Flight Simulator with an API

I would like to experiment with various control algorithms, currently I use FlightGear and connect over telnet but when it is running it is making my开发者_JAVA技巧 compter crawl. What I was wondering is are there any flight simulators that would allow me to plug my AI that are not as resource hungry?

If you're still there and interested after all this time:

Doesn't seem Flightgear is all that resource hungry (there are apparently issues with shaders etc on some graphics cards/drivers that can make it very slow). I'd suggest first checking that you're getting good performance without your telnet interface and tweaking Flightgear if not.

Second, IIRC, depending on what you want, you can use the actual aircraft simulation code (e.g. JSBSim) if you're only interested in flight dynamics, but not scenery etc.

Third: if you're on Windows, you could check if an older version of Microsoft Flight Simulator (e.g. FS2004) will fit your needs. If you have problems with FlightGear, I think running Microsoft FSX (the newest version) is out of the question.

Fourth: I have no experience with it, but you might want to look into interfacing with X-Plane and see if that meets your needs.