Hi,

 While patiently waiting for a fix for the A310 FPS issue, I am reminded about another product that had a less than stellar roll out, GSX.  I tried the initial release and used the free demo, with poor results.  I decided to hold off on a purchase, but really wanted that products.  Just wondering where it's at today?  I had issues with jetways on the wrong side of the aircraft and passengers walking on air.  Just wondering if it's good to buy now?

Thanks

1 hour ago, morso484 said:

I had issues with jetways on the wrong side of the aircraft and passengers walking on air. 

Those were never release day issues. They were and still are purely user issues. If you don't set up the program correctly these things will still happen.

GSX is not an install and forget add-on. It needs proper customization to function without issues.

If I didn't own it already I would currently be hesitant to use it, because of the Simconnect Object limit introduced with SU10. That will lead to scenery not loading properly if you overload the system with AI and add-on airports. GSX with it's own objects also contributes to this problem. That is not GSX's fault,it is Asobo who need to adress this, but as it stands now, certain combinations of add-ons that are supposed to make the world more believable will break it, if used together.

Edited November 16, 20223 yr by Farlis

Thanks for the reply, I used this in FSX and know there is a bit of customization, I just didn't feel like having to customize various airports or gates.  The support vehicles seem for work well though.  I think I'll wait for Asobo to clear up their end of thinks,,,,someday.

Thanks

I have it and it works great ~90% of the time. The issues come from incorrect/poor config files and some API limitations on how well it's able to read the scenery data. There are now hundreds of available GSX profiles which makes the reliability even better.

Thanks, maybe it's time to jump back in.

 

I have been using GSX since it's MSFS release, and for the most part, I agree with everything said above. It does get updated often, so that is a plus. And, for my part, it works as advertised and helps add to the immersion. I have encounted some passengers walking in air a few times, but I know that was due to either the scenry addon jetway issue, OR because I did not take the time yet to customize that specific area yet. In either case, it does not really bother me, as there are so many other things I like and enjoy about the addon that I don't let it bother me. Especially since I could do something about it if I got around to it 😉 

It's now able to read encrypted airports from the marketplace, it's become much more user friendly (e.g. you can now decide if you want to board the pilots or crew or none of them, which was one of the most requested features) and it's much more stable.
Still there are issues with MSFS parking spots, jetways etc. that are out of reach for GSX to fix as of now (e.g. one cannot board pax via the jetways into the CRJ, it's because of MSFS jetway height and stuff, but apparently GSX is working on that too). So every now and then something akward will happen, but it's definitely less common. ALso with a profile from flightsim.to you are basically guaranteed to have no probems with either parking spots or pushbacks.

Simconnect Object limit is the reason I’m not buying it. Hopefully Asobo fix this in SU12.

Simconnect Object limit ... can someone fill me in ... it's a 64bit native app why would there be any limit to object creation?  Is this exclusive to SimConnect or does it pertain to WebAssembly approach?

I hope it's not limited because of XBOX?

Shame, not having any issues with GSX L2 and P3D and was hoping the experience would be even better in MSFS.  One thing that I found distracting in P3D was object collisions where aircraft and vehicles would drive thru each other, was hoping that issue was resolved in MSFS version??

Try the demo again. That's what I did yesterday. It's the same as the final product (so it gets all the updates) and can be used on all non marketplace FSDreamteam airports as well as Milan Malpensa, San Francisco International, and Munich airport.

I spent a couple of hours on it yesterday and had mixed results. I think it still has a long way to go in order to feel less 'clunky'. The menu is still unresponsive at times, not opening when I click on it, and I had several crashes of the Coutal app that runs it.

I think there should be options to speed some services up more than the options that are there. Or certainly it'd be nice to end things quicker if you run out patience/time. For example, if I get fed up of waiting for a service to finish there should be a 'stop' service button and move to the next one option. Otherwise every flight takes far too long to set up. Some will argue that this is more realistic but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be the option for both. Eating airplane food whilst simming would be more realistic too, it doesn't mean I want to do it. A sim always need to balance reality with fun and have options that meet both. Before anyone says otherwise, yes that is actually possible.

The animations too are somewhat basic and very repetative. I think it would have been much nicer to create more passenger types. Seeing the same passengers repeating themselves again and again within the same boarding or deboarding procedure is more than a bit boring and immersion breaking. It's 2022 afterall, can't the developer model some more characters? It looks like many of the existing models were bought online and are the same ones that Aerosoft and Flytampa use inside their terminal buildings. That feels a bit cheap to be honest. As a result of seeing these characters in these other addons, it becomes a bit immersion breaking and too repetative. I know those characters faces so well at this stage, I may as well give them names.

