On 12/25/2020 at 9:30 PM, mSparks said:

for all the things they havent got to yet, its wide open to DIY, and has been for years

Yep. I did a lot of DIY in X-Plane, including several big gateway airports, LUA scripts, fixed Ortho Scenery, and fixes to the system itself like the cockpit shadows or the dreadful snow on the taxiways. It is, of course a good thing to be able to do all this. But that just underlines my point. Instead of doing the next great thing LR should learn to take care of the details. Or embrace the community in such a form that the innocent newcomer does not have to do all fixes again.

Me Wantzzzz AUTO-ATC !  NOW !!!!

🙂

mSparks, really looking forward into a beta release. Do you plan to make it payware (*) ?

 

(*) actually I think you should contact, or be contacted by LR in order to find some way to integrate such a solution into X-Plane ( maybe for XP12 ? ) 

Edited January 4, 20215 yr by jcomm

Hello JCOMM  What did you think of  the ATR fire, and atc video?

Edited January 4, 20215 yr by Paul Deluca

1 hour ago, Paul Deluca said:

Hello JCOMM  What did you think of  the ATR fire, and atc video?

It was great to watch - airmanship and the addon itself !

Looks like a great add-on, but I thought it was FSX ?

Edited January 4, 20215 yr by jcomm

It is FSX  I can picture that system in X Plane . If so, a big game changer

7 hours ago, jcomm said:

Me Wantzzzz AUTO-ATC !  NOW !!!!

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin/releases

Go wild.

I do not want speech-recognized ATC as a default X-Plane feature. Even Android's speech recognition fails more often than necessary and I imagine a multiplatform module integrated into the basic sim would not fare much better.

 

Basic installation/setup:

1. Install the Android app (free or paid)
2. Install the X-Plane plugin (Linux/Windows or Mac; both folders must reside inside Resources/plugins) and the VC redistributables
3. Set up and/or test the connection between simulator and app
4. Make sure you have English (US or UK) as an available language on your Android device
5. Go through the app's Ground School to train speech recognition
6. Also go through the items in the auto-correction menu in the app to fill in all blanks to further train speech recognition
7. Map a flight stick button to AutoATC's "Transmit" command in X-Plane
8. Try to do a test flight

At least on the payware app, a good indicator for a successful connection is seeing and hearing AI traffic.

You'll have to trial & error your way around all this a bit as both plugin and app are pretty much undocumented.

Supported input commands and readbacks are listed in the phrasebook PDF contained within the plugin download.

Edited January 4, 20215 yr by Bjoern

On 1/4/2021 at 9:22 AM, jcomm said:

Me Wantzzzz AUTO-ATC !  NOW !!!!

🙂

mSparks, really looking forward into a beta release. Do you plan to make it payware (*) ?

 

(*) actually I think you should contact, or be contacted by LR in order to find some way to integrate such a solution into X-Plane ( maybe for XP12 ? ) 

lol, nice timing. Finally back in a position to push it forwards again. Not least because XP is all up and running like a dream now (keeping it roughly on topic).

RE payware: Its a bit of both, at least for now, can pretty much try everything out for free, all functionality at the same time plus a little extra is payware via the play store.

One thing Bjoern missed, which I would say is fairly essential is to use a headset/mic on the phone, voice recognition is really sensitive to background noise, a headset mic makes a massive difference by cutting out the background noise.

Most of my "no point releasing a new version until I fix these bugs" bugs seem to be fixed now, including my favourite "nice to have" of terrain signal occlusion, should get the new plugin and apps live today, the next issue to fix up will make a huge difference to how usable it is Bjoern actually did a lot of write up for:

Ticketing/User aircraft tracking

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin/issues/80

I expect it to make a huge difference because it means it can fall back into a sensible state after a failed recognition, whereas at the moment it just falls back into a generic "fallback" state which effectively means it forgot everything about you (not quite, but enough to surely trigger the avsim word filter, its even had the German contingent spitting out French iirc).

On 1/4/2021 at 4:55 PM, Bjoern said:

Even Android's speech recognition fails more often than necessary

As above this is currently more of an issue than it needs to be, speech recognition failing is only a minor "problem" - because its fairly realistic, the bigger problems are the knock on effects that has on future recognition, because so much of understanding depends on current context.

I made life a little hard on myself by not cheating, reception is modelled as closely to RW as I can - that means it needs to handle failed reception, ground transmitters are placed - as far a possible - where they are supposed to be - that means it has to handle multiple ATC towers receiving the same transmission.

otoh this really helped for my PPL language test - I was the only one in the group that got the crackly "this is not your station" recording, and even the examiner didn't understand before why that would be something a ATC would say. 

On 1/3/2021 at 11:26 PM, flyingpauls said:

Or embrace the community in such a form that the innocent newcomer does not have to do all fixes again.

Its oh so easy to forget how far its come. right now I'm down to one mod to default settings - reducing tree ring density so I can turn world object up high without blowing up frames.

It was really not that long ago that:

Every default aircraft was completely broken out of the box, including the C172, and especially tail draggers

The jets all spewed thick black soot as exhaust.

getting more than 20fps on even half decent machines required overly complex messing to disable FTT water (might still need it, I spotted it causing some issues yesterday)

Getting shadows working was a lot of work to likely give up on them anyway

clouds couldn't be turned out without destroying fps.

It didn't have VR, let alone the solid linux VR I now finally achieved in Vulkan.

