PMDG Announced Global Flight Operations at FSE 2018

[ErichB 3,647]

5 minutes ago, serviceceiling said:

And while we're at it, doesnt all this data-sharing lay a good foundation for some sort of shared cockpit? 

And there's the question of the day.   I hope PMDG will comment on that, because even though I wasn't expecting shared cockpit, I really wished for it. 

[Jetman67 517]

Thanks pmdg for all the hard work,  it does not currently interest me but im all for any expansion of realism or capability and there will be many that will utilise this new utility. Some of the comments here are down right childish and embarassing. Yes there was hype by simmers that ultimately did not match the reality.  End result you like it buy it and use it if not dont

 

Wayne

[hkhoanguyen 8]

15 hours ago, joona_ said:

We desktop flight simmers are just one of their customers and I recall seeing Robert mentioning in one interview years ago that their main target group is in the aviation industry and we are just one of their target groups. I could also remember wrong though 

https://www.precisionmanuals.com/pages/company/about.html

Customers are customers, not a big one or small one, since we pay for the products.

[kevinh 409]

10 hours ago, scandinavian13 said:

RSR didn't really have time to go into all of the protections and details, but - while people seem to be drawing their own conclusions, and assuming we never thought about all kinds of things - we've taken care of this. To be honest, I didn't want to do what we did to handle this, but RSR and the rest of the team thought it would be more useful for VAs to do it in the way we've set it up, so that's how we've set it up. He actually referenced it at one point in the speech, but didn't go into detail, for the sake of time.

 The VA aspect is managed, and planes won't be teleporting.

Kyle, I remember Robert referencing this, after all he used my VA as his example. I understand there was no time to get into detail. So now there is no time constraint why not explain how it is being addressed instead of just repeating “there will be no teleporting.”  Are you tracking multiple instances of each airframe for participating VAs?

[Stefan888 11]

PMDG is a good company great to be exact.I'm tired of people bitching about new product that they launched look at the amazing products they have produced over the years.Just wait to see 747-8 and NG3 im sure you will be blown away.

At the end success of new product will be determined by the market and consumers not some discourageing comments on the forum.

[Captain Kevin 586]

4 hours ago, HighTowers said:

The only way this sorts itself out, is an actual detailed featured list and a video demonstration of what it actually does and how it benefits the average simmer.

I assume they'll get to this eventually at some point. The issue is people started talking about this whilst the presentation was taking place, so they clearly didn't have the time to do it, and I don't know if some of them might still be in Las Vegas now.

[Lowryy757 5]

Knowing PMDG this will the best operations add-on money can buy.

 

However I'm gonna skip this one. "This just isnt for me"

[Chock 17,769]

I'm not so interested in the 'who flew the aeroplane before me' stuff, but I certainly am interested in my airliners having a realistic ACARS system; that will be really useful. It's sort of been done before, anyone who ever used Flight Keeper will know you could put an ACARS gauge in your airliners which had quite a fair bit of functionality, and I always did install it in my airliners because it was really very cool to have the capability to know the weather at arrival, runways and gates available, what fuel/services were available on the ground etc. Having this realistically implemented on the CDU will add a lot of realism to the aircraft. I'm sure anyone who is not familiar with how all that ACARS stuff works will be a lot more excited about it when they know how helpful a working ACARS will actually be for their simulated flights, not least because it will give them something to play with when in cruise instead of simply hitting accelerated time.

Those who are inclined to think they would not have a use for it might be surprised to learn how useful it actually would be for them in practical terms to make their virtual airline flights go smoother. Right now, the lack of something like this is quite a large piece missing from the cockpit of a realistically simulated airliner.

Edited June 11, 2018 by Chock

[Guest]

Kyle - any poss you could touch on how both service based failures and random failures will be implemented in GFO?

[ZKOKQ 984]

26 minutes ago, Chock said:

anyone who ever used Flight Keeper will know you could put an ACARS gauge in your airliners

That was a great tool Chock. I really miss it. Thomas the Dev sort of vanished off the radar.

[Tony747-400 44]

Is there any idea of a release date and how much this product is likely to cost?

[scandinavian13 5,192]

3 hours ago, ErichB said:

So, clearly there will be people trying this on just for laughs - and because trolls are a fact of life in this community.  What controls will be in place to expel people from the system who leave aircraft in completely ridiculous places repeatedly or completely, and unreasonably  mis-configure the aircraft.

If this system is all about realism, then it is also realistic to revoke or suspend usage for unreasonable operations.

Given the nature of griefing, I'm not going to go into the specific protections, but they're there. To be honest, I laid out the foundation of this whole project when I first started. The fundamental aspects of it are pretty easy to set up. Setting up all of the protections, however, was the harder part.

If you get a griefed panel state, for example, you'll have an immediate "fix" for it. This is what RSR was referring to when he "downvoted" me in the presentation. It isn't so much that he gets an option that says "how would you vote Scandinavian13?" It's more that he will get a prompt of "was the aircraft in an acceptable state?" (or similar), and if he needed the "fixed" state and didn't find it to be acceptable, then that's an implicit downvote (anonymously on both ends) for me.

