Beginners Guide to Systems Coding¶
Note from the developers
This guide is still under development. There may be grammatical errors and typos present. If you find either, please write a commit to appropriately resolve them.
Welcome to the DCS World Beginners Guide to Systems Coding!
For a long time, we’ve seen rapid growth in the DCS modding communty. Many modders have begun creating flyable aircraft that utilise their own 3D models, weapon loadouts and flight models. But out of all these new mods, only a mere fraction of them have what we call an External Systems Model. (ESM) ESMs are responsible for allowing developers to write their own systems code in their mod, such as animating the movement of landing gears, implementing weapon systems and having working avionics.
Instead of calling this the “Beginners Guide to ESM Development,” we’re going to keep it nice, sweet and short with calling it “systems coding”. The goal of this guide is to educate DCS modders how to develop custom systems and incorporate them into their mods. Going headfirst into systems coding can be frightening at first, so it is our mission to make easily digestible for beginners.
Looking at getting started? Check out our Quickstart guide.
Prerequisites¶
Before you can get started coding systems into your DCS mods, there are a set of prerequisites that we expect everyone who reads the guide to pass:
You must have a basic understanding of creating a mod structure. It’s important to understand how to design the architecture of your mod’s codebase.
You need to have a basic understanding of programming. This is an absolute requirement for systems coding. If you don’t know how to code, you won’t know how to work around and solve problems in your system scripts.
Lacking an understanding or skillset in 3D animating is detrimental to writing animation-based systems code. Here is a good starting point for learning how to animate 3D models for DCS World.