The helicopter flight model was little more than a toy (now a slightly tweeked VSKYLABs R44 is practically perfect in every way)

Crosswinds were completely broken

To name a few. Remember them? Because for all Greazer's whining and Microsoft marketing hype that Laminar had done nothing for years, I certainly don't miss them.

 

Edited January 6, 20215 yr by mSparks

10 hours ago, mSparks said:

One thing Bjoern missed, which I would say is fairly essential is to use a headset/mic on the phone, voice recognition is really sensitive to background noise, a headset mic makes a massive difference by cutting out the background noise.

Good point. My phone is usually close to me and I hardly have any background noise, so I never saw the need for one.

 

10 hours ago, mSparks said:

should get the new plugin and apps live today, the next issue to fix up will make a huge difference to how usable it is

Don't forget changelogs! It's quite hard to check for bugs if you don't know what's new and what isn't.

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

Don't forget changelogs! It's quite hard to check for bugs if you don't know what's new and what isn't.

The worst of those - the cursed crash on exit - should now be fixed, and if/when similar does crop up again there is (should be) now enough info in the atclog.txt file when it happens to track down why.

plugin side has been reasonably good at tracking changes for 6+ months now since I put it up on github

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin/commits/master

rest of the changes over that time has really just been fixing things, getting to close issues

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed

and getting the AI to the point it is capable of acceptable uptime.

On 1/6/2021 at 5:45 PM, mSparks said:

The worst of those - the cursed crash on exit - should now be fixed, and if/when similar does crop up again there is (should be) now enough info in the atclog.txt file when it happens to track down why.

Have not had that crash in ages.

Quote

plugin side has been reasonably good at tracking changes for 6+ months now since I put it up on github

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin/commits/master

rest of the changes over that time has really just been fixing things, getting to close issues

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed

and getting the AI to the point it is capable of acceptable uptime.

I was especially referring to the app whose changelogs were a bit on the barely informative side in the past.

Edited January 7, 20215 yr by Bjoern

On 12/25/2020 at 7:04 PM, Janov said:

Well - I am eagerly awaiting your first flightsimulator, then - since you seem to know so much about how to implement all this. Or are you careless and don´t want to program it for us? 😂

Janov, this is an old discussion about critique. You don't have to prove by doing it yourself. Suffices to prove that it is sub-optimal.

And then, I do know how to program a bit, believe me. But I am not talking about programming a flight simulator on my own. I am talking about how to put pipes on top of a roof of a terminal building properly instead of measuring its height from the ground and make it float on uneven airports. Things like that. Maybe also a proper look of the skies obeying the astronomical facts. Indeed, I think I could even find a more clever way to position auto-gen houses along roads.

The true problem has been pointed out by Austin himself: X-Plane is not meant to be a flight simulator reflecting the real world of flight. To him, it is an engineering tool to test planes, or even the flying cars he is dreaming of. I accept that. It is his child. But I have never even started the plane maker.

29 minutes ago, flyingpauls said:

I am talking about how to put pipes on top of a roof of a terminal building properly instead of measuring its height from the ground and make it float on uneven airports.

Out of genuine curiosity, are people really interested in having things like this done properly??

I mean, I've seen some really unusual requests from people to have specific visuals implemented into a flight sim, but correctly modelled and positioned terminal building piping?

3 hours ago, GoranM said:

correctly modelled and positioned terminal building piping?

tbh, outside the cockpit, visually, thats all I actually really care about.

once you are more than about 1500 feet agl even lvl14 ortho with no 3d buidings is just about acceptable (just - I still want and have dense 3d buildings at high framerates, 400fps without them is way overkill, but not everyone has decent PCs)

In and around the airport tho, I want and expect photoreal to at least witcher 3 standards (mainstream graphics 5 years ago).

Edited January 10, 20215 yr by mSparks

7 hours ago, GoranM said:

I mean, I've seen some really unusual requests from people to have specific visuals implemented into a flight sim, but correctly modelled and positioned terminal building piping?

The funny thing is that this is a non-issue. You simply need to reference both facades (the walls and the pipes) to the same spot on the ground, a simple authoring technique.

So I think a lot of the points of critique on X-Plane that I keep reading is due to ignorance of the proper way to achieve the desired results.

I write several posts every day to people that complain about this or that - and quite often it is because they are not aware of a certain setting or technique in X-Plane to achieve their desired results.

The most frequent critique we get (like FlyingPauls) is about visual things - of no consequence to aviation - like buildings along a road, pipes on a roof or proper astronomical skies. Just like it was said, X-Plane is a flight simulator first, a scenery/world viewing simulator second. Other offerings out there may have other priorities 😉, but I personally fly X-Plane simply because how the planes fly and can be operated is my top priority when using a flight simulator.

Cheers, Jan

 

3 hours ago, Janov said:

The most frequent critique we get (like FlyingPauls) is about visual things - of no consequence to aviation

Which reminds me of thoughts that cross my mind every time XP12 comes up.

firstly, they have an issue that in every way that really matters they dont seem to have much they can really do for XP12...

And secondly, mac graphics are pretty much maxed out already, in fact they already have a much better offering on windows and linux because mac opengl and metal are so terribly crippled.

Thats not to say there isnt going to be an XP12 with overhauled default assets, decent lighting and lots of loose ends tied up (like the weather).

But more that these things are of no consequence to aviation... (well, I would quite like to be able to judge wind direction on the blowing of the leaves on the trees, but that level of detail is starting to get silly)