Another lump of coal: PMDG Update [24DEC22]

[abennett 172]

5 hours ago, Aamir said:

Could you expand on the buggy VNAV? Curious to see what you mean.

For me, it more often that not breaks the 250kt at 10000 even when there are no altitude constraints beforehand, so it really could calculate enough time to decelerate. 

If I am constantly hugging the bottom of the speed window on descent I will often pop into selected at the same speed as managed. I would expect the engines to spool up and maintain the same path as calculated but with enough thrust to maintain the selected speed, instead it will sometimes give a new path with the green dot suddenly jumping and leaving me well off this new path.  and  too high if I go back in to managed mode at a later point, even if that managed speed is exactly the same speed as I’m doing in selected.

If I’m managed mode when approaching a speed constraint I feel it often doesn’t decelerate quickly enough, it still seems to descend too much, and is indeed showing below the path, surely it should pitch up and stay on path which would also help it to decelerate to the speed constraint? (Similar to the 250/10000 issue.)

Sometimes when there is a speed constraint there is no magenta dot on the ND, which I would expect to see indicating a change of attitude to change speed, usually to decelerate.

Manually entering speed constraints also seem to completely screw up the path, and sometimes changes speeds further down the flight plan to ridiculous numbers such as 42kts.

Decel point often seems too late. 
 

If there are constraints below 10000 at waypoints on the approach, 220kts for example, and then further waypoints before the decel point with no speed restrictions the aircraft accelerates up to 250 if still in managed mode, though I think the real aircraft may do this, and the approach needs to be activated manually, and then selected speed until ready to go to green dot. But I’m nervous about switching between the two, as have I’ve mentioned above, often it will recalculate the path when switching between the two and leave you quite off profile.

Of course just my observations, though I do average above 6 hours a day in this aircraft in the sim.  
 

I wouldn’t spend so much time using it if it wasn’t enjoyable and so none of this is me criticising just trying to give any useful information, and of course if I am incorrect in any of my assumptions, I will be glad to learn something that I am doing wrong.

Thanks once again for a wonderful aircraft.

[abennett 172]

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

are all your drives SSD/NVME?

Yeah Windows on an M.2 and the sim and all addons on a separate M.2.

[honanhal 1,420]

2 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

So, yes, those (minor) issues do indeed exist, but I just can't take a guy like that seriously.

Yeah, for myself I’d put those issues more in the category of “would I buy long-term stock in PMDG” than “this interferes with my use/enjoyment of this addon.” It’s possible to see these things as early signs PMDG is slipping behind the competition/innovation curve but also not be personally bothered!

[Christopher Low 5,354]

To be fair, I actually agree regarding the low resolution textures. If you can create high resolution textures for 99.9% of the aircraft, then I see no reason why it cannot be done for the remaining 0.1%.

Edited January 3, 2023 by Christopher Low

[Lucky38i 1,095]

12 hours ago, Stearmandriver said:

It's more an indication of simmers not taking the time to understand how the sim works, how selling products for the sim works, and why other add-ons can do things like native simbrief integration but PMDG doesn't (yet).

Remember that the Fenix (and all these other add-ons folks are comparing PMDG to) run custom code external to the sim.  Doing this allows a dev to work around sim limits.  However, you cannot run external code if you intend for your product to be used on Xbox ( and I believe if you wanted it in the Marketplace at all until recently.)

PMDG has been clear from the beginning that they intended to sell their products on the Marketplace and for every platform.  This is obviously just smart business.  This also obviously places limitations on them that other, less ambitious devs do not have. 

PMDG has been one of the driving forces behind getting many of these limitations lifted from the base sim over time, benefiting us all, even if you'll never use a Boeing in the sim.  They are the reason that HTTP access has now been unlocked for WASM modules, allowing them (and all other devs) to incorporate native simbrief access without external code, for instance.

The idea that the developer driving improvements in an entire sim platform is "stuck in the old ways" doesn't quite track, if you understand why things are the way they are.  😉

Mmm... Just want to correct a few things here. I'm not going to use any other devs as example to prove my points, just going off of my development knowledge. Whether it's enough to supplement what I'm saying is for you to decide I guess, it's no matter to me. Also as far as I'm concerned, Fenix is the only high fidelity addon running an external app to the sim. Some people might think leonardo does as-well, however it's not used to run any of the aircraft systems. Wether you're running your code externally or within the confines of a WASM based and/or JS based code structure, You're going to need to interact with the sim in one way or another, you're not working around any "sim limitations" because no matter what you do you need to work with the sim. MSFS was primarily built around JS based aircraft with the WASM solution providing an alternative to ESP based addons that were mostly compiled DLLs. MSFS now supports this mixed code base development and to be quite frank sticking to one code base will just present limitations in the future. For example C++/Rust being really fast and most suited to real-time calculations but an absolute trauma to develop UIs (Unless you have a nice component library setup, but that's a lot of boilerplate for people doing things from scratch) compared to using JS/TS with the WT Avionics SDK. You cannot just develop aircraft while limiting yourself to one language, you will find roadblocks along the way.

