BVI Mode and staying airborne

[FS++ 707]

10 hours ago, Orinks said:

Sure. I currently have:

Voice4 =Microsoft Zira Desktop - English (United States),0,10,0

 

Up to now, there was never the need to use those rate and pitch parameters on voice4, as they would make it sound horrible, never mind the fact we moved to using recorded human voices more than 5 years ago. But can understand why you want to speed that up with the "read instruments aloud" BVI specific feature. Consider it sorted in next update.

 

[jfayre 2]

Hello,

I'm curious about programming the FMC. In theory, even if MCE didn't read back the data in the FMC, shouldn't it be possible to program it by memorizing what to say when?

If I got my flight data from something like Simbrief, could I program the FMC by voice command?

If so, is there one particular aircraft that works best with MCE as far as the FMC?

I've been looking through videos, but can't find one where the FMC is programmed entirely by voice.

Thanks!

 

 

[Tyler K 0]

I just got to thinking, once P3D V4 is fully supported, perhaps one of us BVI pilots should try it. They offer developer subscriptions which are $9.99/month, which is probably as close to a free trial as we're going to get. In addition, perhaps it's worth investigating whether or not the FSXPilot developer would be willing to explain to us how their version of landing assistance is implemented (I know we shouldn't necessarily try for full autolanding initially, as there are so many different types of aircraft that MCE supports). Just my thoughts at nearly 10:00 PM.

[FS++ 707]

On ‎30‎/‎06‎/‎2017 at 1:39 AM, Orinks said:

Hi FS++,

 

I tried changing the second parameter of voice4, but no change. My voice is actually not Microsoft Zira, it's actually Inoettics John...

 

Oh well. Going to try and see if the patch worked.

 

Download this patch

You should be able to speed-up the MCE built-in narrator.

Forgot to mention something...

For years, it was possible to ask co-pilot about any runway frequency. Example

You: "confirm ILS frequency runway two five left".

Co-pilot: "what airport ICAO ID?"

You: "Kilo Alpha Tango Lima"

Since you're using PF3 and the latter can vector you into the ILS, I guess it's a good start when you're on approach to request FO set the ILS frequency and intercept the lock and glide on autopilot.

Narrator should also cover all Voxscript related panels.

 

 

[Orinks 3]

16 hours ago, FS++ said:

Download this patch

You should be able to speed-up the MCE built-in narrator.

Forgot to mention something...

For years, it was possible to ask co-pilot about any runway frequency. Example

You: "confirm ILS frequency runway two five left".

Co-pilot: "what airport ICAO ID?"

You: "Kilo Alpha Tango Lima"

Since you're using PF3 and the latter can vector you into the ILS, I guess it's a good start when you're on approach to request FO set the ILS frequency and intercept the lock and glide on autopilot.

Narrator should also cover all Voxscript related panels.

 

 

Hi FS++,

 

Thanks for the patch. I'll download it now.

Thanks for the info on loading the ILS frequency. Is there a list of all PF3 voice commands available? How do I request the FO load the PF3 ILS frequency?

As far as landing ILS, it's a start. However, since I've been getting runways that don't have Glideslopes lately, a nice feature for MCE's narrator to read, or a command for it if there isn't already one, is to get the AGL altitudes. Also a way to get airport elevation so that, once we can get our AGL altitude, we know when actual touchdown occurs. I know that most complex aircraft have the ground system announce the AGLs automatically, but I'm still hung up on the FMC thing which makes me hesitant to buy and try one.

 

[hadi 30]

Hi guys

I suppose this topic is for BVI pilots so i'm going to reply here.

First of all, thanks to MCE development team for keeping up with our requests and their great support. keep up the good work.

I remember  around 1-2 year ago I started communicating with MCE developers and  I managed to finally  fly the aerosoft airbus A320, the same exact way as sighted pilots do. Because I was using the FMC, I could fly on vatsim and talk to air traffic controllers and do  sid and  star procedures; however with a very big major issue.

Flight discontinuities.

Somewhere in the star or approach procedures, my plane would hit a flight discontinuity placed  by the FMC, my plane would go off route, and i could never  manage to get  back on the route to finally land my aircraft with  the airbus autoland feature.

