POSCON online flying

[DaveCT2003 1,820]

5 hours ago, skelsey said:

Allow what?

It's really easy to come up with a list of wants.

"I want CPDLC" (actually, you can have that right now: Hoppie's ACARS network exists, there have been plugins on the controller side for yonks, there's standalone software which you can use as a pilot. Why haven't more aircraft developers integrated it?)

"I want a new voice system"

"I want new servers and pilot clients with smoother more frequent updates"

Those things and others have been on the BoG/Founders' list of wants for years, you only have to look at the meeting notes to see the desire to implement this stuff.

Wanting these things, however, is no good if you can't find people who:

• Want (at least one of) these things
• Have the skills and experience to write the software to make it happen
• Want it badly enough to spend a very large amount of their spare time coding, refining, testing, re-coding etc.
• Have sufficient spare time they are prepared to commit to the above

These people don't grow on trees. It's a volunteer-run organisation which is far less centralised than people seem to think. People write software (or anything else - documentation, websites, resources etc) for VATSIM generally because they enjoy doing it and they want to improve their own experience, not because someone on the Board of Governors says "We want a new voice codec, so we're telling you to go and write it, and we want it ready next week so make sure it's not late. And by the way, you need to make sure it works with all the sims -- FS9, FSX, P3D, X-Plane and anything else you can think of that you can connect a pilot client to -- and it also needs to run flawlessly on every OS that any of those sims run on -- Windows, Mac, Linux, Ubuntu, whatever you can think of. I'm sure that won't be a problem though."

Add to that the fact that VATSIM is a global network and there is a whole world out there beyond the largely US/European audience on this forum who all have their own wants/needs/issues, such as limited internet connection bandwidth, for one: whilst I suspect most readers of this forum have largely forgotten (or may not have been born!) the days of ropey dial-up connections, for large swathes of the VATSIM membership across the world connection speed/bandwidth/stability is a real issue. It's easy when you're standing on the sidelines with a relatively cheap, rock-solid 300mbit connection to shout "oh well who cares, just get rid of them", but it's a lot more difficult to do that when it's your name that's going to go above that decision. The same goes for legacy sim/weird and wonderful OS support.

That's before you've thought about the policy issues (e.g. what the best way to make use of the new technology is - voice Unicom, for instance and how that sits with practical concerns (keep a single common frequency? Use different frequencies which would have to be looked up (ha!) by each pilot?) accessibility issues (what about deaf users?) and how it's policed (can't send a screenshot of an abusive voice transmission to a Supervisor), authentication. How the system as a whole works in a VATSIM environment (for instance: it's entirely technically possible to develop a system which would be a very close simulation of real-world VHF, with totally realistic terrain masking effects and so on. But how does that work in the VATSIM environment where unlike the real world there is often one controller on one frequency covering a very large area (perhaps 400+ NM in radius). Do you really want a situation where if you're on the ground you can't hear 80% of transmissions from other traffic on the frequency that might be airborne, or at another airfield 150nm away, or where you can't hear another aircraft on the other side of a mountain range even though the controller can hear all of you? Would that make the issue of people stepping on each other worse or better and would it make the overall environment worse or better?)

Many of these problems potentially require technological solutions/ramifications that need to be fed back in to the development, coded, tested, evaluated and refined, either on the voice system side itself, within the core network FSD code or within the pilot clients etc. If the guy who looks after FSD is on holiday for two weeks, or the guy who writes the code for one of the pilot clients has a really busy month at work and you need a change in one of those areas, you're stuck. It's not like a big corporation where you can demand everybody work to strict deadlines, it's a hobby and people's real careers, families etc take precedence.

Having said all of the above, from what I've seen things are progressing well. The system's come out of proof-of-concept and in to a 'production' phase, I think the test server is or will soon be replaced with a proper (VATSIM-controlled) server, small-scale tests are still running fairly regularly and the feedback from those is going back in to the development... it'll get there.

You should probably check who runs the day-to-day business of VATSIM. Hint: it's not the founders.

I know you've got a long-standing thing about this. As I mentioned, Hoppie is there and in use for you and who knows, maybe in a later version of the voice codec we'll have an HF simulation with all its attendant fun.

However, in the meantime could you please get LM (and Laminar) to put HF radios in the sim that can be accessed through Simconnect/FSUIPC so that you can actually tune in to the HF frequencies? Thanks...

If we want to stay ahead of the curve, we just need to implent SATCOM, which is being used by many carriers during transoceanic flights. 

Besides, we really don't need HF implemented in P3D, it can be done more easily outside of the sim by a third party, you'll just need a 2D popup panel to manage it aboard the aircrash (lol).

 

 

[n4gix 4,947]

1 hour ago, DaveCT2003 said:

If we want to stay ahead of the curve, we just need to implent SATCOM, which is being used by many carriers during transoceanic flights. 

Besides, we really don't need HF implemented in P3D, it can be done more easily outside of the sim by a third party, you'll just need a 2D popup panel to manage it aboard the aircrash (lol).

