wysiwyng / wthud

Head-up Display for additional War Thunder data

wthud

Notice

This project is obsolete. It has been superseeded by a new implementation in C# / .Net / Windows Forms. See here: https://github.com/wysiwyng/wthud2. No further updates will be published here.

Description

Head-up Display for additional War Thunder air battle data. Written in Python 3.7+, uses data exposed by War Thunder on localhost:8111. The shown data is configurable per aircraft.

Compatible only with Windows! Transparency is handled by the window manager / compositor in most Linux distros, and is therefore neither easy nor portable to handle.

You need a python distribution for Windows, as it is not installed by default. A good choice is e.g. Miniconda.

Installation (Development builds)

1. Download the latest zip package here (chose the file wthud.zip)
2. Unzip the package wherever
3. Run wthud.exe

Installation (From source)

1. Clone / Download this repo
2. Install python dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Run python wthud.py

Usage

1. Complete installation as above
2. Configure War Thunder to run in either windowed or borderless mode
3. Join an air battle or start a test flight
4. All available telemetry data is loaded into the config screen once the match starts, also a basic minimal default HUD is loaded
5. For custom per-aircraft configuration, change the parameters in the config UI:
   • Checkbox enables a variable
   • First text entry sets the display name in the HUD
   • Second text entry sets a unit shown behind the data value
   • Third text entry sets a format string for the data, see here
6. Save your custom configuration with the Save Config button
7. Once a new battle starts, wthud tries to load a saved HUD configuration for the new aircraft. If none is found, the default configuration is loaded
8. Change HUD position using X and Y spinboxes on the bottom of the config GUI

Advanced Usage

You can edit the HUD configurations manually, they are saved in a JSON format inside the configs folder. You can also replace the default HUD by editing the corresponding file.

Implementation Details

War Thunder exposes craft telemetry data on a web interface at localhost:8111 during air battles. This data can be looked at on a second screen in a quite awkward GUI. This project aims to make the presented information more useful by overlaying select telemetry data directly on the game window, similarly to the already present (but limited) data.

Data is collected from the in-game webserver using the requests library and displayed on screen with a transparent, undecorated Tk window. The data to be shown can be configured individually per aircraft, and is saved between sessions in json files residing inside the configs folder.

Usage Disclaimer

This tool is neither sponsored, endorsed or otherwise approved by Gaijin Entertainment. It merely presents readily available data in a comfortable manner. Use at your own risk, at the time of writing similar tools were more or less "tolerated" when asked about on Gaijin's forums. No liability will be held by the authors should this and similar tools be the reason for the ban or termination of your War Thunder account.

This tool was only properly tested with a handful of planes from the German tech tree. Other planes might be broken in this tool, please report your issue in the GitHub issues tab.

Contributions

Pull Requests and issues are welcome, expect a slow response as this project is developed in the free time of volunteers.

TODO / Future Features

• Change order of shown items
• Position shown items individually
• Logging
• Better UI framework, possibly Qt
• General UI cleanup (WIP)
• Code cleanup / documentation (WIP)
• Cross-platform support (possibly impossible)
• Extension interface for calculated telemetry data (WIP)
• Make telemetry interface asynchronous (WIP)

License

This program is licensed under a GNU GPL v3 license, see COPYING for details.