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Helios Virtual Cockpit

Helios is a Virtual Cockpit Simulator primarily for use with DCS and BMS.

This is the wiki for the source code repository for the Helios Virtual Cockpit System for DCS World and Falcon BMS. This repository is for core and module developers use. Some of the information is useful for users as well, but this is not a product manual.

Downloads of releases for end users are located at https://github.com/HeliosVirtualCockpit/Helios/releases and user documentation is currently very limited. There are some pages in this wiki that are created in response to user questions, but there is no entirely up to date user information available here. The user manual is mostly updated to Version 1.4 and is available as a PDF in the Docs folder of the installation directory where you chose to install Helios. If your Helios installation is missing this file, you can get the latest version of it from its GitHub location.

Helios is composed to two programs, the first being the Profile Editor, which allows the creation of virtual cockpits. Visual components in the profile can then be bound to an interface, which allows communication between the simulator and the virtual cockpit. Input bindings take interface triggers and link them to actions on the visual components. Output bindings take triggers in the virtual cockpit, and link them to actions on the interface into the simulator. The interface that gets bound to the visual components is usually aircraft-specific.

The Helios Control Center program executes the profile that was created by the Profile Editor and displays the virtual cockpit, sometimes on a touch screen, for the virtual pilot to interact with.

When the aircraft specific interface is deployed from the Profile Editor, it creates an export.lua script file in the %userprofile%\Saved Games\DCS\Scripts\ directory, and this is the code that is invoked by DCS at aircraft start-up, and communicates with the Control Center over a UDP link. BMS is implemented via a shared memory interface.

There is a very short, basic overview of Helios on YouTube