PMDG specifically doesn't support things like native simbrief because they have specifically chosen to not include JS-based code at all, despite this being fully compliant with the MSFS marketplace and deployable on Xbox. Wether that will change with the deployment of their EFB is yet to be seen, but PMDG isn't blocked here just because they're only WASM based, just to clarify.

Whether you need to develop the hydraulics systems, electrical systems, LNAV module etc. etc. for your aircraft, for all intents and purposes the sim is not interacted with save for the use of LVARs where needed, because majority of these modules are internal to the aircraft. The sim does not care about the current PSI pressure of your control surfaces, it cares about the position of your control surface to actualize the aircraft within the sim world. With the exception of having a weather SDK to draw weather details to building a weather radar, high fidelity aircraft are fully possible in MSFS whether done externally or "internally".

 

Just to clarify, I'm not trying disparge PMDG here in anyway, just want to correct some misconceptions about developing for MSFS.

Edited January 3, 2023 by Lucky38i

[grandfred29 180]

2 hours ago, abennett said:

For me, it more often that not breaks the 250kt at 10000 even when there are no altitude constraints beforehand, so it really could calculate enough time to decelerate. 

If I am constantly hugging the bottom of the speed window on descent I will often pop into selected at the same speed as managed. I would expect the engines to spool up and maintain the same path as calculated but with enough thrust to maintain the selected speed, instead it will sometimes give a new path with the green dot suddenly jumping and leaving me well off this new path.  and  too high if I go back in to managed mode at a later point, even if that managed speed is exactly the same speed as I’m doing in selected.

If I’m managed mode when approaching a speed constraint I feel it often doesn’t decelerate quickly enough, it still seems to descend too much, and is indeed showing below the path, surely it should pitch up and stay on path which would also help it to decelerate to the speed constraint? (Similar to the 250/10000 issue.)

Sometimes when there is a speed constraint there is no magenta dot on the ND, which I would expect to see indicating a change of attitude to change speed, usually to decelerate.

Manually entering speed constraints also seem to completely screw up the path, and sometimes changes speeds further down the flight plan to ridiculous numbers such as 42kts.

Decel point often seems too late. 
 

If there are constraints below 10000 at waypoints on the approach, 220kts for example, and then further waypoints before the decel point with no speed restrictions the aircraft accelerates up to 250 if still in managed mode, though I think the real aircraft may do this, and the approach needs to be activated manually, and then selected speed until ready to go to green dot. But I’m nervous about switching between the two, as have I’ve mentioned above, often it will recalculate the path when switching between the two and leave you quite off profile.

Of course just my observations, though I do average above 6 hours a day in this aircraft in the sim.  
 

I wouldn’t spend so much time using it if it wasn’t enjoyable and so none of this is me criticising just trying to give any useful information, and of course if I am incorrect in any of my assumptions, I will be glad to learn something that I am doing wrong.

Thanks once again for a wonderful aircraft.

I a agree with you, but recently I learned in real life a320 captain spend lot of time to fly his aircraft by anticipate speed or decent sometimes fly 220 knots before a descent constraint because the plane will accelerate, number of time where the path is cut during star so the plane is to high… there is a good vidéo YouTube channel where the purpose of these videos are the descent and the approach.

since I drive my plane with more anticipation when I reach TOD, descent and approach

[Jazz 1,046]

5 hours ago, honanhal said:

As I understand it, getting it to work in the 737 involves not just setting up the simbrief downloader, but also then downloading the OFP every time I want to fly, right?

As I explained earlier, the SimBrief downloader takes a few seconds to setup. Literally. Unless one a bit thick and blind in which case it may take 20 to 30. It maybe took me 20 if I'm honest but I was already wearing my glasses at the time😉

I can only imagine this being a problem for the kind of person that wears velcro shoes all the time because tying shoelaces is too much of a inconvenience

Once this is done you never need to touch it again and IT downloads the files automatically every time you produce a plan. It detects a plan and WX file have been produced (or it is pinged with the info, I'm unsure which) and immediately installs the files in the correct place. I have watched it do this many times trying to see what the delay is. It's about 1 or 2 seconds from the moment my plan is generated on my laptop to the file being placed in the folder on my simming rig. You don't download them, IT does. If I didn't tell you that it was doing you would literally not know that the 737 was not pulling them directly from SimBrief rather than the folder on your computer. You would assume it was functioning exactly the same way as the Fenix. Because for all intents and purposes it is.

For some to pretend this is some kind of issue is laughable and if this is being trawled up as a strike or fault of some kind against PMDG and the 737 then it seems to me that it serves only to prove what a quality product it is. If this is one of the best arguments against it/them then its real faults really must be very limited indeed.