I searched and searched for a way to resolve this, but i eventually managed to burn myself out on it and let it go. There was no way for me to delete the flight discontinuity points on my fmc, so my plane would get knocked off the actual route, and I never could use the auto approach and auto land features of the Aerosoft Airbus.

In case you guys want to know how i did it, I would:

1. based on the weather conditions and runways in use, made a flight plan with fs commander for aerosoft airbus A320. I'd have to use a route planner to get the waypoints. selecting sids and stars  were not easy if you couldn't ask an air  traffic controller.
2. I had a voxscript file that  i wrote. It would set up my fmc for me when i asked  the co pilot to. For each flight, I had to edit the file, and put in the file name of my flight plan inside it, so the airbus could load it.
That's a feature that almost all professional aircrafts have, you can type in a file name of a flightplan, and it would load the route, sid and stars, and select runways for you.
3. After MCE ran my scripts and the FMC successfully loaded my flight,  that, I would just take off and let the computer handle most of the things.
I would like to mention, the few times I managed to get back on the fmc navigation after hitting a flight discontinuity, It was  very satisfying to hear the airbus lock on the localizer, control the speed and smoothly land on the runway  with the autoland feature.

[hadi 30]

Oh and it's worth to mention! Ben has helped me along the way by adding an option to MCE that would read the "FMC distance" for me.

It was helpful, because I would know when i'm 12-14 miles out from touchdown, not the actual airport.

[Orinks 3]

20 hours ago, hadi said:

Hi guys

I suppose this topic is for BVI pilots so i'm going to reply here.

First of all, thanks to MCE development team for keeping up with our requests and their great support. keep up the good work.

I remember  around 1-2 year ago I started communicating with MCE developers and  I managed to finally  fly the aerosoft airbus A320, the same exact way as sighted pilots do. Because I was using the FMC, I could fly on vatsim and talk to air traffic controllers and do  sid and  star procedures; however with a very big major issue.

Flight discontinuities.

Somewhere in the star or approach procedures, my plane would hit a flight discontinuity placed  by the FMC, my plane would go off route, and i could never  manage to get  back on the route to finally land my aircraft with  the airbus autoland feature.

I searched and searched for a way to resolve this, but i eventually managed to burn myself out on it and let it go. There was no way for me to delete the flight discontinuity points on my fmc, so my plane would get knocked off the actual route, and I never could use the auto approach and auto land features of the Aerosoft Airbus.

In case you guys want to know how i did it, I would:

1. based on the weather conditions and runways in use, made a flight plan with fs commander for aerosoft airbus A320. I'd have to use a route planner to get the waypoints. selecting sids and stars  were not easy if you couldn't ask an air  traffic controller.
2. I had a voxscript file that  i wrote. It would set up my fmc for me when i asked  the co pilot to. For each flight, I had to edit the file, and put in the file name of my flight plan inside it, so the airbus could load it.
That's a feature that almost all professional aircrafts have, you can type in a file name of a flightplan, and it would load the route, sid and stars, and select runways for you.
3. After MCE ran my scripts and the FMC successfully loaded my flight,  that, I would just take off and let the computer handle most of the things.
I would like to mention, the few times I managed to get back on the fmc navigation after hitting a flight discontinuity, It was  very satisfying to hear the airbus lock on the localizer, control the speed and smoothly land on the runway  with the autoland feature.

It is great that the airbus is usable with MCE. What about other aircraft though?

I'm talking about the complex ones. PMDG, Just Flight, etc. Could we in theory use all of these with the method you described above?

I also really want to get into online flying, however I wish I could simply follow a controllers instructions when they tell me to taxi to a runway and it won't slew. FSXPilot comes the closest to this with the "taxi plan" feature, but relies on being able to manually taxi to a desired gate/runway once. I wonder if a program can implement a procedure that makes these Vatsim controllers happy.

I've heard that Vatsim controllers are rather stingy regarding that, even in our situation of there being absolutely nothing we can do about it. I'd be interested in flying a number of these events that a number of my virtual airlines host.

