If you think you have found something that's not working.........

[Helix1250 3]

I just tested this at EGKK, I set up Nav 1 and 2 to ILS and set course for 26L. I looked at the FO HGS display it showed TO. which was right, I then proceeded to take off and I had none of the call outs you had Stuart. 

Rob

[STUART_H 12]

Strange, not sure what's going on? Will check again on my next flight. 

You can hear what happened in this video. Takeoff is around 15:54 minutes into the video. 

Stuart

[Helix1250 3]

Yeah I watched the video yesterday, I thought it was a bit odd when I could hear  the call outs and also the ILS identifier 

[medianet 0]

On 4/1/2017 at 7:06 AM, FS++ said:

As for the Go-Flight feature. It works with Native ATC only.

It is designed for VFR flight, without any flight plan loaded.

Not sure what MCE version you're on. Suggest you update to latest V2.7.0.6 anyway.

I've updated to the latest version, and restored the factory settings as you suggested.

I only use native ATC, and only fly VFR (no flight plan loaded). I tested the Go-Flight feature again tonight, and it still doesn't seem to be doing any sort of drilling-down to find the airport for arrival (I end up having to speak "Select 2, Select 1" etc.). My procedure before setting up for an arrival at an airport is to cancel flight following and then dial in the frequency of the tower/unicom of the arrival airport on the Go-Flight console - is there anything else I need to do besides that, or perhaps I should follow a different procedure? What is it that MCE wants to see (or hear) before it performs the ATC airport menu check?

 

Thanks,

Michael

[FS++ 708]

8 hours ago, medianet said:

I've updated to the latest version, and restored the factory settings as you suggested.

I only use native ATC, and only fly VFR (no flight plan loaded). I tested the Go-Flight feature again tonight, and it still doesn't seem to be doing any sort of drilling-down to find the airport for arrival (I end up having to speak "Select 2, Select 1" etc.). My procedure before setting up for an arrival at an airport is to cancel flight following and then dial in the frequency of the tower/unicom of the arrival airport on the Go-Flight console - is there anything else I need to do besides that, or perhaps I should follow a different procedure? What is it that MCE wants to see (or hear) before it performs the ATC airport menu check?

 

Thanks,

Michael

It is vital for MCE to constantly read the native ATC menu content. Otherwise it wouldn't be aware of much and more importantly would just play darts by sending key strokes and hoping for he best.

Assuming Windows isn't blocking interaction between "mce" and "fsx.exe" or "Prepar3D.exe, here is how you can check MCE is getting ATC info.

Because recorded human voices cannot speak unpredictable text, you have to temporarily switch to a TTS voice.

Go to <Command> tab in MCE UI and click <Change> button next to assigned Fo voice.

In voice assignment panel click "TTS voices" at the top, pick one up from the list and click OK to assign it.

With a TTS voice as your FO, trigger changes manually to the ATC menu and keep asking Fo "confirm ATC options" or "what about ATC options". He/she should be able to read aloud the content of ATC window all the time.

The GoFlight feature would typically pick-up "nearest airport list", select it, wait for the next airport list", compare current VHF freq to all known frequencies for those airports. If no match, it triggers option "airports farther from you" and checks again, until it eventually finds the nearby airport that has the relevant frequency and then selects it so you can just start transmitting without having to go through the menu fiddling.

Confirm at least MCE is getting data as expected.

 

 

[medianet 0]

15 hours ago, FS++ said:

With a TTS voice as your FO, trigger changes manually to the ATC menu and keep asking Fo "confirm ATC options" or "what about ATC options". He/she should be able to read aloud the content of ATC window all the time.

The FO was able to read everything that was in the ATC menu (even when the ATC window was closed). This includes all airports listed in the "Nearest Airport List", as long as I manually chose that list first.

15 hours ago, FS++ said:

The GoFlight feature would typically pick-up "nearest airport list", select it, wait for the next airport list", compare current VHF freq to all known frequencies for those airports. If no match, it triggers option "airports farther from you" and checks again, until it eventually finds the nearby airport that has the relevant frequency and then selects it so you can just start transmitting without having to go through the menu fiddling.

