Wizzo

A second-monitor kneeboard for Falcon BMS, DCS World and IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles. It reads what the sim already writes, pulls in the matching charts, and turns your loadout into an employment reference -- automatically, every time you take a new mission.

Named after the WSO -- the one in the back seat working the charts, the nav and the stores while you fly.

Loadout -- every station, with employment detail	Steer -- the full route with times, headings and altitudes

DCS's own aeronautical chart for the terrain, cropped to the mission, with the route, numbered waypoints, airfields and bullseye drawn on it.

Runs as a small local web server, so the same board also opens on a tablet or phone over your LAN.

Only want it on another device?

Wizzo Server is the same board with the desktop half removed: no window, no installer, no GUI dependencies. It is the shape this project started as, kept as a separate option because it suits a different setup.

Reach for it if the board lives on a tablet rather than a second monitor, if you want it running as a service that starts with the machine, or if you want it in a container. It runs headless and on Linux, which this build does not. Both read the same files and show the same pages.

Same caveat as here, and it matters more there: it is for a network you trust. No password, no TLS, not for the internet.

Which sim it shows

The board opens on a sim chooser: one card per sim showing whether it was found, which mission it would read, when that was written, and which is newest. Click one and it pins the board to that sim and goes straight to the brief. H returns to the chooser at any time; the board pages keep their 1-8 shortcuts.

The chooser reads file stats only, never parsing a mission, so opening it is instant regardless of how many sims you have installed.

If you would rather the board follow whichever sim wrote a mission most recently, press the button below the nav until it reads (auto). It cycles auto → BMS → DCS → IL-2.

The three sims expose very different amounts of data, so what each page shows differs. See DCS support and IL-2 support for exactly what carries over.

Running it

The download

Grab the zip from Releases, unzip it anywhere, and run Wizzo.exe. No Python, no pip, no console -- the board opens in its own window.

About 20 MB to download, 39 MB unpacked. It writes nothing into its own folder: settings, the map caches and a log go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Wizzo, so the app folder can sit anywhere, including somewhere read-only, and deleting it leaves nothing behind but that one directory.

Windows will probably say the publisher is unrecognised. That is because the executable is not code-signed, which costs a few hundred dollars a year -- not because anything is wrong with it. Choose More info then Run anyway, or build it yourself from source with python packaging/build.py.

The window is the same board a browser shows, and the server is still running behind it, so a tablet or phone on the same network can open the address printed in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Wizzo\wizzo.log. F11 goes fullscreen in the window just as it does in a browser.

It is reachable from your network

The board serves on all interfaces by default, which is what lets a tablet on the same Wi-Fi open it. That also means anyone else on that network can, and what they would see is your mission: route, target, loadout, frequencies. On a home network that is the point. On a shared or public one it may not be, so bind it to the machine only:

python wizzo.py --host 127.0.0.1

There is no authentication, and adding some would be pretending the board is something it is not. It only ever reads; nothing it serves can change a game file.

If reading it on another device is the whole reason you are here, the window and the installer are dead weight: Wizzo Server is this without them, and can run as a service so it is already up when you sit down.

From source

Python 3.10 or newer -- the code uses X | None type syntax throughout. CI builds and tests on 3.13.

pip install -r requirements.txt

python wizzo.py

Then drag the browser window to your second monitor and press F11.

On Windows you can also just double-click start-wizzo.bat.

Run from source the board serves and opens a browser, as it always has. Pass --window to get the packaged build's desktop window instead, or --no-window in a packaged build to go back to a browser.

Where your games are

All three are found automatically -- BMS from the registry, DCS from the registry, IL-2 from Steam's own library list, each falling back to a scan of the usual folders. Most people never have to think about it.

When that misses, the board asks. The first time it runs it shows a Game folders panel listing what it found, what it did not, and a box for each one. After that the panel is behind Change game folders on the Home page, and it reappears by itself if nothing at all was found -- an empty board is almost always a path.

Each row can be pointed at a folder, set back to Find it automatically, or marked Not installed so the board stops looking for a game you do not own. Changes take effect immediately; there is nothing to restart. In the downloadable app there is a Browse… button with a real folder picker -- a browser cannot be given one, so there it is a text box.

A folder is checked before it is accepted, against files the board actually reads: Data\TerrData for BMS, Mods\terrains for DCS, data\Swf.gtp for IL-2. Pointing at the wrong game is rejected with the reason rather than accepted and turned into an empty board -- the obvious markers (Data, bin, data) are shared by all three, and checking those accepted a DCS folder as BMS and accepted IL-2 Sturmovik 1946, a different game from 2006, as IL-2 Great Battles.

