What exactly are GSX profiles in flightsim.to? Thanks

23 minutes ago, John Snyder Jr said:

What exactly are GSX profiles in flightsim.to? Thanks

They are customised configurations for each stand at a specific airport while using the payware add-on GSX Pro.

People have created a profile for an airport scenery (usually payware) and have placed the aircraft stop mark, the ground marshaller, the jetway / airstairs, the ground service vehicles, the passengers and the crew to all engage with your airliner exactly as you would expect without the misalignments that can occur without GSX.

The other, probably most noteable feature, is that the pushback from each of an airport's stands has been designed to match the apron markings.
For instance, at a small gate in a tight part of an airport apron, someone may have created a pushback to help your aircraft point in the appropriate direction.

What's great about these is that someone has very kindly gone to all the effort to create a simple download, drag and drop file for everyone to enjoy airport ops as you would expect them at a particular airport.
 

Edited December 12, 20223 yr by F737MAX

If you exclude a custom airport for the jetways will GSX still read profile when installed or do you need to re-include it.  Any help on this is much appreciated!  Thanks!

6 minutes ago, toddl said:

If you exclude a custom airport for the jetways will GSX still read profile when installed or do you need to re-include it.  Any help on this is much appreciated!  Thanks!

Jetways have nothing to do with GSX profiles, so yes, no problem. All custom airports need to be excluded from the GSX enhanced jetways.

1 hour ago, F737MAX said:

They are customised configurations for each stand at a specific airport while using the payware add-on GSX Pro.

People have created a profile for an airport scenery (usually payware) and have placed the aircraft stop mark, the ground marshaller, the jetway / airstairs, the ground service vehicles, the passengers and the crew to all engage with your airliner exactly as you would expect without the misalignments that can occur without GSX.

The other, probably most noteable feature, is that the pushback from each of an airport's stands has been designed to match the apron markings.
For instance, at a small gate in a tight part of an airport apron, someone may have created a pushback to help your aircraft point in the appropriate direction.

What's great about these is that someone has very kindly gone to all the effort to create a simple download, drag and drop file for everyone to enjoy airport ops as you would expect them at a particular airport.
 

That in itself seems like another add-on business opportunity.  In fact, why not FSDT itself?.  GSX Pro Ultra.  I'd happily cough up what I paid for GSX Pro to have that as a single install, to have essentially all airports profiled.  Huge project I would think but it would make GSX Pro that much more attractive.

I must say somehow or other it works pretty well without these profiles fortunately.  I think one can get better at choosing a gate that will work well.  The only annoyance for me right now is the plane parks too close to the marshall, well past where it ought to.  The fact that this is consistent makes me think a new default might do better at this but I know Umberto knows it inside and out and must be a reason why it is the way it is.

1 hour ago, Fiorentoni said:

Jetways have nothing to do with GSX profiles, so yes, no problem. All custom airports need to be excluded from the GSX enhanced jetways.

Thank you!

18 minutes ago, Noel said:

That in itself seems like another add-on business opportunity.  In fact, why not FSDT itself?

Once upon a time, maybe. Aerosoft did this with AES and iniBuilds charged for a GSX profile, making it free to everyone after.

Both have given up on their respective ancillary charging models.

The flight sim community is very generous (see FBW, WT, and the hundreds of freeware creators and livery painters), just see how much content is out there on flightsim.to.

I don't believe this type of nickel and diming is going to work any more.

23 minutes ago, F737MAX said:

Once upon a time, maybe.

Why's that, why not now?  If freeware folks are able to crank out a custom profile for one airport then why no can create a suite of airports in the US for example the top 100 (https://gettocenter.com/airports/continent/north-america) and sell them as a package.  Look at the effort FSLTL must have taken and many other freeware and payware products.  Perhaps a dev can create a script which does a lot of the work.  Again--FSDT is the obvious vendor for this it would seem.  If GSX gets enough traction (and ironically this addon would amp up that traction as it would address much of issues w/ GSX) then it could pay for itself.  I just have no idea how much GSX sells.  I really like it myself

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Why's that, why not now?

Numbers of contributers.

On the GSX Pro profiles page of the other freeware flight sim file hosting site, there are 23 new airport configs released in the past 13 days (nearly 2 per day on average).
In total, there are 27 pages of GSX profiles on there, at 23 per page that is 621 airport configs. Even if you generously say that half are duplicates, that still leaves 310 airports that have been completed, a lot of the most popular ones at that, all since August of this year.

No payware developer in their right mind will chase a rapidly and ever-dwindling pool of airport sceneries to try and produce a GSX config before a freeware contributer releases their version and kills the demand for the payware version to practically zero.

Unscientifically, when you search for 'GSX' in the Avsim library, just 106 files dating back to 2012 are returned. Not all are airport config files either.
You can now perhaps see why there was demand for payware solutions in FSX and P3D, but not now.

Even if you are willing to pay a professional developer for a payware GSX config, the opportunity cost of working on something far more profitable is just far too high.

1 hour ago, F737MAX said:

No payware developer in their right mind will chase a rapidly and ever-dwindling pool of airport sceneries to try and produce a GSX config before a freeware contributer releases their version and kills the demand for the payware version to practically zero.

Makes perfect sense.   Perhaps one of the non-payware developers that contribute to projects like FSLTL might take it on.  It's one thing to individually search, download, extract and install 100 airport profiles versus installing the lot of them all at once. 

There are also aircraft profiles on flightsim.to that affect various things such as baggage loader types (belt or container), stairs and so on.

For example I've tweaked the default GSX profile for the A310 to use 2 x container loaders and omit the belt loader. Baggage loads much faster this way, similar to the Fenix A320.

GSX aircraft profiles can end up being somewhat compromised in functionality because of how the aircraft was developed - many were designed before GSX was available in FS2020.

Everyone is free to tweak any profile they have downloaded to their liking of course. The learning curve can be steep but the manual is detailed. In any case figure investing several hours if you want to tackle a large airport to customise.

I've been looking at this software for a while now but have given it a wide birth since it being the royal PITA for me personally in P3D. But now there seems to be a plethora of profiles, I think I may get out the plastic. Quick question, are the profiles specific to a particular developer's airport or will they work with any version, say for example, the freeware version of Gatwick and the paid version?

26 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

I've been looking at this software for a while now but have given it a wide birth since it being the royal PITA for me personally in P3D. But now there seems to be a plethora of profiles, I think I may get out the plastic. Quick question, are the profiles specific to a particular developer's airport or will they work with any version, say for example, the freeware version of Gatwick and the paid version?

Yes mostly, the files on flightsim.to will specify which version of the scenery that it will work on.

3 hours ago, Steve_Ellis said:

Yes mostly, the files on flightsim.to will specify which version of the scenery that it will work on.

Excellent, thanks Steve.

6 hours ago, Rockliffe said:

I've been looking at this software for a while now but have given it a wide birth since it being the royal PITA for me personally in P3D. But now there seems to be a plethora of profiles, I think I may get out the plastic. Quick question, are the profiles specific to a particular developer's airport or will they work with any version, say for example, the freeware version of Gatwick and the paid version?

I've been using GSX Pro for over a week with a lot of flights now and have yet to use a single profile--not perfect but very stable and very well done.  What I don't get is why the standard default arrival position advances too far, past where the plane would optimally stop relative to a jetway.  The jetway automates as you're rolling so lately I've stopped well short of where the marshall wants me to stop.  What's odd to me is it is always this way and as that seems to be the case why not put that stop point well before where default is now?