I did not see any evidence of this happening whatsoever when I cancelled flight following and tuned to the appropriate airport frequency.

Even though I use the native ATC feature, I fly with a non-default aircraft (the Scansim Piper Pa-28-140 Cherokee Cruiser) - would that cause any sort of issues? I would assume that if the FO can read everything in the menu, that the other MCE ATC processes shouldn't have an issue.

 

Michael

 

[FS++ 708]

9 hours ago, medianet said:

The FO was able to read everything that was in the ATC menu (even when the ATC window was closed). This includes all airports listed in the "Nearest Airport List", as long as I manually chose that list first.

I did not see any evidence of this happening whatsoever when I cancelled flight following and tuned to the appropriate airport frequency.

Even though I use the native ATC feature, I fly with a non-default aircraft (the Scansim Piper Pa-28-140 Cherokee Cruiser) - would that cause any sort of issues? I would assume that if the FO can read everything in the menu, that the other MCE ATC processes shouldn't have an issue.

 

Michael

 

OK, I think it may have to do with your usage scenario. I mean disabling all MCE features except ATC. A scenario that isn't well tested to be honest.

 

Suggest you re-enable the crew coordination feature, as well as the "Call-outs and monitoring" feature, then fly that way and see if the auto-selection is working. You can ignore copilot completely.

We'll have a look at what might be preventing it. But will wait for your confirmation first.

Edited.

 

[medianet 0]

On 4/6/2017 at 7:02 AM, FS++ said:

We'll have a look at what might be preventing it. But will wait for your confirmation first.

It looks like that did the trick - thanks Gerald

When you click on the "Command" tab, there's a slider titled "Volume" in the "Speech Settings" section. If I set that slider all the way down to "mini", will that mute (or at least lower the volume of) the copilot's voice?

 

Michael

[FS++ 708]

10 hours ago, medianet said:

It looks like that did the trick - thanks Gerald

When you click on the "Command" tab, there's a slider titled "Volume" in the "Speech Settings" section. If I set that slider all the way down to "mini", will that mute (or at least lower the volume of) the copilot's voice?

 

Michael

OK, will see if it's possible to make that feature totally independent and only works when ATC feature is enabled. 

You may not even need to enable the crew coordination feature. Try using the "Call-outs and monitoring feature" only. If not mistaken that Go-flight feature is considered part of monitoring.

Reducing volume will only get it down to 50% (slider fully to the left)

[medianet 0]

13 hours ago, FS++ said:

Try using the "Call-outs and monitoring feature" only.

I didn't have any luck with the above-mentioned setting on my latest test flight just now, but I'm not going to say it's not working yet (details below).

Have you had any reports of strange interactions between MCE and the native ATC window within P3D (for example, the ATC window randomly closing and opening, or the MCE PTT button closing the ATC window when pressed, and then having the ATC window open again when the PTT button is released)? Within the MCE program under "ATC", the "Auto-hide the ATC Window" checkbox is unchecked, so I would assume that's not the problem. I DO have another button on my yoke mapped to open and close the ATC window when pressed, however, the successful test from last night was a two hour flight (and I opened and closed the ATC window many times during that flight) during which time there were no ATC window irregularities whatsoever. The test flight with the strange ATC window activity was relatively short, and it reared it's head before takeoff (FWIW, I did have this ATC window issue crop up during another short flight about a week ago). Strangely, during the process of the ATC window opening and closing (in this example, no buttons are pressed and the window seems to open and close at about two second intervals), some of my PTT voice commands are recognized and responded to correctly, but the basic non-PTT commands ("Select 1", "Select 2", etc.) seem to stop being responded to whatsoever by MCE once the strange ATC window behavior begins.

Michael

[FS++ 708]

11 hours ago, medianet said:

I didn't have any luck with the above-mentioned setting on my latest test flight just now, but I'm not going to say it's not working yet (details below).