From the command line, and taking priority over anything saved:

python wizzo.py --bms-path "D:\Falcon BMS 4.38"

--dcs-path and --il2-path do the same, as do the BMS_PATH, DCS_PATH and IL2_PATH environment variables. Order is command line, environment, what you saved in the board, then automatic discovery.

Other options: --port (default 5000), --host, --no-browser, --no-update, --check-update (report whether an update is waiting, then exit).

Keeping it up to date

The packaged build tells you, and lets you decide. On start it asks GitHub for the latest release, and if it is newer than what you are running the sidebar says so with a link. It does not download or replace anything by itself: swapping a running application's own folder is exactly the operation that turns a working install into a broken one, and a kneeboard that fails to open before a sortie is worse than one that is a version behind.

A git clone updates itself. On every start it checks GitHub, fast-forwards the working copy if there is something new, and relaunches on the updated version before serving anything. Push a change from anywhere -- including Claude Code on web from a phone -- and the next launch on the desktop picks it up.

The current version and commit are shown at the bottom of the sidebar.

This only works if the folder is a git clone. If you copied the files rather than cloning, there is no remote to update from; the sidebar will say not auto-updating.

Updating is deliberately cautious and never destructive. It is skipped, with the reason printed, when:

• there are uncommitted changes in the working copy -- your edits are never touched
• there are local commits that were not pushed, so a fast-forward is impossible
• GitHub is unreachable -- the board runs on what it has

Only fast-forward pulls are performed, so an update cannot rewrite history, discard a change, or leave a merge conflict behind. Skip the check entirely with --no-update.

If an update changes requirements.txt, the console says so and you should run pip install -r requirements.txt again.

Pages

Page	Contents
Home	The sim chooser -- status, current mission and timestamp for each sim
Brief	Flight, package, time on target, target, situation, package elements, roster, ROE, emergency procedures
Aircraft	IL-2: performance limits, engine modes, temperature limits and recommended control settings, from the sim's own data. BMS and DCS: their aircraft manuals, matched to your airframe
Loadout	Your stores with weights, missile ranges and expandable employment detail; laser-code panel
Steer	Full steerpoint table -- time, distance, heading, CAS, altitude, action, formation
Comms	Comm ladder alongside the actual UHF/VHF preset table, plus IFF and Link 16
Threats	Air and surface threat analysis, support assets with TACAN channels
Weather	Conditions at takeoff, target and landing
Charts	Approach plates auto-selected for your departure, recovery, alternate and target fields; all 89 KTO airfields browsable
Maps	BMS: theatre maps. DCS: the sim's own raster aeronautical chart for your terrain, cropped to the mission, with your route, waypoints, airfields and bullseye on it. IL-2: the sim's own planner map with your route, waypoints and airfields drawn on it

Keys 1-9 switch pages, H opens the sim chooser. R forces a reload. T switches theme.

On a portrait screen the nav moves to the top so the full width goes to content, the stat grids drop to two columns, and the chart viewer takes most of the remaining height -- approach plates are portrait, so a tall screen suits them.

Themes

Two palettes, toggled with the button under the nav or the T key:

• Amber night -- the default dark cockpit scheme.
• Paper day -- a light scheme for a lit room. Worth switching to when you are reading charts: the approach plates are white PDFs, so on the dark theme every chart is a bright rectangle in a dark frame.

The choice is stored per device in the browser, so a second monitor in a dark room and a tablet in a lit one can each keep their own. It is applied before the stylesheet paints, so a night-theme board never flashes white on load.

How it updates

The board polls the modification time of briefing.txt every two seconds and rebuilds when BMS rewrites it. Commit to a new mission and the board follows -- nothing to click.

Where the data comes from

Everything is read live from your own install; nothing is bundled or cached.

Data	Source
Mission brief, steerpoints, comms, IFF, Link 16, weather, ordnance	User\Briefings\briefing.txt
UHF/VHF radio presets	User\Briefings\dtc_comm.txt
Weapon weights and missile ranges	Data\TerrData\Objects\Falcon4_WCD.xml
Approach plates and airfield diagrams	Docs\03 KTO Charts\
Theatre maps	Docs\05 Maps\
Employment guidance, fuzing, laser applicability	bmskb/data/f16_stores.json (curated)

Charts are matched to your mission by ICAO code and airfield name -- the departure, recovery and alternate fields come from the comm ladder and emergency procedures, and the target field from the package mission line.

Things worth knowing

These are deliberate choices, not gaps waiting to be filled.

