PMDG is coming to MSFS

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

9 minutes ago, kaosfere said:

There's also the complicating matter -- and one that can be really difficult for nontech folks to understand, which makes the matter even more muddled when it hits the forums -- that there are basically two different dev stacks for the sim.   You have the HTML/JS side, and the C++/WASM side.  And there hasn't necessarily been 100% feature parity between them.   To do some things you may have needed to dip into one stack or another. 

They need to make the JS stack expose everything if they are going that route, having to use both is too messy. C++ is a PITA enough, but mixing both is worse. 
 

 

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

8 minutes ago, kaosfere said:

There's that, too.  Folks wave around "the SDK" as if it's this single concrete thing that's the cause of, and solution to, all of the problems with the sim.   It bugs the picky nerd side of me, and so I sometimes put it in quotes in discussions like this to represent that -- but I figure it's a convenient shorthand for folks to use to talk about the general dev toolchain.

At least it's slightly more meaningful than "study level'.  😄

 

I've been using the word "High Fidelity". That seems a better representation of what it is.

I agree with you on the SDK terminology. It's been generalize

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

15 minutes ago, kaosfere said:

There have been a number of cases of developers publicly stating "we can't do this yet", and other people taking that as gospel, when what they really meant was "we can't do this yet with our preferred technology".  Those are two different things.

But when we read that TDS cannot (yet) override the FD, or HSI, or autopilot indicators, is that a case of the former or the latter?

[Jeff Nielsen 1,386]

9 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

It is interesting to hear RDR explain that is was indeed PMDG's intent to bring out the 737 first, but that after 1.5 year's of work, they decided to go with "Plan B", the DC6 because there were glass gauge problems that had not been solved as yet..

Now, the 737 is still planned for later this year, so the problems are being worked on, but it gives you a sense for the state of affairs..

Yup, things are always fluid.  Kind of fitting though, it seems like the 37 is always there to kick things off.  Kind of like coming home.😀

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

Do not worry. I am pretty sure Robert has enough influence over Asobo to get the things they want for the 737

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

5 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

Do not worry. I am pretty sure Robert has enough influence over Asobo to get the things they want for the 737

And, with a bit of luck, getting the 737 glass gauges worked out, might also open up the possibility of other 3rd party glass gauges as we were used to in previous sims..

Edited May 23, 2021 by Bert Pieke

[abrams_tank 7,426]

5 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

Do not worry. I am pretty sure Robert has enough influence over Asobo to get the things they want for the 737

Asobo also wants PMDG to succeed in MSFS, because PMDG is the gold standard.  If PMDG can make their study level airliners for MSFS, it's lights out for P3D and X-Plane. What left do P3D and X-Plane really have as an advantage over MSFS at that point?  Very little, IMO.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

There is a security issue with only using the easier methods of Javascript, not counting that you have to use both C++ and Javascript for some things, since both interfaces do not universally share the same capabilities. The fsarchives and SPB files can be decoded too easily, hence people can steal your stuff and claim it as their own. That part was at least theoretically true AFIK. That may have stopped some people from digging further.

This did not affect the open source developers for obvious reasons.

That is why some are still pushing for the old C++ that compiles into ML, it's much easier to obfuscate. Also performance issues of JS, but the security issues were real somewhat. I suppose you can obfuscate the JS, but that is only going to work well if you have enough code separate from the API, otherwise it would take a bunch of tricky alias obfuscation code, and that's nothing short of a mess, and it's still hard to really obfuscate JS correctly.

 

Edited May 23, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

2 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

And, with a bit of luck, getting the 737 glass gauges worked out, might also open up the possibility of other 3rd party glass gauges as we were used to in previous sims..

I think people need to adapt to the new SDK. Those who only want things the way they were will not survive.  There is a need to be able to sent traffic or override AP using Simconnect. That would be a door opener for a lot of 3rd party product.  People think the current tool aren't capable of doing complex glass cockpit and it couldn't be furthered from the truth. The WT CJ4 and the CRJ are perfect example of great implementation of glass cockpit. 

