SP1 Beta Preview - Weather Radar into ATL

[KriVa 307]

Frankly...If the way you act in real life resembles the way you act here, you should be told off for it.

What part of Kyle's explanation don't you understand, exactly?

 

PMDG doesn't owe you, or me, or anyone, a target date. What they do "owe" us, is a Service Pack. That SP will be released when it's ready, not sooner not later.

Just because you're vocal, doesn't make you right.

[AirborneZed 168]

Thanks for the pics Kyle. Greatly Appreciated

 

 

A request IF possible. I've been wondering on how the WXR depicts light precip. As in large areas with light rain/overcast.

[tecboy99 0]

 

 

shoutout to Jimmy Reistad, who I pestered a bit after departing IAD

Whoo hoo! I made the cut.  :lol:  I cant wait for this bird. Thanks for the update Kyle!

[Don t moderate me this way 882]

I might possibly hug a number of people in this thread, including Kyle, but except for one person.   :rolleyes:

[pinlifter 502]

 

 

but except for one person.

 

Any hints Ollie :rolleyes:

[Tabs 2,790]

Thank you for your long and nice answer. So where are we now on the SP1?

 

 

Was bombarded with "target dates" which PMDG doesn't seem to have and I told them "it will be ready once its ready" taking a page out of the standard PMDG answers here on the forum. No guesses of what their reply was. So without any target dates, PMDG`s SP1 release might well be at the 1st anniversary or even later at the rate things are going. I told my boss I will finish by September this year and he told me July. So I told him it will be ready when its ready and I had a 2 hours lecture from him.

 

I think that it is the lack of transparency and targets to be set by PMDG that is frustrating not just me but many on the forum. I guess I am just more vocal than most as I have tried some of the tactics employed by PMDG in real life and was told off for it.

 

There is no "target date" - it's done when it's done. That is the honest truth. I'm being as "transparent" as I possibly can here - if we and our test teams were happy with it you'd have had it earlier. We are not happy with it yet.

 

One of the major things that we're doing right now is rewriting our autopilot code to better handle heavy turbulence since we assume everyone's going to go intentionally fly into it now that they have a radar with which to find it reliably. This is not easy - FSX's turbulence model does not match what real world turbulence looks like on a graph and we're having to do some very difficult mathematical tricks to try and filter the garbage out and make the AFDS hold path despite being knocked around by 2+G accelerations 10+ times per second.

 

The biggest complaint here post-release has been the FBW system inaccuracies - that's been completely redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up and behaves as close to the real thing as it possibly can in the FSX environment now. Again, this was not easy - we could have "faked" this, but we've instead gone to the trouble of essentially writing our own virtual flight model and control laws on top of FSX, which is exactly how the C*U control law algorithm in the real airplane works. It's a system that simulates the characteristics of a normal mechanically linked aircraft on top of an Airbus-style FBW system on top of FSX's normal flight modelling. Not easy to do in the slightest - it took months of work to get this right and it's still being tweaked right now. We've added a whole bunch of "assists" for the desktop sim environment with this system too including an option that displays the current trim reference speed on the PFD speed tape to help visualize what the system is doing, and options to control FBW sensitivity, control force loading (you feel the elevator get less effective as you get out of trim) and deadzone to account for differences in range and force preset in different user hardware etc. This is a serious overhaul - we didn't just pay lip service to the idea that there was a problem here in the original release.

 

Add to that the creation of the wx radar, the modelling of the company datalink and the huge list of smaller improvements and bug fixes and you have your explanation as to why it's taken "so long." This is a bigger update than all of the NGX updates we released combined in the year after that product released. I realize having to wait so long sucks, but we wanted to make this good - you're not getting some minor update here where you won't see any difference vs. the original release.

[Veracity 8]

Looking good!  That weather radar is wicked!  I was using the ASN map to thread around some weather on approach to VHHH a few days ago and got my first  "BOOO-BEEP "WINDSHEAR WINDSHEAR".... Oh, man... that made the whole flight for me right there! Honestly, I think I welled a tear.

 

Exciting times (and weather) ahead! Thanks for the update!

 

Cheers!

[AirborneZed 168]

^

^

 

Now that's transparency.

 

Thanks Ryan!

[Veracity 8]

 

 

Add to that the creation of the wx radar, the modelling of the company datalink and the huge list of smaller improvements and bug fixes and you have your explanation as to why it's taken "so long."

 

Will we be able to pull ATIS information from the datalink?

[Boeing or not going 578]

This looks great but even the little things count. Can you put the selcal in the registration card of the virtual cockpit for all the default repaints?

[Nyxx 6,993]

Thanks Kyle.

[Tabs 2,790]

Will we be able to pull ATIS information from the datalink?

 

No - from the new manual:

 

"In SP1 we have simulated the FMC company datalink functionality. This functionality is described in detail in the provided documentation in the FCOM2 on pages 11.34.1-11.34.12 (pages 925-936 of the PDF). This includes RTE, FLT NO, PERF INIT, WIND DATA, DES FORECAST, ALTN, ALTN WX and ALTN LIST uplinks and RTE REPORT and POS REPORT downlinks. The optional TAKE OFF datalink functionality is not presently modelled in the PMDG 777 product line."

 

This is *not* the EICAS COMM page stuff (CPDLC, ACARS etc) that you control with the cursor. That's something we want to do but it's a much bigger project and we'll need the SDK for the new VATSIM client etc when it comes out to do that stuff.

 

This looks great but even the little things count. Can you put the selcal in the registration card of the virtual cockpit for all the default repaints?

 

This is not happening sorry - too much work to go back and modify every livery at this point. A lot of them we have no way of knowing what the code is anyway because there's no pictures from the cockpit of that aircraft. You can add them yourself if you want by modifying that texture file.

[Boeing or not going 578]

Ok I will modify them. Not very difficult to find the selcal though, for example, here is F-GUOC done by searching google selcal f-guoc

 

http://www.selcal.co.uk/02052014.txt

[A320FAN 370]

Nice update...Great shots! It will be ready for the month of June ?

[scandinavian13 5,192]

 

 

It will be ready for the month of June ?

 

PMDG doesn't give release dates.  It'll release when it's ready.