Until you showed the drum kit, I thought the intro was a drum portion sort of like Hot For Teacher from Van Halen! Sounded good, even just being controls for DCS! Genius.
Happy April Fools! Nice video. Keep em coming. I'm not touching the DCS Apache until they release it into the trial. (Not April Fools) So there you go. The ball is in EDs court.
And that's ladies and gentlemen is a proof to me, that I can fly this bird with keybord in DCS. Thanks for the video! You are good! Would be a much harder to do with MI-24 though.
You're exactly right. Drums are effectively just a keyboard that you can't press and hold the keys down on. I did fly the Mi-8 this way as well but the hard part wasn't staying airborne, it was the difficulty reading the gauges from across the room. Hind would be similar.
Had to watch this again and took a closer look at the code this time. I strongly suspect you were looking for a simple solution and found one, but this has so much more potential. Something like this pseudo-code: IF MIDI.gate THEN var.pitch = var.pitch + MIDI.note36.velocity - MIDI.note40.velocity END IF vJoy.y = var.pitch * (arbitrary scale factor) That would give you analogue controls, based on how hard you hit the drums. I only have my MPK25 and it got me thinking: what if you map this across 2 octaves on a keyboard? That's 25 keys, 15 if we use a 7-tone scale, 11 if we use a pentatonic, we only need 8 and we can map multiple keys to the same control input. Depending on the flight style, that could possibly create tons of interesting melodies/harmonies. We could even do it the other way around. Convert joysticks inputs into MIDI and record it in a DAW. Imagine replaying this MIDI file and it's more reliably than ED's replay system. That would be hilarious! This video is no longer a simple April's fools joke. Did I mention how awesome MIDI is?
You're not wrong, I did start thinking about solutions and ways to make the script more complex so I could have both fine control and the ability to make large adjustments quickly. Basically I just ran out of time. I only had one window of opportunity to record if I wanted the video to be ready for April 1 so there wasn't time for refinement. But I like your idea about using the force of each hit to control the amount it moves the controls. That's clever. A lot could be done with this. Maybe it's something to revisit in the future!
Looks more complicated than it was in GlovePIE, which is slightly discouraging, but at least there are some working examples on the forum. I'll have to play around with it some day. Connecting a NintendoDS via MIDI over WLAN and flying with the stylus sounds like fun as well.
MIDI is awesome, isn't it? I've used GlovePIE and ppJoy in the past for some axis shenenigans, but couldn't figure out how to map MIDI-CC from an MPK25 to an axis. The manual wasn't perfectly clear on MIDI-CC, so either support was limited or I just did it wrong. I'll have to give freePIE and vJoy a shot one day. I was also thinking about controling a DAW through DCS. Prepare a bunch of samples, clips, effects and ramp things up based on joystick deflection, speed/altitude, g-forces, sensor mode, time-to-impact, pickle button .... loads of interesting events you could use as triggers. Sadly my musical ideas surpass my ability to code.
You fly the Apache better with a set of drums better than a lot of people I see online with thousands of dollars in peripherals. Good job! This was a highly entertaining video. Not just because it was someone flying a helicopter with a drum kit, but also seeing the cat sleep through it all.
There are actually a lot of drum videos on my channel. It's kind of what I did before DCS. Here's a more recent example: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tmbRb0Ib1Qk.html