Set up a Zello channel and use that to simulate SATCOM...

[skelsey 765]

17 hours ago, simbol said:

Can you elaborate this a bit more? I might be able to pass on the suggestion to LM.

Regards,
Simbol

Hi Simbol,

Sure -- in essence, the P3D communications radio infrastructure is (at least to my eye) pretty much the same as it was in FS98 so it would be lovely to have a bit of an update to add some additional functionality!

The VATSIM pilot clients rely upon the simulator radio infrastructure (vPilot reads the data through the Simconnect interface, the legacy clients use FSUIPC, etc) to know which frequencies you are tuned to, which radios are active for transmit and/or recieve etc.

At present MSFS/P3D only supports two COM radios (COM1 and COM2), on the VHF band (118-137 MHz) with 25 kHz spacing. This is increasingly a bit 90s GA: many airliners have three VHF COM boxes, and 8.33 kHz frequency spacing is now in widespread use. So in the first instance, native 8.33 kHz frequency spacing support on the existing COM radios would be a good start, and support for additional VHF COM boxes would be even better! (At present, it is possible for add-on developers to create 8.33-compatible COM boxes but the current Simconnect interface is limiting as it encodes the COM frequency using BCD16: so it ignores the first digit and the last decimal place (e.g. 123.456 is encoded as "2345") -- so, for example, the 8.33 channels 123.010 and 123.015 would both be shown by Simconnect as "2301" with no means to distingush between the two).

Further, whilst VHF is the standard band used for air-to-ground communications in domestic ATC, being line-of-sight VHF is impractical for long-range communications (Oceanic is the most immediate example, but also a lot of more remote parts of the world - Africa, Asia, arctic Canada etc). At these longer ranges, the HF band (3-30 MHz) is used and under good conditions can provide communications over many thousands of miles.

However, P3D doesn't understand the concept of an HF radio box: currently it simply doesn't exist as part of the core sim, so although some add-on developers have simulated HF boxes in their aircraft at present they are literally just numbers on a gauge with no way of usefully extracting that information (e.g. to be read by a VATSIM pilot client). If LM could add support for, say, two HF COM boxes and provide a means to read & set the frequency and whether the radio is active for TX/RX etc via Simconnect that would be a very good step forward!

As Dave says, from a VATSIM point of view there would still need to be some sort of external solution for non-P3D users anyway, but having the boxes in the sim to start with would certainly make the case for doing it stronger (and having it in Simconnect sets a useful common standard for future 3rd party development).

16 hours ago, DaveCT2003 said:

If we want to stay ahead of the curve, we just need to implent SATCOM, which is being used by many carriers during transoceanic flights. 

SATCOM is an interesting one! In time in many ways it may end up very much like a VATSIM voice room at present: whilst at the moment it's a one-to-one call (i.e. no other aircraft hear you), I gather there are discussions about implementing some form of common SATVOICE relay so that pilots could retain the SA gained by listening to other transmissions. So who knows, one day we may eventually end up back where we started! 😄

[ErichB 3,643]

22 hours ago, skelsey said:

It's really easy to come up with a list of wants.....

That was a useful, contextualized reply.

Thanks Simon.

[simbol 5,821]

Many thanks Simon,

I have now send these suggestions to LM, let's hope we can get these features sometime in the future.

Kind Regards,
Simbol

[fluffyflops 1,858]

Still the easiest 20 notes I ever made.  I should of put another 20 on the aerosoft 330 not arriving this but that would of been too easy. 

Edited March 2, 2019 by tooting

[Victoroos 205]

On 2/27/2019 at 1:10 PM, skelsey said:

Allow what?

It's really easy to come up with a list of wants.

"I want CPDLC" (actually, you can have that right now: Hoppie's ACARS network exists, there have been plugins on the controller side for yonks, there's standalone software which you can use as a pilot. Why haven't more aircraft developers integrated it?)

"I want a new voice system"

"I want new servers and pilot clients with smoother more frequent updates"

Those things and others have been on the BoG/Founders' list of wants for years, you only have to look at the meeting notes to see the desire to implement this stuff.

Wanting these things, however, is no good if you can't find people who:

• Want (at least one of) these things
• Have the skills and experience to write the software to make it happen
• Want it badly enough to spend a very large amount of their spare time coding, refining, testing, re-coding etc.
• Have sufficient spare time they are prepared to commit to the above

These people don't grow on trees. It's a volunteer-run organisation which is far less centralised than people seem to think. People write software (or anything else - documentation, websites, resources etc) for VATSIM generally because they enjoy doing it and they want to improve their own experience, not because someone on the Board of Governors says "We want a new voice codec, so we're telling you to go and write it, and we want it ready next week so make sure it's not late. And by the way, you need to make sure it works with all the sims -- FS9, FSX, P3D, X-Plane and anything else you can think of that you can connect a pilot client to -- and it also needs to run flawlessly on every OS that any of those sims run on -- Windows, Mac, Linux, Ubuntu, whatever you can think of. I'm sure that won't be a problem though."