 

Additionally, a couple notes about 'protection' (chuckles)...

RSR briefly alluded to it in the presentation. The Check In page has multiple options/functions: check in, restart, rebuild, and fly again.

• Check in: you're done with the flight and the plane, so you want to give it back at its new location
• Restart: something happened - either the sim or you messed something up and you want to start over - so you want it to restart it like you'd just checked it out
• Rebuild: 5 hours into your 12 hour flight, FSX crashed - the tool will actually place you back where you were when the sim crashed without the performance hits and oddities that can be caused by the sim having to autosave
• Fly again: you're done with your flight, but you want to keep the plane and fly again to a new destination

...so, not only are there protections against people griefing, there are protections against your sim trying to ruin your day, too (without the performance hit that other systems use).

[McFly08151 3]

1 hour ago, ZKOKQ said:

That was a great tool Chock. I really miss it. Thomas the Dev sort of vanished off the radar. 

Why "was" ? Its  workimg well with Win10 and P3d

Edited June 11, 2018 by McFly08151

[ErichB 3,647]

7 minutes ago, scandinavian13 said:

Given the nature of griefing, I'm not going to go into the specific protections, but they're there. To be honest, I laid out the foundation of this whole project when I first started. The fundamental aspects of it are pretty easy to set up. Setting up all of the protections, however, was the harder part.

If you get a griefed panel state, for example, you'll have an immediate "fix" for it. This is what RSR was referring to when he "downvoted" me in the presentation. It isn't so much that he gets an option that says "how would you vote Scandinavian13?" It's more that he will get a prompt of "was the aircraft in an acceptable state?" (or similar), and if he needed the "fixed" state and didn't find it to be acceptable, then that's an implicit downvote (anonymously on both ends) for me.

 

Additionally, a couple notes about 'protection' (chuckles)...

RSR briefly alluded to it in the presentation. The Check In page has multiple options/functions: check in, restart, rebuild, and fly again.

• Check in: you're done with the flight and the plane, so you want to give it back at its new location
• Restart: something happened - either the sim or you messed something up and you want to start over - so you want it to restart it like you'd just checked it out
• Rebuild: 5 hours into your 12 hour flight, FSX crashed - the tool will actually place you back where you were when the sim crashed without the performance hits and oddities that can be caused by the sim having to autosave
• Fly again: you're done with your flight, but you want to keep the plane and fly again to a new destination

...so, not only are there protections against people griefing, there are protections against your sim trying to ruin your day, too (without the performance hit that other systems use).

Smart.  Thanks

[scandinavian13 5,192]

3 hours ago, serviceceiling said:

Will customers who own the 747, 777 etc. get basic ACARS functions such as METAR/TAF and arrival ATIS info for free?

METAR/TAF/ATIS, no - anything that requires communication through the server is limited to subscribers. I think we've left the OOOI times page exposed, as we currently have that in the 744, and we didn't want to remove functionality that's already out there.

3 hours ago, serviceceiling said:

Will PDC/CPDLC work via the MFD/ECL interface as it should in the real airplane?

Yes. That's one of the huge parts of this system. A lot of people have mentioned "ACARS has been out for a while now," and it's true that there have been 3rd party tools out there, but none of them have featured an integrated ACARS in FSX/P3D, which you interact with in the sim itself (the Hoppie one was an external program that you couldn't access via the CDU in the sim itself). This whole system is really there to get deeper into the realism and simulation of all of our products, using the technologies of today, in the sim.

3 hours ago, serviceceiling said:

And will the DC-6 cover these "persistent" state-sharing options as well?

Yep! The DC-6 wasn't originally going to do this, but mid-way through the DC-6 project, I got the team to change things up to accommodate GFO.

2 hours ago, kevinh said:

Kyle, I remember Robert referencing this, after all he used my VA as his example. I understand there was no time to get into detail. So now there is no time constraint why not explain how it is being addressed instead of just repeating “there will be no teleporting.”  Are you tracking multiple instances of each airframe for participating VAs?

Essentially, yes. VAs can either have their users use the global fleet as is, where is, or we can set them up with separate instances of the airframes for their own use. It's somewhat of a departure from the realism of airframes existing only once in this 'world' but it also mitigates issues where a single VA might somewhat implicitly become the "official" VA in GFO.

2 hours ago, Chock said:

Those who are inclined to think they would not have a use for it might be surprised to learn how useful it actually would be for them in practical terms to make their virtual airline flights go smoother. Right now, the lack of something like this is quite a large piece missing from the cockpit of a realistically simulated airliner.

Yeah, I'm hoping that this slowly starts to be a realization for people...and it's modeled in pretty good depth, and it's a lot more than a lot of people realize I think. Many VAs call their tools "ACARS-something," which distracts from what the actual tool is in the real world (and therefore, here).