Gidday,

I'm curious if anyone has had a crack at getting Radar Contact to interface with MSFS 2020. I have FSUIPC7 and understand from Pete Dowson that "Radar Contact uses facilities in FSUIPC to display menus on screen in the Sim. Unfortunately these are not working properly yet in MSFS -- the facilities provided by MSFS are faulty and we are awaiting a fix from Asobo. The menus may display okay, but they won't remove and may accumulate (lots on top of each other)." Assuming Asobo gets this fixed what would be the steps to get Radar Contact setup?

Thanks,
Harry

Harry, I don’t have MSFS and have no immediate plans to buy it until the SDK is sufficiently complete to allow 3rd party aircraft developers to supply their products.

As well as FSUIPC you would need a MakeRwys.exe to extract the relevant data and create the files RC4 relies on.

You would also need to create a dummy FSX.EXE in the main MSFS folder so you could fool the RC4 installer into thinking FSX was installed. That’s just the bare minimum to get it running.

If you trawl through Will this work with FS2020 Once FSUIPC is Out ? a few posts down, you will see that I tried to get it working. ShowText makes the display on screen work better, but there was still a permananent 'tips' type box displayed by MSFS in addition to the ShowText one. The main issues I had were that weather was not being reported correctly, so RC wanted me to set altimeter to 0000, and kept chastising me for being at the wrong altitude - every few seconds. It became so irritating that I never completed a flight.

I've not tried it since - I haven't seen anything mentioned in the SDK notes, or in FSUIPC, that might indicate an improvement, and to be honest my availability for simming is minimal a the moment.

Edited February 1, 20215 yr by ConstVoid
typos

On 2/2/2021 at 4:01 AM, ConstVoid said:

If you trawl through Will this work with FS2020 Once FSUIPC is Out ? a few posts down, you will see that I tried to get it working. ShowText makes the display on screen work better, but there was still a permananent 'tips' type box displayed by MSFS in addition to the ShowText one. The main issues I had were that weather was not being reported correctly, so RC wanted me to set altimeter to 0000, and kept chastising me for being at the wrong altitude - every few seconds. It became so irritating that I never completed a flight.

I've not tried it since - I haven't seen anything mentioned in the SDK notes, or in FSUIPC, that might indicate an improvement, and to be honest my availability for simming is minimal a the moment.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Having had a cursory look before my post I came to pretty much the same conclusion. A shame really but RC 13 years old so no real surprise. I use it with P3DV4/5 so can't complain. Thanks again.

1 hour ago, HarryS said:

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Having had a cursory look before my post I came to pretty much the same conclusion. A shame really but RC 13 years old so no real surprise. I use it with P3DV4/5 so can't complain. Thanks again.

It's nothing to do with the age of RC4. As you say it works perfectly well with all versions of P3D. It's the lack of info in the SDK that makes life difficult for Pete and John Dowson in trying to extract info from MSFS for MakeRwys.

@Ray Proudfoot Although the information gleaned by MakeRwys is incomplete (no Country information, for example), I don't think that's the main issue whick causes RC to work only partially, I think its other information, such as weather, AI traffic, etc., which is not documented/available in Simconnect, and hence FSUIPC struggles to provide in the required level of detail for RC to operate correctly. If that's the case there may be some hope that as the SDK & Simconnect are improved RC might become usable again.

Ian, RC4 certainly needs to be able to read the wx in MSFS as well as the other info you mention. Quite frankly you might as well stick to P3D for your IFR flights and just use MSFS for sight-seeing.

Who knows when Asobo will finish the SDK.