Anyone use Air Manager for their custom virtual cockpit in P3D v4?

[captain420 3,099]

This looks really interesting and I was wondering if anyone here uses this? I have a few iPads laying around and this would be great to have my entire panel running off the iPads and free up my entire main screen for the scenery only, plus I think it would even give the simulator better performance since it doesn't need to render the actual instruments in the virtual cockpit. 

You can read more about it here - https://www.siminnovations.com

I wonder if this would work for planes such as PMDG 777/747, Aerosoft CEJ and the Airbus.

I think having 2 or 3 iPads would make this a pretty awesome setup.

 

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

Hi Aaron,

I have Air Manager and made a couple of instruments for one of my own addons, but I haven't tried it in P3D V4 (32 bit plugin won't work anyway). Air Manager only works with default simulator variables. I am not aware that they have instruments accessing the PMDG SDKs. Plus, they can only access the variables, they don't react to events, so programming these instruments can be tough, bordering on the impossible if you want to transmit event IDs. But the script language that AM uses is relatively easy.

AFAIK they have problems adapting their plugin to P3D V4 currently..

Best regards

[Alexey Ignatenko 0]

I use AirManager with P3D v4. Don't know about 2.x release version, but 3.0 Beta 37 works pretty well with 64bit. I use it for GA, so can't comment about PMDG, etc.

[MarkDH 234]

8 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

I haven't tried it in P3D V4 (32 bit plugin won't work anyway). Air Manager only works with default simulator variables...Plus, they can only access the variables, they don't react to events, so programming these instruments can be tough, bordering on the impossible if you want to transmit event IDs

AM does not 'only work with default simulator variables', it can access Lvars in P3D and FSX or custom datarefs in X-Plane. Indeed, AM gauges are entirely event-driven - i.e. updates are triggered by responding to FSX/P3D or X-Plane events. Perhaps what you meant to say was that only published simulator events are available. As with all such products, only core functionality can be manipulated officially, so manipulating the custom functions of third-party aircraft will generally only be possible by poking Lvars and custom datarefs.

Some vendors like A2A make this relatively easy by publishing lists of Lvars. I have no experience of PMDG. Sim Innovations is likely to create gauge sets for particular third-party aircraft as paid add-ons (the Aerosoft Twin Otter Extended, for example). It seems to me they could also create custom interface libraries for those aircraft and allow users to create their on gauges, but whether that makes any business sense is another matter.

 

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

57 minutes ago, MarkDH said:

 Perhaps what you meant to say was that only published simulator events are available.

 

 

This is only about ESP based sims. There is a difference between simulator variables and simulator events. What I meant to say is, that you cannot send Event (-IDs) from the simulator to the AM gauges. You can only write values to simulator variables. 

Four months ago I made a few AM instruments to be used with one of my products, a timer, a selector, a few buttons - and working around the missing event triggers was quite the effort. So it may actually be a problem that has been resolved.

 

Best regards

[MarkDH 234]

5 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

What I meant to say is, that you cannot send Event (-IDs) from the AM gauges back to the simulator. You can only write values to simulator variables.

I am not a gauge power-user but I note there is a function fsx_event() in the AM API. That looks like it does what you want. (It also gives some examples of what appear to be PMDG-specific events, which means I may have under-sold its abilities in my previous description.)

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

23 minutes ago, MarkDH said:

I am not a gauge power-user but I note there is a function fsx_event() in the AM API. That looks like it does what you want. (It also gives some examples of what appear to be PMDG-specific events, which means I may have under-sold its abilities in my previous description.)

Sorry, you are right, I actually have got this backwards. This was a long time ago. I have checked my issue logs, and one of my problems was, that AM instruments themselves don't react to these Event IDs. I somehow assumed that the AM instruments would work just like every other SimConnect client, and that I could "catch" event IDs being triggered and use them in the code. But that was not the case. And I had issues with sending event ids more than once. IIRC I wanted to control a dial with EventIDs only, to avoid hijacking yet another simulator variable. That dial can be turned in AM, in a simlulator gauge and in an external SimConnect app simultaneously, and all three need to reflect the position of the handle.

But my instruments were non-standard, as my products make use of the simulator in a non-standard way too, so this may have been Lorby specific issues. The instruments were completed in the end and I never had any requirement to revisit them.

I have edited my second post accordingly.

Best regards