FSX Simconnect and TouchBuddy

[DB93]

Hi all,

I recently heard about TouchBuddy on a couple of Flight Sim forums, and where I just ordered my first touchscreen last week (should be here today) , I figured I'd give TouchBuddy a whirl.

First off, thank you for this program, it works exactly as described, and I'm thrilled that I can run it off a machine other than the one that I'm gaming on. I've been playing around with TB, working on a profile and testing things so it would be at least partially configured when my touchscreen gets here today.

Ok, so now for my question. Instead of sending straight keystrokes to the application (which is limited to functions that have a keyboard shortcut associated with them), is there a way to send SimConnect commands to the SimConnect interface instead of to FSX directly?

I only ask as there's a number of functions that could be programmed directly into a profile that don't have any keyboard shortcuts associated with them by default. For example the keyboard combo is CTRL+. for setting/releasing the parking brakes. Using SimConnect, the command to send would be PARKING_BRAKES. Now obviously, the parking brakes are something that already have a keyboard shortcut associated with them, but things like taxi lights don't, so they would need to assign a keyboard shortcut to them from within FSX, and then send that same keystroke combo from within TouchBuddy.

If we could send SimConnect commands directly from TouchBuddy to SimConnect, then almost every FSX feature could be accessed directly from TouchBuddy alone, without needing to configure/reconfigure keyboard shortcuts, so back to the Taxi Lights example, instead of having to configure a shortcut in-game *and* in TouchBuddy, we'd be able to just do it from within TouchBuddy using the TOGGLE_TAXI_LIGHTS SimConnect command.

So is anything like this (sending SimConnect commands to SimConnect instead of sending keystrokes to FSX) possible? Would there be a module or add-in available that I haven't found, that provides this kind of functionality? I also figure that if SimConnect is used, then TouchBuddy running in client mode from a remote machine could probably talk to FSX directly across the network instead of talking to a server instance of TouchBuddy that has to run on the game machine.

Anyhow, just curious if anything like this is available or being worked on or considered for a future update, as I think it would provide a lot more functionality for use with FSX. In any case, I love the program, and will work around the keyboard shortcuts if needed, I was just hoping that a SimConnect version/add-in would be made available for the added flexibility that the simconnect commands offer.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and sorry for it being so long, I just wanted to make sure what I was asking for/about was clear.

-George