MetaRefCard

A tool to generate reference cards for HOTAS (hands on throttle and stick) and game controllers. MetaRefCard is designed to be flexible across many different controllers and many different games.

Hosted at mrc.metadawn.com

Here are some example images:

Flight Simulator 2020 - Alpha Flight Controls

Star Wars Squadrons - Saitek X-55

Running MetaRefCard yourself

Debug mode

If you start MetaRefCard with a -d flag, it will run in debug mode. In this mode, you will get extra debugging messages and Go's pprof tool will be enabled. You can also pass the -t flag followed by a dir name to read test game input files from. This will also enable /test/$GAME endpoints that pre-generate images for supported controllers. These endpoints are useful for testing, performance benchmarking and more.

Production mode

MetaRefCard will default to running on port 8080 but this value can be overriden with the PORT variable.

MetaRefCard code

MetaRefCard is written in Go and is a web application.

Building

Since this is a Go application, running go build . will compile the application but this relies on a dependency to libjpeg-turbo (details below). Therefore, a build script build.sh has been provided to setup the right paths. MetaRefCard also can be built to a container image with the Dockerfile provided simply with docker build .

Build Dependencies

The libjpeg-turbo C library is used for fast jpg decoding/encoding. On Ubuntu/Debian, install libjpeg-turbo-dev - sudo apt install libjpeg-turbo8-dev. On Arch/Manjaro, this package is part of the minimal install.

Directories

config - runtime configuration. config.yaml is the main configuration file. Each package has their own config files too. metarefcard - almost all of the go code for MetaRefCard. resources - runtime resource files like fonts, web templates, static web files, game logos and generated hotas images. resources-source-source - contains the source files used to generate resources testdata - sample game input files used for testing. tools - scripts to benchmark endpoints

Go Packages

The entry package is metarefcard. Within this package is another package called common as well as a package for each game that is supported. For example Flight Simulator 2020 is under fs2020 and Star Wars: Squadrons is under sws. common contains code that is shared across all the game packages.

Generate HOTAS & logo images

Convert and resize high resolution source resources into configured sizes for MetaRefCard. Source images are found in resources-source/hotas-images and resources-source/game-logos. They exported to resources/hotas_images and resources/game_logos respectively. Many of these hotas images were created by EDRefCard and MetaRefCard is very grateful for these.

Dependencies

• Inkscape - sudo apt install inkscape
• Imagemagick - sudo apt install imagemagick

Running the script

Command: generateHotasImages.py

Generate devices model

Generates a yaml file based on resources-source/edrefcard/bindingsData.py that MetaRefCard can read. These bindings are thanks to EDRefCard! MetaRefCard uses these bindings to generate configs for some controllers but also has its own device configs in config/devices.yaml

Dependencies

Install modules - pip3 install pyyaml

Running the script

Command: generateControllerInputs.py