Add to that the fact that VATSIM is a global network and there is a whole world out there beyond the largely US/European audience on this forum who all have their own wants/needs/issues, such as limited internet connection bandwidth, for one: whilst I suspect most readers of this forum have largely forgotten (or may not have been born!) the days of ropey dial-up connections, for large swathes of the VATSIM membership across the world connection speed/bandwidth/stability is a real issue. It's easy when you're standing on the sidelines with a relatively cheap, rock-solid 300mbit connection to shout "oh well who cares, just get rid of them", but it's a lot more difficult to do that when it's your name that's going to go above that decision. The same goes for legacy sim/weird and wonderful OS support.

That's before you've thought about the policy issues (e.g. what the best way to make use of the new technology is - voice Unicom, for instance and how that sits with practical concerns (keep a single common frequency? Use different frequencies which would have to be looked up (ha!) by each pilot?) accessibility issues (what about deaf users?) and how it's policed (can't send a screenshot of an abusive voice transmission to a Supervisor), authentication. How the system as a whole works in a VATSIM environment (for instance: it's entirely technically possible to develop a system which would be a very close simulation of real-world VHF, with totally realistic terrain masking effects and so on. But how does that work in the VATSIM environment where unlike the real world there is often one controller on one frequency covering a very large area (perhaps 400+ NM in radius). Do you really want a situation where if you're on the ground you can't hear 80% of transmissions from other traffic on the frequency that might be airborne, or at another airfield 150nm away, or where you can't hear another aircraft on the other side of a mountain range even though the controller can hear all of you? Would that make the issue of people stepping on each other worse or better and would it make the overall environment worse or better?)

Many of these problems potentially require technological solutions/ramifications that need to be fed back in to the development, coded, tested, evaluated and refined, either on the voice system side itself, within the core network FSD code or within the pilot clients etc. If the guy who looks after FSD is on holiday for two weeks, or the guy who writes the code for one of the pilot clients has a really busy month at work and you need a change in one of those areas, you're stuck. It's not like a big corporation where you can demand everybody work to strict deadlines, it's a hobby and people's real careers, families etc take precedence.

Having said all of the above, from what I've seen things are progressing well. The system's come out of proof-of-concept and in to a 'production' phase, I think the test server is or will soon be replaced with a proper (VATSIM-controlled) server, small-scale tests are still running fairly regularly and the feedback from those is going back in to the development... it'll get there.

You should probably check who runs the day-to-day business of VATSIM. Hint: it's not the founders.

I know you've got a long-standing thing about this. As I mentioned, Hoppie is there and in use for you and who knows, maybe in a later version of the voice codec we'll have an HF simulation with all its attendant fun.

However, in the meantime could you please get LM (and Laminar) to put HF radios in the sim that can be accessed through Simconnect/FSUIPC so that you can actually tune in to the HF frequencies? Thanks...

thanks simon! sorry that my message triggered it,! but cheers for all the insights!:)

[skelsey 765]

9 minutes ago, Victoroos said:

thanks simon! sorry that my message triggered it,! but cheers for all the insights!:)

No problem and I hope it didn't come across as my having a go at you!

[Victoroos 205]

On 3/2/2019 at 7:48 AM, tooting said:

Still the easiest 20 notes I ever made.  I should of put another 20 on the aerosoft 330 not arriving this but that would of been too easy. 

haha, please don't tempt faith... I still kinda want that plane to land 😛

[fluffyflops 1,858]

On 2/25/2019 at 8:42 AM, ErichB said:

@tooting so far, you're winning. 🙂

i decided I want to change the bet...

look at this bad boy...

https://secure.simmarket.com/cockpitsonic-gmbh-a320-pilot-seat-full-electrical-adjustable.phtml

[simbol 5,821]

On 3/20/2019 at 6:16 PM, tooting said:

i decided I want to change the bet...

look at this bad boy...

https://secure.simmarket.com/cockpitsonic-gmbh-a320-pilot-seat-full-electrical-adjustable.phtml

Too expensive! you can get these way cheaper from scrap-yards ffs.

S.

[fluffyflops 1,858]

On 2/25/2019 at 8:42 AM, ErichB said:

@tooting so far, you're winning. 🙂

Let me know when you would like to give me the 10 quid you owe me. Thanks 

[fluffyflops 1,858]

On 1/7/2019 at 9:04 PM, fluffyflops said:

I'll wage anyone £10 bet to a charity of their choice  we won't have the codecs on June 7th 6 months from today. 

I'll also wager another £10 that poscon will also not be off the ground in a years time. 

Any takers, money from a baby right? 

🙂 Money from a baby

[fluffyflops 1,858]

Cant help but notice @ErichB you lost the bet..,. youre not going to do a willy walsh now are you ??

[ErichB 3,643]

47 minutes ago, fluffyflops said:

Cant help but notice @ErichB you lost the bet..,. youre not going to do a willy walsh now are you ??

Well, Fluffers, seems you have won.  A bet's a bet.

Do you want that in beers or squids?

PM me.