MD11 - Issues and enhancements

[MatthewS 761]

IMHO the MD11 raises the bar for airliner simulation. Congratulations PMDG! If you can release the 737NG with the same level of performance, visual quality and systems modeling then I will purchase it without a second thought! (Maybe the same team that worked on the MD11 is working on the NG?)I've spent a few hours flying your MD11 and have some comments:-1) The autoflight system seems to initiate turns far too aggressively. The plane really seems to "jerk" into the turn for the first 1/4 second. By comparison the LDS767 is much smoother during the initial turn. To me it really breaks the "immersion" because its unnatural looking. In fact, when I turned off the autoflight and flew by hand and turned as fast as I could there was no jerkiness to the inital turn.2) I purchased the MD11 version of FS2crew and they mention in the manual that there is no SDK for the MD11 and so there are somethings they cant do such as read the VSpeeds. This means I need to manually set the VSpeeds in the FS2Crew panel which is a real pain. Could you write a text file that have the computed VSpeeds (and other info that might be useful for FS2crew). FS2crew could then read the speeds from this file and it would make FS2crew more integrated with the MD11.3) I really love the animated wipers and the wiper noise. Ive not tried flying through rain yet but I assume there is no "rain on the windscreen" noise. Would it be possible to detect if the aircraft is in rain and play a windscreen rain WAV file? You could have multiple rain files that play based on airspeed. So sitting parked the rain sound would be a little softer than when flying when the rain sound would be much louder. 4) How about ground roll noise when running over the runway lights?5) The FMS shortcuts menu is brilliant! How about adding support for the Jetway? I guess you could even let the user have custom actions in the shortcuts menu with a Ini file that has a "caption" and "keypress sequence" entries, that way users can add their own items to the shortcuts menu. If a third party simconnect client listens for a particular keypress then this would let the user control the client from the FMS menu.Anyway, just a few ideas... You have a real winner with the MD11! Congrats again.

[Tabs 2,790]

Matthew,1. EDIT - see Markus's answer below, I was wrong.2. I can ask about adding something like this. Bryan from FS2Crew is on our test team.3. Can ask as well.4. I think we do have groundroll noise, but I'm not sure there's any way to specifically detect when you're over certain types of pavement etc.5. Can ask about this as well.Thanks for the suggestions!

[mburkhard 23]

Matthew,1)This is a known issue for turns initiated with the heading selector. Fixing this just didn't make the release due to more important items. Ryan must have missed those mails concerning this issue but this is understandable since we had more than a hundred e-mails a day in the last two weeks before release... But the issue is noted in the bug tracking database.3)FSX has its own rain sound. As far as I know this can't be turned off so implementing an MD-11 type rain sound would lead to a double rain sound. However I'm not 100% sure about this so Michael or Armen need to confirm...Markus

[MatthewS 761]

>>1. EDIT - see Markus's answer below, I was wrong.That's great its on the list! It's the only thing I find inferior to the mighty LDS 767. >>2. I can ask about adding something like this. Bryan from>FS2Crew is on our test team.Maybe Bryan could give you a list? There seem to be a number of things that FS2crew MD11X would like to read but can't due to lack of SDK. So maybe this text file solution is the easiest way to give FS2crew some of the info it needs.Ideally, it would be good if SimConnect would let clients (eg PMDG MD11) "publish" properties (both readonly and writable) which can be read/written by other SimConnect clients (eg FS2Crew MD11X). This would provide a seemless/consistent way for clients to communicate with each other. Imagine how detailed FS2Crew MD11X could become if it had better access to the PMDG MD11 internals via this SimConnect interfacing. Maybe PMDG and FS2Crew could ask Microsoft to provide this type of functionality in SimConnect2. Surely they would listen to developers of the caliber of PMDG and FS2Crew!PMDG congratulations again. I can see the MD11 providing many hours of entertainment over the next couple of years. FS2Crew congratulations for FS2Crew MD11X! A great addon for a great plane!