I also have the pushback truck disappearing in and out of existance depending on which way I move the camera angle. And there are tonnes of object clipping as the GSX objects have no awareness of MSFS objects apart from where the aircraft is located. In Milan for example, the tow truck was inside the terminal building. The follow me car does a dance around the aircraft before finding the right position. Passengers even walk through each other. There are plenty of these types of thing (bugs) that all add up to break the immersion and any sense of fluidity.

So it's still a very unpolished product in my opinion requiring time on your hands each flight, patience, and a willingness to overlook a lot of individual issues or complaints. I understand there are constraints due to the MSFS SDK but I also think that it is not just down to that. Looking at what other addon developers have achieved in MSFS, I am sure a lot more can be done with GSX to make it look and work a lot better. 

Will I buy it now? The answer is I'm still on the fence. I think it needs more refinement in much of what I have mentioned above to be something I would use regularly, and in order to not be relegated to an addon gathering dust on the shelf.

I looked into it since I used it in P3D but decided against it. I never did any editing in P3D, except to use the "reposition aircraft" or "find a suitable parking space" commands. The rest worked pretty well.

I just don't have the time to fiddle around to get things sorted. Plus, I now fly mostly turboprops and BizJets, so the program is not that useful to me.

YMMV.

is GSX broken since Su11 update mine is ?

1 hour ago, steve310002 said:

I spent a couple of hours on it yesterday and had mixed results. I think it still has a long way to go in order to feel less 'clunky'. The menu is still unresponsive at times, not opening when I click on it, and I had several crashes of the Coutal app that runs it.

Every menu "clunkiness" is caused entirely by the hoops we had to go through to use a proper Toolbar menu instead of a (really) clunky external superimposed overlay. Being a proper menu has lots of advantages and it's better in the long run, but it's affected by the fact all Toolbar menu code is automatically killed by the sim to save performances, so no Javascript code (other than airplane gauges ) runs when the menu is closed. Because of this, the menu can't be really closed, it's only hidden, so we can pop-up the menu at any time, since GSX often requires a new menu opening automatically after some time.

And, it requires user understanding that, while the menu is closed, you can't call it from the Hotkey, but you need to open it from the Toolbar and in that state you'll miss all text messages and menus won't pop-up, while when it's only hidden ( white toolbar icon ), it works as expected. I see lots of tutorials online where the presenter keep using the mouse to open/close the menu every time, which makes it extremely "clunky", because when it passes from the closed to the open state, it's obviously slower since it has to reinitialize the whole menu, so it looks "unresponsive", but only because it's not used as it's supposed to be used: opening the menu with the mouse when you call it the first time, never close it with the mouse, except when you are done with ground services. The manual explains this but, since this was a big operating change from the initial release, and it's on the last pages, I think not many users are fully aware of it, otherwise I wouldn't see so many videos online of always using the mouse, which causes lots of unnecessary double clicks, missing notifications and worse responsiveness. 

 

1 hour ago, steve310002 said:

I think there should be options to speed some services up more than the options that are there. Or certainly it'd be nice to end things quicker if you run out patience/time. For example, if I get fed up of waiting for a service to finish there should be a 'stop' service button and move to the next one option.

This is actually a very good idea, not sure why nobody has expressed this way, but we'll surely look into it.

 

However, even without it, there are many ways you can accelerate services that takes longer and are:

- The Passenger Density slider has a direct effect on the Boarding/Deboarding time

- The "Multiple Trips" for Passenger Bus and Fuel Trucks also can be used to shorten Boarding/Refueling times, because if it's Disabled, instead of use the real Fuel/Pax trucks capacity (adding to their trip time to the overall waiting time for the service), it will only send a single Truck with an "infinite" capacity, no matter how many passengers you have, or how much fuel you asked.

- The "Time Acceleration" for Refueling slider can be used to make refueling going up to 10x faster than realtime, without having to use a real Time Acceleration in the sim, which might have other side-effect.

 

1 hour ago, steve310002 said:

It looks like many of the existing models were bought online and are the same ones that Aerosoft and Flytampa use inside their terminal buildings. That feels a bit cheap to be honest.

Well, let's use actual numbers to be the judge of that. Surely, everybody buys models from Turbosquid, some guys that work for us even SELL models on it. Looking at my invoice for that particular set of 18 people, dates almost a year before Aerosoft EBBR came out, it's just that GSX took longer to be released, and one of the (many) reasons it didn't come in 2021 was BECAUSE it look a very long time to add a lot more models, and animated them.

At this time, we have 53 different characters, meaning 18 out of 53 are the same ones bought by Aerosoft or Flytampa: would you say those developer were "cheap" by using the same 18 GSX models, had we released GSX a few months earlier with JUST those 18 guys ?

Animations might look "basic" or "repetitive", but only because you keep seeing them at each flight, and you might seem them (especially without jetways) in the OPEN and, most importantly, because you see them for a longer time. When using these characters inside terminals to create ambience, you don't notice their animations are even more basic and far more repetitive.

