DCS-TS provides native Javascript scripting and TypeScript support within the DCS mission environment. DCS-TS is built using a native Lua module written in Rust which embeds the Deno runtime. User scripts run within a separate thread embedded within the DCS server, and communicate with the Lua mission scripting environment via asynchronous functions.

• Deno Runtime provides you with a modern and extremely powerful language runtime.
• Custom TypeScript SDK gives you a best-in-class editing experience with editor tooling, type checking, auto-documentation, and more.
• Rich Debugging allows you to diagnose and experiment at runtime via the Chrome web inspector, attached directly into your running DCS server.
• Reloading reload your scripts as required, either for fast development or to hotfix issues without disrupting players.

• catfacts.ts adds a command to the in-game F10 menu for receiving a random cat fact
• http.ts provides an example embedded http server which interacts with the running DCS server
• scramble.ts scrambles AI aircraft when players reach pre-defined distances from captured air-fields

• Getting Started Guide
• SDK Patterns
• FAQ

DCS-TS is based off the work in DCS-gRPC/rust-server, which supports embedding a rust DLL and associated functionality within the DCS Lua environment. Instead of using this to provide an external API surface like DCS-gRPC, DCS-TS embeds an instance of the Deno Javascript runtime (based on v8). To communicate between Lua and Deno DCS-TS implements "tasks" which are asynchronous Lua function calls made from Javascript, and "channels" which provide one-ended communication either from or too the Lua environment.

On top of these abstractions and Deno a TypeScript SDK is provided which allows type-safe and clearly documented interaction with the DCS MSE functionality.

The Deno runtime within DCS-TS is ran via a separate system thread and utilizes polling from Lua to process pending tasks and channel messages. This results in quite good performance, and allows you to off-load a lot of processing and logic from the DCS engine itself. Unfortunately this comes with a caveat based on limitations within the DCS engine itself. The scheduled function feature within the MSE is quite inaccurate and will regularly experience hitches of 10-40ms. This means some thought must be taken when designing abstractions which you want to perform quickly:

// This will perform badly, as the await calls are lineally sequenced.
const updatedUnits = [];
for (const unit of units) {
  updatedUnits.push(await getUnit(unit));
}

// using Promise.all we can ensure operations into the scripting environment get
//  batched efficiently
const updatedUnits = await Promise.all(units.map((it) => getUnit(it)));

DCS-TS is written in rust and when possible attempts to avoid potential program crashes. Additionally Lua itself guards against program faults when calling into remote DLLs, which prevents the DCS server from crashing if there is a bug in DCS-TS.

1. Download the latest release and unpack the zip somewhere on your local disk, it should contain two files ts-init.lua and dcs_ts.dll.
2. Edit the Scripts\MissionScripting.lua file contained within your DCS server data directory, generally this is in Saved Games\DCS.openbeta_server:

dofile('Scripts/ScriptingSystem.lua')
+  dofile([[C:\Users\dcs\Documents\dcs-ts\ts-init.lua]])

3. Create a configuration file at Config/ts.json within your DCS server data directory:

{
  // whether to enable development features like the inspector server
  "development": true,

  // whether to enable debug logging
  "debugging": true,

  // optionally we can provide the path to the bundled sdk we're using, which will
  //  export all the available functions for use within the chrome inspector.
  "sdk_path": "C:\\Users\\dcs\\Documents\\build\\sdk.js",

  // path to scripts that will be loaded on initialization
  "scripts": [
    "C:\\Users\\dcs\\Documents\\dcs-ts\\build\\project.js"
  ]
}

To configure your development environment simply clone the repository and create a link from the res/dcs_ts.dll directory pointing at target/debug/dcs_ts.dll. Then follow the normal installation procedure with the ts-init.lua file contained in res/. You will need to shutdown DCS when rebuilding the DLL.