Hi Klaus. A discussion in the other thread made me think about this. What if neXt would allow for extensions? See mockup:


This could let us, developers, extend next, especially to add learning functions, like I just did in OpenTX. OpenTX is great, but not very popular in heli community. And programming for it gives very very limited possibilities.

In simulator, on the other hand, there is so much possible. You could do so much more. I can easily imagine extensions to teach you some specific maneuvers, overtake single channels from them, or event organize complete learning processes. Teach you orientations while tracking your progress and making you teach those, which you're bad at.

This way I and other people could realize my passion, and your simulator could gain sales and popularity thanks to other peoples work.

Not to mention, that making helicopters easier to learn is a great thing for our hobby. Helicopters are so hard to fly and this is number 1 factor that makes a lot of people pickup drones.


Allowing extensions might sound complicated, but I think you could start with something simple.

As you see on the screenshot, the concept could be quite simple:
- an extensions has its own window. As soon as you close the window, the extension is disabled. As soon as you show the window, the extensions runs. This is consistent with heli trainer, piro trainer etc.
- extension UI, in its simplest form, could support a list of parameters (bool, numbers, enums, which would result in checkboxes, numeric edits, combo boxes..) and a set of buttons at the bottom for some actions. This is sufficient for so many things.

Then the extension needs to be called every frame.
And it needs some API from neXt. To know heli position, being able to control it. Maybe show messages to the user. This can grow really big, but we could easily start with something simple.

What do you think?|addpics|rer-2-6691.png-invaddpicsinvv|/addpics|