Laser codes are entered by hand. BMS sets them in the in-game DTC and does not write them to any exported file, so there is nothing to read. The laser panel is a reminder of what you set, validated against BMS's rules (1xyz, where each of x, y, z is 1-8). It does not read the jet. The panel highlights itself when your loadout actually contains a laser-guided weapon.

Missile ranges are game data; bomb ranges are not shown. Falcon4_WCD.xml holds a usable maximum range for missiles, which is displayed. For bombs it holds a campaign-engine placeholder of 0-2 that has nothing to do with release range, so it is suppressed rather than shown as a misleading figure. Bomb delivery guidance comes from the curated library instead.

Guidance types are not derived from the game files. WCD stores guidance as an integer that conflates ballistic bombs and GPS JDAMs under the same value, so any label built from it would be wrong. Guidance descriptions come from the curated library.

IFF rotation rows are shown as BMS writes them. BMS does not always emit the same number of values per row, so the rows are not zipped into aligned columns -- pairing a code against the wrong time block is worse than reading across a row.

Radio presets are checked for staleness. dtc_comm.txt is written independently of briefing.txt. If the two timestamps disagree by more than five minutes the board says so, because presets from a previous mission are worse than none.

Tank weights are dry weights. The stores total is airframe-external weight from the game files, not a fuel load.

The curated employment notes are planning guidance drawn from the BMS manuals and standard Viper procedures. They are a reference, not certified release tables.

DCS support

DCS exports nothing for external tools -- there is no equivalent of BMS's briefing.txt. Everything comes out of the mission .miz, which is a zip containing the mission as a Lua table.

Page	What DCS gives you
Brief	Mission briefing text, airframe, task, theatre, date, start time, time on target, plus fuel, flares, chaff and gun state
Loadout	Every station with the store on it and full employment detail for stores in the curated library
Steer	The full route: waypoint names, altitudes, speeds, ETAs, and computed leg distance and bearing
Comms	The aircraft's programmed preset channels, one block per radio, plus tanker and AWACS frequencies
Weather	Cloud base and thickness, wind at three altitudes, visibility, temperature, QNH
Charts	Kneeboard pages the mission generator embedded in the .miz (Retribution adds these; stock missions usually do not)
Threats	Nothing -- see below
Maps	The terrain's own raster aeronautical chart, cropped to your mission, with the route, numbered waypoints, airfields, your start and bullseye drawn on it

The theatre chart

DCS ships real 1:500,000-style aeronautical charts for each terrain -- relief, spot elevations, airspace boundaries, labelled coastlines -- as DXT-compressed tiles in Mods\terrains\<terrain>\RasterCharts. Two things are needed to put a flight plan on them, and the terrain files state both.

Where each tile sits. rasterCharts.sup5 is the scene index for the tiles: fixed 344-byte records, each carrying a world bounding box as six floats followed by the tile's name. Every record in all three installed terrains parses, and the boxes agree with a regular grid to the metre. This is read rather than inferred for a reason -- Syria's sheets happen to sit on a tidy 262,144 m grid from the origin and Caucasus's do not, so anything derived from the tile names would have been right on one terrain and wrong on another.

How mission coordinates map to the world. beacons.lua lists every beacon twice over: position in world metres and positionGeo in latitude and longitude. That is enough to solve the projection outright. DCS uses Transverse Mercator on WGS 84 at the UTM scale factor 0.9996, with the central meridian of the terrain's own UTM zone and a per-terrain false origin:

Terrain	Central meridian	False northing	False easting	Beacons	Worst residual
Syria	39°E	−3,879,866	+282,801	151	0.07 m
Caucasus	33°E	−4,998,115	−99,517	164	0.79 m
Persian Gulf	57°E	−2,894,933	+75,756	101	0.11 m

Sub-metre against the sim's own figures, with round-integer offsets and meridians exactly on the UTM zone -- an exact match rather than a fit. Nothing is hardcoded: each terrain is solved from its own beacon table on load, so a terrain never seen here works the same way, and the residual is reported on the page.

The whole theatre is never built. Syria at 32 m per pixel would be 390 megapixels, so only the tiles covering the route's bounding box plus a 30 km margin are stitched, at the finest resolution that covers the box without going over 44 megapixels. A typical sortie comes out around 5,000 px square, built in about a second and cached in a gitignored dcs_map_cache/ keyed on the game files' own modification times. Stitching never happens while the board is being assembled -- only when the image is actually requested -- so /api/state stays at 5-20 ms warm.