Have you had any reports of strange interactions between MCE and the native ATC window within P3D (for example, the ATC window randomly closing and opening, or the MCE PTT button closing the ATC window when pressed, and then having the ATC window open again when the PTT button is released)? Within the MCE program under "ATC", the "Auto-hide the ATC Window" checkbox is unchecked, so I would assume that's not the problem. I DO have another button on my yoke mapped to open and close the ATC window when pressed, however, the successful test from last night was a two hour flight (and I opened and closed the ATC window many times during that flight) during which time there were no ATC window irregularities whatsoever. The test flight with the strange ATC window activity was relatively short, and it reared it's head before takeoff (FWIW, I did have this ATC window issue crop up during another short flight about a week ago). Strangely, during the process of the ATC window opening and closing (in this example, no buttons are pressed and the window seems to open and close at about two second intervals), some of my PTT voice commands are recognized and responded to correctly, but the basic non-PTT commands ("Select 1", "Select 2", etc.) seem to stop being responded to whatsoever by MCE once the strange ATC window behavior begins.

Michael

That is intentional (by design).

In order to make sure MCE has the latest ATC options, it needs to be refreshed regularly.

When you hold PTT down, the window will pop-up, ensuring MCE can retrieve very latest options (takes a few milliseconds), then assuming auto-hide is on, the window will close. And when an option is to be selected, the ATC window must be brought to view. 

Even with "auto-hide", should you need to check the window, just say "show ATC" and MCE will assume you temporarily need it. "Auto-hide" functionality will resume after saying "hide ATC"

To prevent cheat commands "Select 1", "select 2" which may accidentally trigger menus in other windows that expect keys, 1, 2, 3 etc... the ATC window must be visible.

At some point, you'll become comfortable with Native ATC VFR operation. You could then reduce the ATC  window to its smallest size and not have to peek at its content.

Edit: Try removing assigned joystick button that emulates key " ' " for handling ATC window.

[flytriman 22]

Did a new PC build a little ago and since then if I want to assign a Flight Plan in the UI, it goes to my "E" drive to look.  All my flight plans are in their FSX default location on the "C" drive.  Opened up my MCE.cfg file to see if there was a way to assign where MCE would look for the flight plans and found, under "FlightPlansPath" that it was blank.  So I typed in the path to my flight plans on the "C" drive, but MCE still goes to my "E" drive.

Please let me know how I can get MCE to look in the proper directory.

Thanks,

 

 

[FS++ 708]

8 hours ago, flytriman said:

Did a new PC build a little ago and since then if I want to assign a Flight Plan in the UI, it goes to my "E" drive to look.  All my flight plans are in their FSX default location on the "C" drive.  Opened up my MCE.cfg file to see if there was a way to assign where MCE would look for the flight plans and found, under "FlightPlansPath" that it was blank.  So I typed in the path to my flight plans on the "C" drive, but MCE still goes to my "E" drive.

Please let me know how I can get MCE to look in the proper directory.

Thanks,

 

 

Are you using Native ATC , PF3 or Radar Contact ATC??

FS9, FSX or P3D?

That entry in config file was meant for PF3 or RC4, when user has FPLNs on a networked machine.

 

[flytriman 22]

5 hours ago, FS++ said:

Are you using Native ATC , PF3 or Radar Contact ATC??

FS9, FSX or P3D?

That entry in config file was meant for PF3 or RC4, when user has FPLNs on a networked machine.

 

I'm using FSX Native ATC...Not any of those others.

I'm in FSX.

Guess that explains why it didn't work.

So how do I get it to look in my default FSX Flight Plans location instead of the "E" drive?

Thanks,

[FS++ 708]

58 minutes ago, flytriman said:

I'm using FSX Native ATC...Not any of those others.

I'm in FSX.

Guess that explains why it didn't work.

So how do I get it to look in my default FSX Flight Plans location instead of the "E" drive?

Thanks,

Normally, with FSX & FS9, MCE should automatically pick-up the flight plan you loaded within FSX (assuming it's default FSX (or FS9) format.

Eventually, try reloading flight plan while MCE is running.