, 0 = NO

FEDERATION

Name of the federation execution to (create and) join

FEDERATE

Name of the X-Plane federate

FEDFILE

Path to the fed-file (only necessary when creating the federation)

TIMESTEP

Number of seconds between updates (valid range: ]0.0, 2.0])

SITEID

SiteID used in FederateIdentifier

APPLICATIONID

ApplicationID used in FederateIdentifier

FORCEID

ForceIdentifierEnum8 value according to SOM (valid range: [0, 3])

Entity type configuration

To specify the entity type for exported aircraft, use the file hlaxpexp.ini. The syntax is: <Keyword> <Kind> <Domain> <Country> <Category> <Subcategory> <Specific> <Extra>. Keyword is a string used to identify a specific aircraft in your X-Plane installation; the keyword is matched with the path or filename of your aircraft file (first match used). The rest are integers matching the DIS-enumerations.

Example — matching an X-Plane aircraft with the string "B-747" in the pathname or filename with a US "Boeing 747-400" (according to DIS Enumerations document 2003): B-747 1 2 225 57 1 1 0. The "Extra" field is not specified in the document and can e.g. be used to identify a specific airline or even a specific aircraft.

HLAXP v0.95 SOM

HLAXP uses a Simulation Object Model that's a part of the RPR-FOM V2.0 Draft 9 (see SISO for more information on RPR-FOM).

HLAXP v0.95 only publishes one type of object — Aircraft — with the following attributes provided:

EntityType

Fully user configurable using HLAXP configuration files

EntityIdentifier

SiteID and ApplicationID user configurable

Spatial

Position, Velocity, Acceleration and Attitude using SpatialFWStruct; no dead reckoning implemented

ForceIdentifier

Fully user configurable using HLAXP configuration file

HLAXP v0.95 subscribes to the interactions StartResume and MunitionDetonation. The StartResume interaction is only used to set the date and time (no start/stop/pause functionality).

HLAXP v0.95 SOM vs. RPR-FOM2 D9

• HLAXP v0.95 doesn't use timestamps.
• HLAXP v0.95 doesn't use dead reckoning — spatial data is published as DR algorithm no. 5 (DRM_FVW) though.

Information links

• X-Plane
• X-Plane SDK
• Defense Modeling and Simulation Office HLA
• SISO
• VTC

Customer specific development

Memention are willing to adapt HLAXP to your specific needs, e.g. modify the SOM or develop specific HLA functionality to make X-Plane fit into your federation. Please contact us if you have any questions so we can discuss the details.

We can also make the source code available for customer specific needs. Please contact us if you have any questions so we can discuss the details.

Version history

0.95

Evaluation release; auto-resigns from federation after three minutes

0.9

Earlier beta release

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