Placement is checked, not assumed. Every terrain also ships MissionGenerator\nodesMap.png, a land-and-water image exactly georeferenced by the bounds beside it. After a chart is stitched, its coastline is compared against that image where it is placed and at eight positions 20-35 km away, and the result is reported on the page. If a displaced position ever wins, the chart is not shown again -- the terrain outline is drawn instead and the page says why.

What is not done is score the overlap against a fixed threshold. The terrains draw their seas quite differently -- Syria's is a solid blue, Caucasus's is nearly white -- so the same colour test finds 52% of one and 12% of another, and a fixed threshold rejected a Caucasus chart that visibly lands on its own printed airfield symbols. Which position wins is a question that survives a mediocre colour test, because both sides of the comparison share it. Measured over twelve coastal areas across the three terrains, the stated position won every time.

When there is no chart. A terrain with no RasterCharts folder, no tile index, or no tiles covering the route falls back to that same land-and-water image, enlarged, with a latitude and longitude graticule, named places from the terrain's own towns.lua, a scale bar, and bearing and range from bullseye tabulated for every steerpoint. The page says which of the two it is showing and why.

What DCS deliberately does not show, and why

Weapon names come from a curated library, not the game files. DCS builds its own CLSID-to-name mapping by executing Lua at load time, so there is no table to read. Three extraction approaches were tried and all rejected: proximity matching reached 44% and mislabelled an ALQ-184 as a Soviet recon pod; enclosing-block matching reached 35% with conflicting answers; literal declaration arguments were accurate but covered only a handful. So names are hand-curated for the F/A-18C, A-10C and AV-8B N/A. Anything outside that is shown as its raw CLSID and flagged as having no reference data -- a wrong weapon name on a kneeboard is worse than an unresolved code.

No weights or ranges. Falcon4_WCD.xml gives BMS trustworthy per-store weights and missile ranges. DCS publishes no equivalent, so those fields stay empty rather than being invented.

No threat picture. A DCS mission lists every unit on the map, but nothing marks which are a threat to your route. Building a threat brief from that would be invention, not reading.

Only the airfields the terrain names are labelled on the map. Airfield positions and names come from the AIRPORT_HOMER entries in beacons.lua, which covers 23 of Syria's 76 airfields. The rest exist only in AirfieldsTaxiways, as per-airfield binary road-network files whose format is not established here, so they are left off rather than drawn as unnamed squares in guessed positions. The chart itself prints every airfield regardless -- the overlay adds names to the ones the sim states, and does not invent the others.

The chart is shown without a coordinate grid. In chart mode no graticule or place names are drawn, because the chart carries its own and a second set on top of them would be two grids to read. The graticule appears only in the fallback, where there is no printed one.

Wind is reported as the direction it comes from. DCS stores the direction the wind blows toward, rotated 180° from the convention the Mission Editor displays. The board converts it and says "from" in the value so the convention is explicit rather than assumed.

Only tanker and AWACS groups are listed as support. DCS group tasks do not reliably describe what a generated group does -- a BARCAP in the test mission was tagged Transport. Labelling the rest would be guesswork.

IL-2 support

IL-2 exports nothing and has no telemetry of any kind -- no shared memory, no UDP export. Everything comes from files it leaves on disk.

Career mode is fully supported. Scripted DLC campaigns are partially supported; see below.

Page	What IL-2 gives you
Brief	Mission title, flight callsign ("Finch 4"), airframe, date, takeoff time, theatre, the complete mission briefing, your flight's pilot roster, and spawn fuel and ammunition
Loadout	Every store with the game's own name, and a planned-versus-as-flown comparison
Steer	The route: waypoint names, altitudes, commanded speeds, formations, plus computed leg distance and bearing
Comms	Callsigns only -- see below
Weather	Five wind layers, cloud base and thickness, cloud preset, temperature, pressure, haze, turbulence, sea state. The richest weather of the three sims
Charts	Taxi diagrams for your departure and recovery fields, drawn from the mission's own coordinates
Threats	Nothing -- see below
Maps	Nothing -- IL-2 keeps terrain as packed data, not images

Where the loadout comes from

Unusually, IL-2's own weapon tables are readable, so store names come from the game itself rather than a curated file. The mission's PayloadId is an index into the aircraft's ammunition list inside Scripts.gtp, and the weapon codes in that list resolve against the name table in Swf.gtp. Both are read directly and cached in a gitignored il2_name_cache.json, keyed on the archives' size and modification time so a game patch rebuilds it automatically. The build takes about 0.15 seconds and reads roughly 8 MB of the 1.6 GB involved.

