Safety Request: Telemetry flag when the player aircraft is destroyed

[skydenzy]

Hi ED team,

This is a safety request.

I fly DCS with a motion simulator chair. I use Sim Racing Studio (SRS) to read DCS telemetry and drive the rig. The problem is what happens after the player aircraft is destroyed: the airframe tumbles unpredictably and the telemetry reflects that. SRS dutifully follows the data, and the rig thrash violently, without a secure harness, a user could be thrown around and potentially injured.

The first thing I did is contacting SRS support, and this is their replay:

Quote

Sorry for the issue you're having with DCS when an aircraft is shot down. Unfortunately, there is not a way in telemetry to tell if the aircraft is flying normally or shot down from what Eagle Dynamics provides. Thus, there isn't a way at this time to stop motion via game telemetry when shot down.

I’m not asking for a gameplay change. DCS is already amazing. I’m asking for a small telemetry addition that would let SRS (and other motion software) switch to a safe profile as soon as the player’s aircraft is no longer flyable.

Proposed solution ( any of these would work )

• A boolean flag: playerAircraftDestroyed (true/false)
• An enumerated field: playerFlightState = { Normal, Ejected, Crashed, Destroyed }

Why this helps: Third-party motion apps can immediately cut motion or fade to a neutral pose when the flag/event appears. This is backward-compatible, doesn’t affect gameplay, and meaningfully reduces risk for motion-rig users. 

Thanks for considering this. It’s a small change with a big safety impact for a growing part of the DCS community.

Edited August 26 by skydenzy

[skydenzy]

Is there is already something that we can use in Lua scripts to know if the player's jet get destroyed?

Thank you.

[muzica9]

need this. 

[skydenzy]

ED Team ?

[Kang]

As hilarious as I would find the news report about somebody having been thrown through the wall by their fancy sim rig, I think this should be done, yes. The event flag quite obviously is a thing in DCS already, it just needs to be routed out to the whole export business.

[skydenzy]

Haha! Yeah, funny... well, where is the event? Because SRS support said there is not.

[skydenzy]

ED Team ?

[skydenzy]

ED Team ?!

[Vakarian]

8 hours ago, skydenzy said:

ED Team ?!

You know that just saying "ED team" means absolutely nothing?

 

@BIGNEWY @NineLine Can you help the guy?

[draconus]

On 8/30/2025 at 12:44 AM, skydenzy said:

ED Team ?

From the wishlist guidelines: "...in fact most times we will just read the first post for the idea and move on from there..." [https://forum.dcs.world/forum/207-dcs-core-wish-list/]

On 8/26/2025 at 6:11 AM, skydenzy said:

without a secure harness, a user could be thrown around and potentially injured

Neither ED or your motion platform sw/hw can be reponsible for your safety.

Luckily, this user wore the harness:

[Hiob]

Actually, the firmware of the motion/ffb device should filter out unsafe telemetry. That really isn't that hard to do. Just implement cutoffs above certain acceleration values (in simple terms).

Provider of FFB devices really shouldn't deflect blame for jolting/unsafe behavior of those on the game.

 

Edited Monday at 09:47 AM by Hiob

[NineLine]

I would think the team building this chair would need to address this; if needed, they could reach out to us to discuss. But we cannot make changes for one piece of hardware without the ability to verify or confirm what is actually needed. 

[skydenzy]

On 8/31/2025 at 5:53 AM, Vakarian said:

You know that just saying "ED team" means absolutely nothing?

OMG! Are you serious?!

Vakarian?

Edited 10 hours ago by skydenzy

[skydenzy]

On 9/1/2025 at 5:39 AM, Hiob said:

Actually, the firmware of the motion/ffb device should filter out unsafe telemetry. That really isn't that hard to do. Just implement cutoffs above certain acceleration values (in simple terms).

I agree. But the the company who build the motion chair is going to bankrupt... they won't do anything.

On 9/1/2025 at 5:28 AM, draconus said:

Neither ED or your motion platform sw/hw can be reponsible for your safety.

I agree. But the company who build the motion chair is going to bankrupt, they don't answer anyone. And the company who develop SRS said ED is the one who can solve this by adding a simple basic "destroyed" event to the event list.

Edited 10 hours ago by skydenzy

[skydenzy]

On 9/3/2025 at 12:57 PM, NineLine said:

I would think the team building this chair would need to address this; if needed, they could reach out to us to discuss. But we cannot make changes for one piece of hardware without the ability to verify or confirm what is actually needed. 

Please @NineLine, adding this feature will cost you less than nine line of code!!

This requested feature it's not for that one specific hardware, it can be used with any other hardware, any other software like SRS... it's for general use, a simple event get fired when the player's fighter jet just get destroyed, it's very basic.

Btw, I already spent hours reading documentation, I found some "destroyed" event, but looks like works only for missions, not in multiplayer public servers.

Edited 10 hours ago by skydenzy

[SharpeXB]

On 9/1/2025 at 4:39 AM, Hiob said:

Actually, the firmware of the motion/ffb device should filter out unsafe telemetry.

I wonder if it simulates crashes in those racing sims accurately

[draconus]

6 hours ago, skydenzy said:

ED is the one who can solve this by adding a simple basic "destroyed" event to the event list

There already are "pilot dead" and aircraft "kill" events, at least in SP.

[Hiob]

1 hour ago, draconus said:

There already are "pilot dead" and aircraft "kill" events, at least in SP.

Next to those, I can imagine a couple of other variables in the telemetry that could be used to identify such an event. They should be available in MP (accel e.g.).

Shouldn't be hard to figure out how to detect a "kill" event by proxy if neccessary.  With reasonable accuracy.

VPforce did it for the Rhino (The stick used to jolt forward when hitting the ground - now it doesn't anymore). Maybe they could ask him for advise.

Edited 2 hours ago by Hiob
typo

[erniedaoage]

I simply can't stop thinking how much fun and immersion it has to be, when you get hit at 20k feet and spiral down in a 360° motion sim rig, trying to pull the eject handle.