GSX animations are less basic and way less repetitive then both previous GSX version because:

- We moved away from FSX-backward compatible human skeletons with 22 bones, to higher counts allowed in MSFS, averaging about 70 per characters, so the animations are visibly more natural

- Our updated animation player has built-in randomness: in the FSX/P3D version we only had ONE walking cycle (with 22 bones) for each passenger, now we can have many variations, randomly selected, with most passengers having at least 3 different walking cycles, usually looking straight, or right or left, but also picking up phones, etc. Yes, of course this can only be improved, but you must understand it takes time, because even adding a couple more variations for each passenger, it means we'll need to multiply ( as of today ) by 53 different people. So yes, this will improve, but it will take a bit of time, the important thing was to have the basics working, since there's no limit how many variations we can have for each walking cycle, and no limit how many different characters we can have, it's just a matter of time modeling/animating them.

GSX for FSX/P3D was a 10 years long project, and it has always been updated ever since. I don't even know why I need to explain this, when there's some history backing it up.

 

1 hour ago, steve310002 said:

I also have the pushback truck disappearing in and out of existance depending on which way I move the camera angle

We explained this so many times: GSX actually FULLY respect Asobo LOD guidelines, it's probably the only add-ons that does that, which not only added a lot to release time but, it's something that, while it makes for a more reliable product in fps and memory footprint, it's also something that users don't like, yet at the same time they yell at new products that are "fps killers", and when I look at why these products are so heavy on fps, most of the time it's because they either don't have LODs, or even if they have, they have been set in a way they are only enter in effect when they don't do any benefit.

The SDK has a very precise tool that tells you exactly, based on a combination between the object complexity, it's size and it's distance from the camera, how you are supposed to switch LODs properly. With "properly", meaning "before the simulator will eventually axe your object itself", because that's what will do when memory becomes constrained. Now, while this is the theory, we don't exactly know how this strategy really works, and how it's different between Xbox and PC.

This because when the "kill the badly LODed object" strategy was announced by Asobo, sometimes around SU5 ( the first Xbox version ), even if they said it would be several months before the strategy would enter in force, it still caused some stir on developers forum, because nobody basically took LODs seriously before, and since it takes lots of extra work to create them and tune them visually, adding LOD is something every developer hates, because it adds to development time. Users hates it, because it might be visually distracting, but it's mostly a necessary evil to prevent bigger issues of fps and, most importantly, too high memory usage.

Again, this is the theory. The practice is, the simulator doesn't seem to scale this very well. While I'm fairly sure that with a video card with "only" 8GB, which today can be considered entry level, a proper LOD strategy is absolutely required by add-ons, because they just won't fit all together ( and GSX works best with BIG airports and airliners ), it doesn't seem the sim ever tries to use much of extra resources you have, because without manual tweaks, even on Ultra settings, I never managed to see more than 8-9 GB of VRAM used of my 3090.

Since GSX objects are not used just when GSX is in action, but they are also used as visual replacement for default Ground Vehicles ( Airport Services and Living World vehicles ), we MUST use LOD properly, because when those vehicles are not called by GSX, we are not even in control HOW MANY of them we have, it's the simulator that will create them, based on the Ground Traffic density sliders, and the number of parking spots (both for AI and Ground vehicles) in the airport. That is, an add-on scenery that has more parking spots than a default scenery, will force the simulator to create more ground vehicles than usual, just because it has more parking spots.

However, since the issue with the Pushback truck in GSX you noticed, affects ONLY the models with a Towbar, since these are not available (the sim doesn't support Pushback with a Towbar by default) as default Ground Vehicles, but appear only for the user airplane and only when calling GSX, I guess we CAN tweak their LOD to be less restrictive, since we are sure only one vehicle will be seen at any given time.

Then there's the OTHER issue, which now has been documented in the SDK: there can't be any more than 1000 Simobjects in a scene. This counts includes everything that moves, basically, like AI planes, Ground vehicles ( GSX and default ), Living World vehicles, Passengers, Boats, Animals, and airport Jetways too. 

Because, the irony of the above limit, is that SU9 added a new way to create objects, which is way more convenient and more efficient and allows more reusability, and it's the breaking up of objects, allowing to attach objects to other "parent" objects. This is clearly more efficient because, while before SU9, a Pushback with a Towbar would have to be made as a single object including the Tow Truck, the Towbar and its Driver, now it's made by 3 separate objects, which can even controlled by variables, and since GSX came out no longer after SU9, we immediately jumped on this feature ( this delayed GSX as well ), because is so much better and flexible being able to independently model the Truck, the Towbars and the Drivers, and create many variations of vehicles by combining them in different ways.