Coverage is 99.3% of every loadout string in the game; three drop-tank codes have no entry in IL-2's own table and are shown as raw codes.

Planned versus as flown

IL-2 never writes your chosen loadout back to the mission file. One career mission here was reused across five sorties with different loadouts each time. The mission file therefore holds only what the generator planned.

What you actually took off with is recorded in data\missionReport(...)[0].txt, which IL-2 writes when a mission starts. The board reads it, checks it really does belong to the mission on disk (four tests: the mission it names, its date, its time, and that it is not older than the mission file), and says which source it is showing. When they disagree, it says so and shows what you flew.

This depends on mission_text_log = 1 in data\startup.cfg, which is on by default. When it is off the board says so rather than presenting the planned loadout as fact.

What IL-2 deliberately does not show, and why

No weapon modifications or gun round counts. The mission file writes the modification bitmask as base-2 digits and the log writes the same value in decimal, but which end the digit string starts from is not confirmed -- and bit 0 is set either way, so a wrong reading would look entirely plausible while mislabelling every modification. Likewise, a payload label like SHKAS-AP-1500 carries a number, but whether it is per-gun or a total for the pair is not established. Both are extracted and cached, so surfacing them later is a display change; neither is displayed on a guess.

Wind direction is stated without a convention. The mission file gives a direction per altitude layer, but whether it is the direction the wind comes from or blows toward is not confirmed, so it is shown as the file states it.

No frequencies. IL-2 aircraft of this era have no tunable radio and the mission files carry none. Callsigns are resolved against the game's own callsign table; the preset, IFF and Link 16 panels are not rendered at all.

No threat picture. The mission file places every unit on the map but marks none as a threat to your route.

No estimated times. IL-2 records no ETA at any waypoint, so the time column is blank rather than derived from distance and speed.

Scripted campaigns are partial. DLC campaign missions are compiled into .cmpbin inside Campaigns.gtp -- a binary this cannot read -- so there is no route, weather or planned loadout for them. What is readable beside each mission is its briefing text and its briefing map image, and the sortie log still gives the as-flown loadout, so the board shows those and says what is missing. This path is built from the archive's structure but has not been exercised against a real campaign sortie.

PWCG is out of scope. Missions under data\Missions\PWCG are ignored so they cannot be picked up as the current mission.

Layout

wizzo.py                  entry point and Flask routes
start-wizzo.bat       double-click launcher
bmskb/
  install.py              BMS discovery (registry, env var, drive scan) and encoding handling
  briefing.py             briefing.txt parser
  dtc.py                  dtc_comm.txt radio preset parser
  weapons.py              WCD weapon data joined to the curated library
  charts.py               chart and map indexing, ICAO matching
  state.py                source selection, payload assembly, caching, validation
  selfupdate.py           safe fast-forward self-update on startup
  data/f16_stores.json    curated F-16 store reference
  dcs/
    install.py            DCS discovery and mission listing
    luaparse.py           parser for the Lua table dialect .miz files use
    mission.py            .miz reader, unit conversion, route geometry
    maps.py               terrain projection, raster chart index, stitching, cache
    weapons.py            CLSID lookup against the curated library
    source.py             DCS payload assembly
    data/dcs_stores.json  curated F/A-18C, A-10C and AV-8B store reference
  il2/
    install.py            IL-2 discovery, mission and sortie-log listing
    gtp.py                reader for IL-2's packed .gtp archives
    missionfile.py        targeted scanner for the mission text format
    localization.py       UTF-16 text files and the briefing-to-prose converter
    logs.py               sortie log reader and mission correlation
    reference.py          callsign and country tables from data\GUI
    extract.py            weapon-name extraction from the game's archives, cached
    weapons.py            payload lookup with honest unknowns
    mission.py            mission reader, route geometry, unit conversion
    source.py             IL-2 payload assembly, career and campaign
  paths.py                bundled resources vs the writable state folder
  desktop.py              free-port selection, the native window, folder picker
  simpaths.py             where each sim is installed, and checking it really is
templates/index.html      page shell
static/css, static/js     styling and renderer
packaging/
  build.py                builds and zips the double-click package
  wizzo.spec              PyInstaller spec
  make_icon.py            renders the .ico from the favicon's own path

Flask and Pillow to run from source; PyInstaller and pywebview only to build the package.

Theatres other than Korea

The briefing, loadout, comms and weather pages are theatre-independent. The chart and map pages read whatever is in your Docs tree, matching on ICAO and airfield name, so a theatre that follows the same Docs layout works without changes.

Support

If this saved you time, you can buy me a coffee.