 

Also, how is the accessibility of FSCommander? Yet another thing I'd have to shell out some cash for. Does it support regional airports like 2AK6, etc? SimBrief only supports the bigger airliner international airports, which makes it a slight disadvantage

Getting slightly off topic a bit, but MCE is looking better and better for us with each new update. I just wish that the narrator feature could use a screen reader library such as Tolk so we don't have to use a TTS voice for that.

 

 

[hadi 30]

1 hour ago, Orinks said:

It is great that the airbus is usable with MCE. What about other aircraft though?

I'm talking about the complex ones. PMDG, Just Flight, etc. Could we in theory use all of these with the method you described above?

I also really want to get into online flying, however I wish I could simply follow a controllers instructions when they tell me to taxi to a runway and it won't slew. FSXPilot comes the closest to this with the "taxi plan" feature, but relies on being able to manually taxi to a desired gate/runway once. I wonder if a program can implement a procedure that makes these Vatsim controllers happy.

I've heard that Vatsim controllers are rather stingy regarding that, even in our situation of there being absolutely nothing we can do about it. I'd be interested in flying a number of these events that a number of my virtual airlines host.

 

Also, how is the accessibility of FSCommander? Yet another thing I'd have to shell out some cash for. Does it support regional airports like 2AK6, etc? SimBrief only supports the bigger airliner international airports, which makes it a slight disadvantage

Getting slightly off topic a bit, but MCE is looking better and better for us with each new update. I just wish that the narrator feature could use a screen reader library such as Tolk so we don't have to use a TTS voice for that.

 

 

Hey,
Regarding complex aircrafts. The Aerosoft Airbus that i was talking about, is a complex/professional aircraft itself. I believe my method would mostly work on other professional aircrafts, though you have to make sure of two things.
1. MCE is able to press the MCU buttons. so you could write scripts.
2. The professional aircraft has the ability to load flight plans. it's called co route in most of them  I believe.
I chose the Aerosoft one because I really felt comfortable with it. It wouldn't just flip off and do weird things by itself. Once you managed to load a flight plan, and  let the computer handle heading, altitude and VR/speed, It was solid as rock. though to be honest i did not  try other ones like pmdg and such.

Regarding VATSIM. see, What i did was really simple. Wait for the traffic controller to be less busy. contact them  with PM, and ask them to let you jump onto the runway once it's all clear. I had to explain to them each time that i'm a blind pilot. I never had been refused or thrown off the network for doing that.
You should avoid asking this on voice, Because  this is not a procedure and you'd be taking up voice space for other pilots.
You should not do it while they're busy handling 5 aircrafts at once, Because it would distract them and they're forced to say no.
If you're flying an event, ask them to handle you once all the other pilots are off the airport.
VATSIM controllers are mostly great, It's just they get ###### off if they're handling 10 aircrafts at once and something goes south.

About simbrief, doesn't it use airac navdata? Because that's what fs commander uses; You'll have to buy  an up to date Nav database and load it into it.
Fs commander is good for making flight plans, probably not good as simbrief because that's a web based service. Also in fs commander you'll be  plotting the route yourself, It won't recommend sid and stars for you.

About MCE, Has there been any progress on making it more BVI friendly? I've not followed their development for the past 6-8 months.

[Orinks 3]

9 hours ago, hadi said:

Hey,
Regarding complex aircrafts. The Aerosoft Airbus that i was talking about, is a complex/professional aircraft itself. I believe my method would mostly work on other professional aircrafts, though you have to make sure of two things.
1. MCE is able to press the MCU buttons. so you could write scripts.
2. The professional aircraft has the ability to load flight plans. it's called co route in most of them  I believe.
I chose the Aerosoft one because I really felt comfortable with it. It wouldn't just flip off and do weird things by itself. Once you managed to load a flight plan, and  let the computer handle heading, altitude and VR/speed, It was solid as rock. though to be honest i did not  try other ones like pmdg and such.

Regarding VATSIM. see, What i did was really simple. Wait for the traffic controller to be less busy. contact them  with PM, and ask them to let you jump onto the runway once it's all clear. I had to explain to them each time that i'm a blind pilot. I never had been refused or thrown off the network for doing that.
You should avoid asking this on voice, Because  this is not a procedure and you'd be taking up voice space for other pilots.
You should not do it while they're busy handling 5 aircrafts at once, Because it would distract them and they're forced to say no.
If you're flying an event, ask them to handle you once all the other pilots are off the airport.
VATSIM controllers are mostly great, It's just they get ###### off if they're handling 10 aircrafts at once and something goes south.

