Click here for a better way to handle briefings.

If you've played Falcon BMS (or other flight sims), you know how convenient it is to have all the flight information, basically the briefing, displayed on a device (real pilots use kneeboards). Before I started doing it this way, I used to just take a picture of the briefing with my phone, which was a pretty ghetto solution. Now I've found a cleaner way to display the actual briefing file.

It boils down to: run a HTTP server serving the directory where the briefing files get saved and then open the page with a web browser on your phone/tablet. For maximum convenience the HTTP server should run automatically when you start Falcon BMS.

On Linux distributions, I'd just use the Python HTTP server module (python -m http.server inside the desired directory). For Windows you can probably find plenty of simple HTTP servers and I used MiniWeb.

Then you can create a small Batch file to start it alongside Falcon BMS.

@ECHO OFF
start "Briefing" "C:\location_of_miniweb\miniweb.exe" -r "C:\Program Files\Falcon BMS 4.35\User\Briefings"
start /b "" "C:\Program Files\Falcon BMS 4.34\Bin\x64\Falcon BMS.exe"

You can change a few options for the briefings in the Falcon BMS config editor. You need to check the "Briefing Output to File" option for obvious reasons. I turned off the "Append new Briefings" options, because I want a separate file for each mission. You also probably want to turn on the "HTML Briefings" options to get a prettier output.

Run the game, go to your campaign, open the Briefing screen and hit the "Print" button in the upper right corner. Then open a web browser on your phone and navigate to the address you're serving the page at (example: 192.168.1.100:8000). Click on a file with the briefing and you should have a really neat display of all the useful information for the mission.

Apart from the HTTP server, I also run all the other utilities together with the Batch file above: OpenTrack for headtracking and VoiceMacro for voice commands.