If Asobo make due on their promise to improved documentation and improved the SDK the way they have been doing. I see a great future for MSFS.

[RXP 2,338]

9 hours ago, devgrp said:

IMO, the devs complaining about the sdk are probably lazy and dont want toget with the program. If WT and FBW can achieve what they did with the sdk, other devs should'ne have problem getting up to speed. Instead they want to their hands held or want to do things the old way. Instead of complaining, they need to roll their sleeves up and step their game up

The community knows both Aerosoft and PMDG are not complaining about the SDK. They are also speaking daily with Asobo developers, and this lasted at least 9 months for the former and 18 months for the latter.

They are also evidently more experienced developers not in the same assistance needs than many others, but if you are considering Microsoft and Asobo are directly working with Aerosoft and PMDG because they are "wanting their hands held or want to do things the old way", do you care explaining?

 

 

[steve310002 1,198]

4 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Considering the complexity and re-play value of a PMDG aircraft, the price is amazingly cheap.  You can easily spend more on a restaurant meal!

That's very subjective. For many reasons.

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

8 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

People think the current tool aren't capable of doing complex glass cockpit and it couldn't be furthered from the truth.

Hence the 737 giving way to the DC6...

 

[Gazzareth 808]

24 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

But when we read that TDS cannot (yet) override the FD, or HSI, or autopilot indicators, is that a case of the former or the latter?

Well WT managed it with the CJ4, so clearly it can be done. Just not the way TDS want to go about it.....

G

[kaosfere 3,115]

34 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

But when we read that TDS cannot (yet) override the FD, or HSI, or autopilot indicators, is that a case of the former or the latter?

I haven't seen the comments you're referring to, but if I understand you right I  think I know what they're getting at.  It's something we have run into as well.  I could go down a rabbit hole with that one, but to give you honest and direct answer:  that is, indeed, a current limitation.  I'll admit it's slightly awkward saying that after the other things I said in this thread, but that much is true, and I won't dissemble about it.  I'm not that way.

It's easy for folks to misunderstand this though and get from those comments that "you can't make a functional autopilot!  MSFS is broken!"   I don't want to give that impression so having given the short answer let me elaborate a little on what I understand as the problem in question.

It's currently possible to build a fully custom autopilot system that can fly almost any real-word procedure you could imagine.   And you can display and manage the state of that system, within your own code, any way that you want.  Where it gets kinda gross is that hings that interact directly with the "core" autopilot system can get slightly confused when, say, you're following an RNAV approach, but the in-sim AP thinks you're in heading hold mode because that's how you're steering the plane.

You can mask that problem to some extent, but it is currently not possible to override all of the internal AP logic regarding state switching and its interaction with hardware and other things that read the default simvars.  Some, but not all.

Personally, while I acknowledge this is a problem, I don't  think it's a show-stopper.  It's a shortcoming, for sure, but there have always been things in advanced planes that have had custom-built logic outside the sim which made interacting with them in certain ways difficult.   That problems as old as FSX is.   Surely you've had the experience where the only way to get the gear in a plane to go down was through writing to some obscure LVar with FSUIPC, or similar.

That said, it IS a shortfall that puts, if nothing else, some warts on things.   It would be good to fix it to better enable full integration of custom autopilots with the rest of the sim's control logic.  You know I'm not free to discuss future development plans or timelines, so I won't say much more on this other than:  we know that's an issue and we've had to work around it in the past.   But we're in a place to fix that.

I'll leave it at that for now. 🙂

 

Edited May 23, 2021 by kaosfere

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

4 minutes ago, kaosfere said:

But we're in a place to fix that.

Thank you, that is what I was hoping you might say.. 😉

As you know, avionics is what floats my boat, and the current state of the flightplan/avionics implementation grates on me..

Because I know that it could all be made better!

Edited May 23, 2021 by Bert Pieke