Same for the Baggage carts: the cart is a separate object, and each bag is a separate object too, which gets attached to the cart. This is incredibly better for flexibility, because we can easily add more variations and new kind of luggage ( in FSX we had just 2 bags, one blue one red ), because bags are separate from the cart, but it also means that each cart is 12 Simbojects, plus 1 for the guy loading, 1 for the loader itself, meaning with two loaders, we add 28 objects to the overall count.

But of course, nobody really noticed this before, when AI Injectors started to appear, and of course highly detailed add-on airports too. A super-big airport like KORD adds to the overall Simboject number 186 objects JUST to create jetways. If we assume using it with a GSX profile, which adds a VGDS on each gate that has a jetway, you add another 186 objects at the very minimum, but that's just the best case scenario, when the wall mounted VGDS is used ( 1 object ). Because the ones with a wall support or a ground support, are made with 2 objects, again for the obvious benefit that allows to create an object variation by attaching two object together to create a new one.

So, the hard limit on the number of Simobjects is seems to affect more products that were made in the most efficient way, since from a memory usage, having the same objects ( for example, drivers ), inserted several times in multiple vehicles, is way better than having all vehicles including all parts, since it lets the simulator more way to optimize their loading.

We can only hope to trying to convince Microsoft/Asobo to lift this limit and/or make it dependent on hardware, at least on the PC version, otherwise it would be very difficult to achieve what everybody would want: that is more passengers and more variations.

 

2 hours ago, steve310002 said:

In Milan for example, the tow truck was inside the terminal building. The follow me car does a dance around the aircraft before finding the right position

We probably made a mistake here, by being too honest, and having the Demo in the exact situation you would be on any random airport without any customization. Because, if we made an airport profile for the 3 Demo airports, you wouldn't have noticed any of that.

What's really best, in the longer term, having users saying:

1) "I checked the Demo, and it worked perfectly fine, but it's a complete mess everywhere else, but I couldn't figured it out from the Demo"

2) "I checked the Demo, and there are glitches, but I heard it's way better if you download an airport profile"

#1 Would work better in the short term, with better initial sales, but #2 will result in the program lasting longer, with users not buying immediately, eventually ending up buying it anyway, sooner or later. That's more sustainable, and better for everybody as well, because you KNOW we MUST keep improving it, something not as obvious with strategy #1.

That's just to say, airport customization is important, because not only it fixes almost all these things, but it also protect GSX from being affected much by badly designed airports. No, not all users needs to customize an airport themselves, that's not really the point. What matters to you, as an user of profiles eventually made by somebody else, is what the GSX Editor CAN DO, even if you don't use it yourself, somebody will and, after only 4 months after its release, there are custom GSX profiles for literally every airport that makes sense using in GSX as free downloads.

That's why we worked a lot adding lots of features to the airport customization editor: it's simply not possible to always sort out every possible situation automatically.

You said vehicles and passenger sometime clash into each other. While vehicle clashing usually can be fixed by editing the vehicle starting positions, you just can't fix every possible situation, and surely not with passengers.

Doing this, would mean checking every vehicle/passenger position at each frame, and that would take a very big impact on the simulator at large, since we would require to Spam Simconnect with many more commands per frame than what is reasonable to not start to disrupt OTHER add-ons also doing their thing. At some time, when somebody spams too much, the simulator cannot cope with all request, causing stuttering, lost commands, objects not being removed, or not even being created altogether.

Without even mentioning that, even if in an ideal world, we could connect to the sim without any of the above issues, the very problem itself of vehicles not clashing into each other or people moving as a realistic crowd is VERY complex, even in games where the developers not only have FULL control over the whole game engine ( we don't ), but where developers have what can be considered an INFINTE BUDGET, compared to any MSFS developer. There are literally hundreds of videos joking about "GTA V glitches", now rapidly being surpassed by "Cyberpunk 2077 glitches", showing AI vehicles and AI people doing strange things, and these games have 100x the resources we have, in addition to be able to work on the actual game code, so they can use whatever method they like, a luxury we don't have, since we need to play within the rules of the Host simulator.

That's why we really can't automatically "fix" those vehicle/people clashing into each other, without some help with airport customization, and even with it, it won't really be automatically solved in all situations, and the crowd simulation will never be perfect, because it would require a far higher level of control we just don't have. And no other game has to work together with other add-ons, it's really something unique to MSFS + add-ons.

I’ve been using it for a month or so and am happy with it, haven’t really run into any issues.

I loved GSX during the entirity of P3D and FSX.  

I recently bought it for MSFS only to find it has the same quirks as it always did and actually, I find it to be a buggy mess.  Not impressed.

• The follow me cars sometimes have a mind of their own 
• The wheels of vehicles point in the opposite direction to the direction the vehicle is moving
• Multiplayer aircraft (on VATSIM) do a breakdance on pushback.

Edited November 17, 20223 yr by ErichB