I need advice

[Chock 17,769]

1 hour ago, Sim737Pilot said:

I might be missing something, but how is this FMC supposed to be "superior" training tool?

Yes, you are missing something. The fact that I did not write that, I wrote that Lockheed Martin's P3D was a better training tool. To quote the actual product page on the Lockheed Martin website:

Training meets reality with Lockheed Martin’s Prepar3D® simulation software. Private pilots, commercial organizations, academia, and militaries rely on Prepar3D for immersive, experiential learning. Prepar3D is a visual simulation platform that allows users to create training scenarios across aviation, maritime and ground domains. Prepar3D engages users in immersive training through realistic environments. Ideal for commercial, academic, professional, or military instruction. Prepar3D can be used to quickly create learning scenarios anywhere in the virtual world.

So, that'd be a product specifically intended for training then, wouldn't it?

[BerndB 349]

On 5/23/2020 at 2:19 AM, Sim737Pilot said:

I might be missing something, but how is this FMC supposed to be "superior" training tool?

This complaint is useless, because this decision was made by the Boing engineers and designer how their "modern" touchscreens have look like. The developer who just "copy" the reallife apearence into an ac for a simulator, of course have to be as much as correct as possible, even if that means it could look outdated or just ugly.

I´am really wondering that a complaint like this came from someone who seems to used to a 737 indeed. 😉

[Greg Gorniak 0]

It looks like I've got approval to move forward with creating the class and thanks to everyone's advice I believe P3D, will be the best match for what I want to do.

I want to use the Airbus 320 as the aircraft for this sim. It seems that FSL makes a good product but I see that they haven't release an add on for P3D.v5 yet. So should I get P3Dv4 to work with FSL or is there something out there that will work with P3Dv5 that can be recommended?

Thanks Greg

 

[Chock 17,769]

P3D V5 is probably a better choice of base simulator because it is more up to date and better able to use SIDs and STARS, and Flight Sim Labs are working toward getting it to be compatible with V5, so if you are envisaging it taking a few weeks to get everything set up, then this is a problem which will have resolved itself by then as FSL's A320 will likely be patched to be compatible with V5 very soon. In the interim however, there is also the (less expensive) Aerosoft A320, which is pretty good and might even usefully serve as a stop gap solution if you are in a rush.

The main difference between the FSL version and the Aerosoft one, is that the detail of the FSL one is obsessively accurate and it is able to simulate unusual and problematic situations because of the underlying way it has been created i.e. rather than just looking and sounding like an A320 so it can offer you the experience of simulating operating one, the FSL A320 is simulating everything which is going on with the real thing 'under the hood', whereas the Aerosoft one just does a good impression of that. To the untrained eye this means they do the same thing, but to someone who knows the real aeroplane, the difference shows in very many subtle ways.

Think of it like this: Let's say I wanted to simulate the light switch in my room in a software program. On a basic level, I could make a graphic of a light switch and a graphic of a light bulb, and have the light switch graphic make a click noise when I clicked it with a mouse and when I did so, the graphic of the light bulb might change to one which appears lit up. That's the Aerosoft A320's approach to simulating stuff. It's good enough for most people.

The FSL approach to simulating my light switch would be this: First they'd create a full 3D model of the light switch with all the moving parts accurately created, including all the screws inside there which tighten to fasten the wires in place, then they'd make models of the wires going to the electric junction box, then they'd create a software simulation of how electricity goes down wires, including simulating the voltage and impedance and how little or much that would drop depending on the thickness and length of the wire, then they'd make a 3D model of a light bulb and have the impedance values etc be exactly what they were for the real thing, etc, etc. Then they'd model the rest of the electrics in the house so that if you turned on the kettle in the kitchen, the voltage would momentarily drop everywhere else in the system, and the simulated light bulb in my room would briefly dim. But it would dim not as a 'canned' pre-set animation, it would dim because the system was a realistic full simulation of the electrics in the house, so it would emulate the real thing. 

This is why everyone rates the FSL really highly, it's obsessively realistic in exactly this way because the above analogy is a good approximation of the level of depth they went to in order for the FSL A320 to behave the way it does. Not everyone will appreciate this of course, but it is true.

Visually there's not much to choose between the Aerosoft one and the FSL one, but if you want the 'under the hood' realism, then that is what you are paying for with the FSL one. Here's a visual comparison between the FSL one and the Aerosoft one which I made a while back, plus a third choice which is the Black Box Simulations one, although I would not recommend the BB simulations one, as even though it is pretty nice, it is effectively a partially finished beta, so it lacks some operational features which you may wish to simulate:

 

Edited June 9, 2020 by Chock