This program is meant to compile .flt files into .vhs file.

Yes, it's technically not a compiler it's more like a .flt to .vhs converter

.flt files are created and filled on the fly by Falcon (whether it's falcon BMS or FreeFalcon) and they are compiled into more readable .vhs files when exiting the 3D environment. The flt file is then deleted and you're left with a .vhs file that you can put into Falcon ACMI viewer (if you hate yourself) or Tacview

• This program was tested on .flt files from FreeFalcon 6 and Falcon BMS 4.33 it should however work with pretty much any version of falcon starting from FreeFalcon 6 (Haven't tested anything before that, but the code was really old so ...)

• You need to use Tacview to read the .VHS files. The reason for that is that the Falcon ACMI viewer is old, slow and will crash if your .VHS file is too big.

• You need some Free RAM for the compilation / conversion (around 2.5 times the size of the .flt file) So for a 500 MB file you'll need ~1.3 GB of RAM

Falcon AVionic Flight Recorder (AVTR) is a really powerful tool that's very helpful for debriefing. However, the longer you record, the longer it will take for falcon to convert/compile the .flt file to .vhs (The fixed screen you see when exiting the 3D environment)

This program solve the problem in 2 different ways:

• The program will "steal" .flt files from falcon and rename them into .flt.tmp that way Falcon will not compile them and you'll be able to access the debriefing immediately

• The program will wait for your input and then compile the .flt files with all the CPU resources available on your computer

• Download the executable

• Move the .exe file to your ACMI folder (by default: C:\Falcon BMS 4.33 U1\User\Acmi)

• Clear the ACMI Folder of any .flt file

• Run the .exe by double clicking on it. (It must run in the background)

• Start Falcon BMS and play normally, the program will detect new .flt and prevent falcon from converting them

• Once you finished playing and have debriefed, go back to the program window, follow the instruction and the program will convert your files

• The program doesn't care if the ACMI is still recording while leaving the 3D environment (So if you eject and can't stop the recording, the program will prevent BMS from compiling the file anyway)

• The converter/compiler is 5 to 6 times faster than the standard Falcon converter.

So, what did I do ?

• Changed the pointer lists to Vectors
• Removed continue that are both slow and make the code less readable
• Removed useless functions that were only here for the ACMI Viewer in Falcon
• Made compilation / conversion consistent (set default value to every structure)
• Added multithreading support
• Various code optimization
• Added automatic dectection for new .flt files in the ACMI folder

• The code was written on Visual Studio 2015 (so well, if you have 2015 or newer it sould be good)

• If you're changing the converter/compiler code, download something like Hashtab so you can get a checksum of the VHS files created

• Building in Debug in Visual Studio will make the code slower because VS add a lot of debugging stuff to the vector (it's nearly 25 times slower ) So use release if you want to evaluate your code performance

• The code uses some C++ 11 and C++ 14 features, feel free to use as much recent C++ as you deem necessary to make the compilation faster

• the .licenseheader file comes from a Visual Studio plugin called : License Header Manager , you don't need it to do PR or anything, I'm just lazy and it updates headers automatically

Thanks to this website for putting me on the path to find some falcon source code and an excellent .pdf describing how Falcon changed over the years

https://sites.google.com/site/falcon4sourcecode/

https://github.com/FreeFalcon/freefalcon-central

• Travis-ci for autobuild / check
• Be able to compile on Linux
• Spawn EC2, upload file, compile, download file, destroy EC2
• GPU calculation ?