How does the NFS software work?

The NFS software was designed from the ground up to be completely separate from the flight simulator environment. The reason for this is to be able to faithfully represent the real aircraft avionics systems without being tied to the bugs or inaccuracies of the flight sims. Our simulator interfaces with Prepar3D, X-Plane, and MSFS 2020 using the Software Development Kits (SDK) for each platform and retrieves the basic flight information such as airspeed, altitude, GPS latitude/longitude, wind, etc. We faithfully reproduce the avionics displays in our software. We also interact with each platform trying our best to sync certain variables such as, heading bug, altitude bug, COM1/2 frequencies, NAV1/2 frequencies, etc.

Due to the constraints of most flight sims, we found that the built-in autopilots do not have the necessary modes to accurate simulate the real GFC700 series autopilot. Whether it’s missing a true FLC mode (P3D) or missing the armed NAV and APR modes (X-Plane), we couldn’t rely on the flight sim APs. As a result, we decided create our own autopilot controller in the NFS software which runs outside of the flight sim. In doing so, we had to also move the Flight Management System (FMS) out of the flight simulator as well. The navigation is heavily tied to the autopilot and the flight sim SDKs do not allow easy transfer of the complex information.

To summarize, P3D, X-Plane, and MSFS 2020 flight sims only act as physics-based aerodynamic modelers. Our software controls how to fly inside this simulated world. This includes the navigation database that resides in the FMS and the different autopilot vertical and lateral modes.