PRO ATC SR… yay or nay?

[Deltaair1212 53]

Since it’s release I haven’t heard a peep on this new program that rolled out. Any users? I’m just going to assume it’s trash if nobody is talking about it. As soon as I saw voice recognition I was already turned away by it but I’m not sure if it’s just voice recognition or if you can use it the traditional way. Either way it doesn’t appear that the sim community is excited about it lol 

[MrSpeaker 122]

You apparently can use it the traditional way, as I have seen through some youtube videos. however I have asked via their forum about callsigns and they have not gotten back to me, I wanted to know if I would be call by a real-world callsign like WestJet 718, not Whiskey Juliet Alpha 718, There was a thread on the site with extra voice sets by Mave creations that I used for the proatc x version but I cant get my question answered if they work for the SR version.

[neilhewitt 494]

I am a long-time (and often frustrated!) Pro-ATC/X user and I just bought /SR which I'm currently using with MSFS. Bear in mind that I also own Pilot2ATC and PF3 and VoxATC and I'm probably going to try out FSHud, so don't take my having purchased something as a recommendation 🙂

You can absolutely use it the 'usual' way via keyboard, but the UI has changed, at least for MSFS. I don't know if it still uses the SimConnect menu method in P3D, but in MSFS you get a new set of windows on your desktop. Because it isn't presenting via SimConnect the options are not numbered as they are usually, so you can only use those keys you have bound specifically to the program, which basically means keyboard options for 'check-in / make next request', 'confirm instruction' and 'say again'. Anything else can only be done by clicking the option in the menu, which is a major annoyance for me since I try to avoid using the mouse at all in my cockpit setup, but I can use a touchscreen which is... not quite so annoying.

If you select an airline from the built-in list (which is fairly extensive) as your callsign then it will read out the name per the callsign (although I don't think they have them all correct) provided that the voice set you're using has that callsign recorded. For example, if you pick British Airways then it will say Speedbird. 

This is the downside of pre-recorded voices. They sound more natural than TTS but can only say what is recorded, so new callsigns for new airlines won't be possible unless you get updated voices. At one point there was a tool to record new voice sets that they made available, which is how Mave made the extra voices (which are now included in the base SR product, BTW), but that isn't available any more. There are some new voices in /SR in several regional accents, so there's decent variety. You can configure which voices get used where for pilots and controllers. There's also a lot of regional ATC chatter (although you quickly get used to hearing the same things over and over again). I believe you can add your own there too. 

Another downside of pre-recorded voices is that if a voice is missing a word or phrase (and some of them are, particularly for checklists) you'll get a substitution where the missing word / phrase will be spoken in a default US-English voice instead. It's very jarring. 'Decimal' is a good example which is missing from a lot of the UK voices, which is odd since decimal instead of point is required by CAA and EASA phraseology standards. 

BTW, the product forum is entirely run by unpaid volunteer moderators who are usually as in the dark about product development, updates and fixes as we are. The developer is never on the forum, all official communication comes through the 'project manager' who sometimes disappears for literally years and has often said 'don't ask about new releases or new features or anything else, we simply will not discuss it and we will not give any estimates or schedules' which has led to some frustration among the community there, including the mods, when it looked like Pro-ATC/X had been abandoned. The lone developer had a major accident a few years back and basically stopped working on the product for 2+ years. This is the risk of single-developer products, which I've moaned about before on this forum!

The point release schedule is almost always once-per-year, so if a release has a bug, you'll have to live with it for potentially 12 months plus, or multiple years if the developer becomes unavailable again. Although they did do a point update to /SR shortly after release since it had some nasty bugs, so maybe that's changing (I'm not holding my breath). 

That said, provided you jump through the hoops that the forum mods insist on, you'll get an answer. I just asked a question yesterday and I got an answer today. 

I will admit that Pro-ATC/X was my favourite of the ATC options I had and it was what I used for years. When I started using MSFS alongside P3D I ended up using Pilot2ATC since it was the best option that worked with MSFS at all; now that Pro-ATC/SR works with MSFS, chances are I'll go back to it full-time. I may try out the speech recognition at some point too.

Hope some of that helps you decide 🙂

 

[Sparkrite 188]

5 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

The developer is never on the forum,

To be fair he seems to have made a couple of appearances since the release of SR and even answered a few questions.

