Operations Centre - Suggestions and Potential Bug?

[craig_read 43]

Hi,

 

Before I start this is quite minor but I thought you might be able to look into it as a developer if you happened to be home alone and the TV was broken.

 

Potential Bug?:  Whilst having to do a complete re-install (because windows decided to turn itself inside out) I was re-installing my PMDG aircraft into P3D v3.1 and using the operations centre (which I really like actually).  I was adding my liveries in the 737 liveries section, selecting download, and queing them up for install.  The process was working fine, while that was going on I thought I'll do the 777 liveries too so went to that page and the Operations centre crashed and I had to restart.  Thought I'd mention it, it wasn't a big deal as everything worked fine once I restarted.

 

Suggestion 1: I like some people like to have all the liveries loaded, disk space isn't a premium on my machine and I install the lot so I can have a bit of variety.  If you feel inclined, and obviously as long as it's a feature many of us would like, perhaps a button that simply activates all the downloads for all liveries could be added?

 

Suggestion 2: Not sure how this works but another good option would be to be able to activate products via the operations centre directly rather than having to load the simulation aircraft individually in the sim and activate there.  This would make activation a lot easier in the case of re-install, also a view to show which products are successfully activated would be good (for numpties like me that activate things using the wrong keys and then wonder why it's not working but need to restart the sim to find out if it worked in the first place).

 

Hope this helps, during the next update I'd be interested to hear how the Operations Centre will be expanded, I think it has great potential as a tool.

 

Cheers

 

Craig

[vc10man 732]

Activation through the Operations Centre will never happen as the OC does not link the aircraft to the Registry, so to ensure it is a genuine Licence, it has to link the aircraft to the sim to the Registry. If you have any FSDT airports, take a look where it backs up/logs the Activation Codes. I may be totally wrong, but that is the way I logically see it.

 

And it is not a bug.

[craig_read 43]

Just to clarify, I didn't say activation through the Operations Centre was a bug (so I agree with you); that along with the "install all liveries" button were both marked as 'suggestions' in my post, not bugs, I made what I thought was a very clear distinction for the team.

 

What I think is a bug, is during install of liveries within say the 737 i.e. I have a number of liveries 'Queued', if I am to select the 777 (because at the time I wanted to start installing those liveries too and thought I could simply add those to the 'Queue' as well) I have found that the application crashed.  As originally stated, this is minor, but perhaps hasn't been spotted before.

 

Regards

[vc10man 732]

Sorry to hear you are experiencing that as whenever I have installed either the 737NGX or 777 liveries, I just queued them up one after another and installed without an issue.

[hasse29 41]

Stealing your thread a bit here. I like the idea of OC, but I have big issues. I live in China, and it's almost impossible to update it. Liveries works, even though it's dead slow. One livery takes about 30 minutes to download. But updating OC is hell. I downloaded and installed latest version of 777 about 4 days ago. I have tried to update OC since then several times, without success. It close down after 3 unsuccessful attempts.

[craig_read 43]

Sorry to hear you are experiencing that as whenever I have installed either the 737NGX or 777 liveries, I just queued them up one after another and installed without an issue.

 

Did you switch from the 737 to the 777 while 737 liveries were still Queued?

[vc10man 732]

Did you switch from the 737 to the 777 while 737 liveries were still Queued?

No, I follow a logical pattern of finishing installing one set of liveries for one aircraft, before installing liveries for the other.

[craig_read 43]

Rick,

 

Ah ok, you see counter to that I often like to multi-task for efficiency (sometimes to my detriment I would concede) and I was in the process of installing both the 737 and 777.  I got both aircraft working and activated within the P3D simulation, installing the most up to date versions and then wanted to batch install all my liveries for both aircraft while I did something else.  Hence wanting to queue the whole lot rather than break it up on aircraft type and have to come back and queue up a whole bunch of liveries again for the second type.  I guess what I am saying is, and with all due respect, I think that is also a perfectly logical approach because I am not prevented from doing so by the menu system.

 

Like I said this is trivial and by no means am I criticising.  I like the Operations Centre and this is likely an edge case not seen by many.  I imagine this hasn't been spotted before by others or it is known but low priority for a fix (which is completely reasonable).  But in my humble opinion, and operations centre aside because this isn't about that specifically, software shouldn't 'crash' when a user does something valid or un-prevented using the menu system within that application.  If you have a known error state that will occur when using menus or want to force a specific way of doing something to prevent one, the software should force specific conditions e.g. using this case purely as an example a popup message perhaps with "Do you want to cancel the queued downloads?", and if the user clicks yes the software simply stops downloads and then allows the user to move to the next aircraft type in the menu prevents the crash, or alternatively the software allows the user to change their menu without deleting the queue with no message, either would prevent the crash condition.

 

Consequently I believe this to be a bug, but as we all know bugs have different priorities and I will stress again that I don't consider this important, it's simply an observation I have made and I think it's good to provide that information to the developers, as I like to get from my users with my work projects.  It's often a case of "oh, you know what, we missed that.. do you mind if we sort it later on because it's no biggie?" often the answer from said customer is "oh we don't really care but just thought we'd say, fix whenever".... this sort of bug is certainly not critical!  It is something that can be lived with easily, or if fixed, is done so when a developer is home alone, bored, there is nothing on TV, they don't want a short nap, have 2 hours to kill and the beer fridge is empty.

 

Regards

 

Craig Read

 

PS: I don't want to get off on the wrong foot; I think we just have a different point of view that's all and I won't labour the point any further.

[vc10man 732]

Hey Craig, we're not getting off on the wrong foot. Far from it. It is not only good, but healthy to have differing points of view. And I can see the logic of your multi-tasking. After all, time is money.

 

I'm afraid only the boffins at PMDG would be able to answer this, if it indeed is a bug as you suspect.

 

Should be interesting to see where this goes.