About simbrief, doesn't it use airac navdata? Because that's what fs commander uses; You'll have to buy  an up to date Nav database and load it into it.
Fs commander is good for making flight plans, probably not good as simbrief because that's a web based service. Also in fs commander you'll be  plotting the route yourself, It won't recommend sid and stars for you.

About MCE, Has there been any progress on making it more BVI friendly? I've not followed their development for the past 6-8 months.

You can follow this topic for the progress on that project. We still can't land very well yet, because the only way I know how to land is how IYP did it. There's a way to read instrument data now, so we can manage airspeed ourselves at least in the default aircrafts.

Now the voxscript panel is accessible with the narrator feature so we should be able to write scripts ourselves now.

 

[Tyler K 0]

2 hours ago, Orinks said:

You can follow this topic for the progress on that project. We still can't land very well yet, because the only way I know how to land is how IYP did it. There's a way to read instrument data now, so we can manage airspeed ourselves at least in the default aircrafts.

Now the voxscript panel is accessible with the narrator feature so we should be able to write scripts ourselves now.

 

I'm on a laptop and don't have a mouse, so using the narrator feature of MCE is still a pain in the butt for me. I've tried using it with System Access' virtual mouse, NVDA object navigation, and the JAWS cursor, all without much success. For instance, JAWS cursor will seem to stick to the status line, SA virtual mouse won't read the controls, and NVDA object nav sees nothing. Would there perhaps be any way in future of making the controls visually remain the same, but be present in the tab order so we could use Tab/Shift+Tab with our screen readers of choice? Just a thought.

[Orinks 3]

2 hours ago, Tyler K said:

I'm on a laptop and don't have a mouse, so using the narrator feature of MCE is still a pain in the butt for me. I've tried using it with System Access' virtual mouse, NVDA object navigation, and the JAWS cursor, all without much success. For instance, JAWS cursor will seem to stick to the status line, SA virtual mouse won't read the controls, and NVDA object nav sees nothing. Would there perhaps be any way in future of making the controls visually remain the same, but be present in the tab order so we could use Tab/Shift+Tab with our screen readers of choice? Just a thought.

For NVDA, I recommend putting it in screen view. Not sure on the issues with Jaws or SA though.

[Tyler K 0]

20 hours ago, Orinks said:

For NVDA, I recommend putting it in screen view. Not sure on the issues with Jaws or SA though.

I'll have to try that. I use JAWS as my primary, so not as familiar with NVDA and its navigation methods.

[Orinks 3]

Hi all,

 

I'd love to get this topic pinned at the top of the forums, since there hasn't been any posts recently and so it completely disappeared from the MCE forum, I had to Google it to find it again.

I want to start flying on Vatsim, but don't have a way to fly Cids and Stars yet. I want to fly with Canadian Air express, but have no idea how to fly cids/stars in props without some kind of FMC...

 

 

[FS++ 707]

14 hours ago, Orinks said:

Hi all,

 

I'd love to get this topic pinned at the top of the forums, since there hasn't been any posts recently and so it completely disappeared from the MCE forum, I had to Google it to find it again.

I want to start flying on Vatsim, but don't have a way to fly Cids and Stars yet. I want to fly with Canadian Air express, but have no idea how to fly cids/stars in props without some kind of FMC...

 

 

I'm not a moderator here.

I just have standard user rights.

This is Avsim unofficial forum for MCE.

We don't have one, because we don't need to "manage (or massage) our image".

We believe all flight sim add-ons should have a Demo. We let ours speak for itself. Nobody buys MCE without knowing what he gets. And with that in mind, we never need to be on the defensive.  You may want to confirm with Avsim, I don't recall a single thread was ever deleted from this MCE sub-forum either 

I enjoy participating here in order to see what users are looking for in terms of needed improvements to the software.

You may want to ask Alpha117 or any Avsim Admin to pin the BVI related thread.