5 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

That said, provided you jump through the hoops that the forum mods insist on, you'll get an answer.

Usually alright, however I feel the forum, such as it is, will never aspire to much. Stopping posts appearing until they have been approved by a mod. kills any real exchange of help/advice/chat/flow and usually leads to a site that fairly quickly dies after initial flurry of posts after a major update.

Also not having a dedicated SR forum, with sub-forums, makes it harder to have any order as to where one can ask/reply to a particular problem.

 

5 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

BTW, the product forum is entirely run by unpaid volunteer moderators who are usually as in the dark about product development

Yes indeed, and I take my hat off to them and the time they give to it. 👍

 

5 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

Although they did do a point update to /SR shortly after release since it had some nasty bugs, so maybe that's changing (I'm not holding my breath).

Actually 3 patches/hotfixes ( IMHO a bit too generous to term them as updates 😄 ) and I still don't think the Simbrief import problem has been fully fixed. But still very good to see these patches being written.

Re. Breath holding, Yeah I fully understand where you are coming from and only time will tell. I am disappointed to see that certain capabilities that were in the X version have been removed from the SR version. Also hate, hate, hate the way you cannot close the "In Flight Window" while using ProATC/SR, even the default ATC allows this.

 

As I have said before, I mostly enjoy using the prg, but am still somewhat peeved at paying a further €40 for what I term as a 'tarted-up' version of ProATC/X that still has the same bugs and has actually removed the option to use historic weather.

But I'm sure I'll get over it. 😆😆

 

Edited August 26, 2022 by Sparkrite

[Deltaair1212 53]

I’m still unsure what’s different about SR than X. They have not fully explained the new features OTHER THAN Voice recognition which I don’t care about anyways. Is there a full list somewhere of differences between the old and new version? It’s not even on their website  

[neilhewitt 494]

11 minutes ago, Sparkrite said:

As I have said before, I mostly enjoy using the prg, but am still somewhat peeved at paying a further €40 for what I term as a 'tarted-up' version of ProATC/X that still has the same bugs and has actually removed the option to use historic weather.

Yes, that's annoying. But since the big pivot to MSFS as the first platform seems to be more or less complete, and it doesn't support historical weather in any shape or form, live weather is now the default and it's just assumed that everyone wants to fly that way. 

At least it does claim to be able to read the weather from the sim (with the proviso that it's only up to 200km away) which would work with P3D if you were using ActiveSky, say, but I don't know if that applies beyond FSX/P3D because AFAIK you can't read the weather at all (beyond wind direction, speed, OAT and QNH at the current location) in Simconnect in MSFS.

8 minutes ago, Deltaair1212 said:

I’m still unsure what’s different about SR than X. They have not fully explained the new features OTHER THAN Voice recognition which I don’t care about anyways. Is there a full list somewhere of differences between the old and new version? It’s not even on their website  

From what I can see it's mostly 'it has speech recognition and it works with MSFS'. I've not noticed any fundamentally new capabilities. That said, I only installed it yesterday.

[Deltaair1212 53]

Just now, neilhewitt said:

Yes, that's annoying. But since the big pivot to MSFS as the first platform seems to be more or less complete, and it doesn't support historical weather in any shape or form, live weather is now the default and it's just assumed that everyone wants to fly that way. 

At least it does claim to be able to read the weather from the sim (with the proviso that it's only up to 200km away) which would work with P3D if you were using ActiveSky, say, but I don't know if that applies beyond FSX/P3D because AFAIK you can't read the weather at all (beyond wind direction, speed, OAT and QNH at the current location) in Simconnect in MSFS.

From what I can see it's mostly 'it has speech recognition and it works with MSFS'. I've not noticed any fundamentally new capabilities. That said, I only installed it yesterday.

Oh great. 

[Sparkrite 188]

2 minutes ago, neilhewitt said:

At least it does claim to be able to read the weather from the sim (with the proviso that it's only up to 200km away) which would work with P3D if you were using ActiveSky

So it claims, but does it work, NO, not for me and not for a few others on the forum.

"X" ver. had the option to load ASP3D weather directly, very annoying that this has been removed.

Even using live weather along with ASP3D injecting it's weather into the sim causes anomalies as quite often they differ.

Whereas if only one source was used, as before, these anomalies were avoided.