 

[Aamir 2,907]

3 hours ago, abennett said:

If I am constantly hugging the bottom of the speed window on descent I will often pop into selected at the same speed as managed. I would expect the engines to spool up and maintain the same path as calculated but with enough thrust to maintain the selected speed, instead it will sometimes give a new path with the green dot suddenly jumping and leaving me well off this new path.  and  too high if I go back in to managed mode at a later point, even if that managed speed is exactly the same speed as I’m doing in selected.

 

Hugging the bottom of the speed band is something the aircraft does in real life fwiw, more so if you're in a geometric segment of descent. In an idle descent segment, it will fluctuate, but by and large, in a geometric, it will decay to the bottom of the band.

For the SEL SPEED changing the descent path, I have actually seen this myself once or twice, but I've never managed to successfully recreate it - so if you can grab it on video of some sort and chuck it over to me, or in the bug reporting system, I'd be most obliged. Even more so if you can identify a repeatable scenario in which this happens. Will get that fixed!

Re the rest of your reporting, a video would again go a long way, just to make sure I've got every single factor possible in order to look at what the systems should be doing vs what they are doing. Mostly because I've done a fair few hours in the last couple of weeks flying around and I've actually found myself reasonably pleased with the efficacy of the constraint management, albeit in fully managed modes. 

[honanhal 1,420]

45 minutes ago, Jazz said:

Once this is done you never need to touch it again and IT downloads the files automatically every time you produce a plan. It detects a plan and WX file have been produced (or it is pinged with the info, I'm unsure which) and immediately installs the files in the correct place.

Sorry, so this is a program that runs at computer startup and sits on the taskbar?

That’s fine, I guess, but also seems more than a little like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer! As for me, I don’t terribly mind inputting the route manually when I fly the 737. Whatever works. 🙂

James

 

[Jazz 1,046]

1 minute ago, honanhal said:

Sorry, so this is a program that runs at computer startup and sits on the taskbar?

That’s fine, I guess, but also seems more than a little like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer! As for me, I don’t terribly mind inputting the route manually when I fly the 737. Whatever works. 🙂

James

 

Correct.

I rarely use it to download the flight plan if I'm honest. I tend to input that manually. I just use the weather/wind data import feature.

Of course the problem with SimBrief weather data, especially on a long flight, is that by the time you get to your destination the winds are out of date. This means that you need to regenerate the flight plan in order to get the latest wind data to upload to the FMC. The SimBrief downloader then does its thing in the background and places the file so that I don't have to ALT+Tab or anything. It just works. Like I said, if you didn't know how it was doing it you wouldn't know the difference at all.

[Sonosusto 681]

4 hours ago, Jazz said:

I can only imagine this being a problem for the kind of person that wears velcro shoes all the time because tying shoelaces is too much of a inconvenience

Hahaha! Fair point. So much complaining about tiny things here. Simbrief downloader really helps but most of the time I just input everything manually because I find it more fun. 

 

[jrw4 624]

4 hours ago, Jazz said:

Of course the problem with SimBrief weather data, especially on a long flight, is that by the time you get to your destination the winds are out of date.

Which in principle is what happens in real life since those winds aloft data are based on global models that are only updated at discrete intervals, six hours I believe.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/fs_html/chap8_section_3.html

[Jazz 1,046]

21 minutes ago, jrw4 said:

Which in principle is what happens in real life since those winds aloft data are based on global models that are only updated at discrete intervals, six hours I believe.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/fs_html/chap8_section_3.html

Yes of course but the point I was making is that in order to get updated weather you need to do so by generating another plan in SimBrief.

Because the datalink is fake.

In the "olden days" this system was actually better because I could just request the data in the CDU and it would pull the data direct from Active Sky on the fly. If I recall correctly.

But that's not possible in MSFS anymore.

[jrw4 624]

11 minutes ago, Jazz said:

In the "olden days" this system was actually better because I could just request the data in the CDU and it would pull the data direct from Active Sky on the fly. If I recall correctly.

Not sure "better" is the right word, but certainly different. It was totally unrealistic to pull the forecast data out of the software actually generating the weather, because that's not how things work IRL. We plan based on the forecast, but then fly based on what the atmosphere (real or simulated) gives us. That uncertainty can make for potentially critical decisions regarding fuel and payload in preflight and really interesting diversion decisions in flight.

It was surprising that so many flight simmers in P3D and XP didn't understand that reading the simulated winds aloft on that table in Active Sky was not how things worked in real life.

[Jazz 1,046]

13 minutes ago, jrw4 said:

Not sure "better" is the right word, but certainly different. It was totally unrealistic to pull the forecast data out of the software actually generating the weather, because that's not how things work IRL. We plan based on the forecast, but then fly based on what the atmosphere (real or simulated) gives us. That uncertainty can make for potentially critical decisions regarding fuel and payload in preflight and really interesting diversion decisions in flight.

It was surprising that so many flight simmers in P3D and XP didn't understand that reading the simulated winds aloft on that table in Active Sky was not how things worked in real life.

Oh, I think most of us understood that, buddy. But for the sake of simming ease of life it was brilliant.