Mi-24v Tiger and InputMapper mk 2

Came across a DVD of the Royal International Air Tattoo 2006, a Czech Republic Mi-24V Hind (number 7353?) from the 231 Attack Helicopter Squadron had a camera strapped to the pylon. I've walked around a few Mi-24Ds at airshows but nothing as lovely as the tiger paint scheme on this one.

I'll just share a few images I grabbed.

The last image was taken by "Vojta_micek" (see his other photos here). Elements of the tandem cockpit appear modernised from what I remember. The all black theme

The Mi-24 is a fast twin engined helicopter, > 200 miles per hour. Versatile, with a small troop compartment/load area and large number of wing payload configurations.


Programming wise I've been re-engineering a lot of game internals to separate them more from the underlying 3D engine. And today that included an alternative input system. Short of using DirectX (which I have problems compiling under MinGW) there isn't a great solution for now. The SDL library falls short since it uses the Windows MMSYSTEM which only handles a few axis (6) and 32 buttons. It manages about 3/4qtrs of the axis and buttons on a new Saitek HOTAS PC joystick.

Ideally I'd use RAWHID which is a method Microsoft provide to read the raw data from any USB input device (there's a Linux library too). RAWHID would cover some exotic input devices, 3D navigators and touch devices for example but that will have to wait till version 2.0. For now I'm abstracting the input handling too, nearly finished with that.

Till now input configuration has been awkward, I wrote a quick and dirty config system last December. The cross-platform input library didn't even return a sensible name for a device on each, it was just a port number, if you unplugged or swapped them around you'd loose your input mapping. Terrible.

Now we have curve options, inversion, min/max range and device ID pulled from the Windows registry. An input monitor overlay with graph was added to help debug and test axis response. If anyone knows of a RAWHID multiplatform lib then please drop me a note.