For those who have had a chance to trial 2024 in the alpha program do you have a sense of how PAX loading and pushback might be?  TBH while I've used GSX since it debuted for P3D and use it now in 2020 I find it 85% annoyance and 15% positive.   My sense is Umberto did as good as could be done presumably for 2020 but again, for me it's almost a net loser. 

So I'm wondering if there is any kind of PAX loading in MSFS 2024.   I'm guessing pushback is going to be at least as decent as is 2020 and hopefully is improved some.   I definitely do not need a duplicate of GSX:  want nothing to do with performance-sapping animated PAX seating themselves in the plane but it would be nice if there is anything to simulate PAX loading and presumably pushback will be at least as okay or better than in 2020.  What's your sense if you've had a look?

GSX works in MSFS 2020 way better than it ever did in P3D, and Pushback has been greatly improved too (in both sims).

The main issue with MSFS, is just *understanding* the needs for the menu to NOT to be closed from the Toolbar, and always use the Hotkey to open/close it. Once you understand this fundamental workflow, you experience with GSX will change completely.

This somewhat unusual workaround, is of course caused by an MSFS specific limitation, which removed the ability to create menus programmatically through Simconnect which was there since FSX, and the fact the menu running .JS code gets killed *immediately* as soon the menu is closed from the Toolbar, without even proving any kind of notification, so we had to find workarounds which required users understanding how it works.

Of course, since the SDK is not out until Monday, we can't say if MSFS 2024 has added ways to overcome those two limitations which made the menu not obvious to use (but once you know that, it becomes second nature).
 

Edited October 19, 20241 yr by virtuali

Thank you for your reply.  I always use the hotkey to close the menu but for some reason some time ago it started not opening GSX initially, but does thereafter so I always use the hotkey to close the menu or REOPEN it.   

One major annoyance happened this morning:  loaded MSFS, launched PMDG 738 to the departure gate only to learn GSX isn't picking up Simbrief because GSX needs an update.  That's a good 20 minutes wasted because as you know now much kill MSFS to start Live update which takes ample time to run so I definitely don't care to run it EVERY TIME up to prevent this annoyance.  

Right now GSX for me is the least desirable part of MSFS 2020 in my system and the biggest source of annoyances:   stuttering animations and ground vehicles, a menu that won't start reliably, ground crew that walk thru walls and ground vehicles to get to the plane for pushback, even planes that get pushed back into walls.  Clearly you've done amazing work with a very constrained SDK but still these kinds of issues are deterrents for me using GSX going forward and why I'm hoping 2024 has enough features to obviate its use, or a much better SDK for you to enhance GSX with.  

 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

I always use the hotkey to close the menu but for some reason some time ago it started not opening GSX initially, but does thereafter so I always use the hotkey to close the menu or REOPEN it.   

It's not "some reason", is exactly how it always worked and how the manual suggests to use it. You need to understand the main concept:

If a menu is closed in the Toolbar (icon dark) NOTHING and NOBODY (except YOU) can open it.

Once you fully understand this, everything will be clear. So yes, the first opening in the session must always be done with a mouse click on the Toolbar, but then, for the rest of the session, you should always open/close with the Hotkey.

 

 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

One major annoyance happened this morning:  loaded MSFS, launched PMDG 738 to the departure gate only to learn GSX isn't picking up Simbrief because GSX needs an update.  That's a good 20 minutes wasted because as you know now much kill MSFS to start Live update which takes ample time to run so I definitely don't care to run it EVERY TIME up to prevent this annoyance.  

You are assuming that GSX didn't work because it needed to be updated, which is not the case.

The sad face and the message in the menu is just a notification, which of course has been added because users suggested they wanted to know if there's an update without having to check the FSDT Installer so, as usual, users suggest something, we add it. But it's just a notification, you can still run GSX in the outdated state, it will still work normally if you don't update it, nowhere you are forced to interrupt your flight to update it.

Fact Simbrief didn't work can be verified (and we of course have means to do that), but it wasn't related in any way to the update.

 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

stuttering animations and ground vehicles

This is usually caused by too much traffic on Simconnect, which is forced by running with an unlimited frame rate. ALL your running add-ons running on Simconnect (not just GSX) which are synched to the Visual frame rate will be forced to generate extra traffic when you run with unlimited frame rate, making the sim working twice as much just to keep up and, sometimes when it can't keep up, it will delay updates to running add-on, resulting in stuttering movements. Of course, the stuttering happens on every add-on but, if it's not something that visually does something or moves, you don't get to notice it but, all your add-ons were affected by the increased traffic caused by the too high frame rate. Limiting fps in MSFS will help a lot about this.

 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

a menu that won't start reliably,

The menu starts reliably if you use it as the manual suggests. First opening with the Toolbar, subsequent opening/closing only by Hotkey.

 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

ground crew that walk thru walls and ground vehicles to get to the plane for pushback, even planes that get pushed back into walls. 

You said yourself you use GSX since it came out on P3D, so I find a bit weird you would indicate these as problems of the MSFS version, considering they always happened with P3D and of course, especially when Pushback is concerned, they were fixed very easily if in the places where it happens, if you used a custom Pushback route or a QuickEdit Pushback which has been there in a long time.

In fact, the biggest difference is that, in MSFS, since the community of users is far larger than P3D ever was, you can find A LOT of pre-made GSX Airport profiles, most of them coming with custom vehicle placements and, most importantly, custom Pushback routes that if done correctly, will always sort the problem of pushing back into buildings or objects.

Edited October 19, 20241 yr by virtuali

1 hour ago, Noel said:

For those who have had a chance to trial 2024 in the alpha program do you have a sense of how PAX loading and pushback might be?

It was still using the same systems as 2020 from what I could see, done through the ATC menu.

I don't think animated PAX was enabled for the tech alpha. There were no airliners to test, and third party ones were a bit wonky.

Edited October 19, 20241 yr by Tuskin38

I think Umberto has done some sterling work on GSX and I think that the reason it attracts quite so much feedback, both positive and negative is that it’s probably the one utility that most serious simmers use on EVERY SINGLE flight. We swap in and out of aircraft and airports but if you’re into the heavies - which I’d say the majority of folk reading this are - then familiarity will breed contempt. 
 

My only wish would be the ability to simply draw a pushback as with Toolbar Pro. I know GSX has way more powerful tools than this, but in the case of an airport lacking a profile (Istanbul is a great example of one I flew from today that amazingly no one has tackled) it is really annoying when the push sends you straight into the grass. 
 

And one more thing - no more lifting tugs at small airports. I’m no expert but I’m fairly sure at small regional airports that you won’t get these behemoths lifting up your Airbus A319 or E-jet. Maybe a config checkbox somewhere to force a towbar push most of the time. 

41 minutes ago, bennyboy75 said:

but in the case of an airport lacking a profile (Istanbul is a great example of one I flew from today that amazingly no one has tackled)

Which developer?

Edited October 19, 20241 yr by Tuskin38

1 hour ago, bennyboy75 said:

My only wish would be the ability to simply draw a pushback as with Toolbar Pro.

We have mouse clicks on the scenery and mouse wheel rotation to rotate and select things (not just in Pushback, in every editor) in the P3D version ( from 4.5+ ), because the P3D SDK allows us to do that. We can even create custom cameras better suited to the various editor tasks in P3D, we can't do that in MSFS (no Camera API).

We don't have mouse interaction in MSFS over the actual scenery in 3D, because the MSFS SDK doesn't allow to do that.

And working on the 2D Map with no visibility of buildings, objects and other obstacles, kinda defeats the purpose of doing an accurate custom pushback, you should always check it in the full airport in 3d mode, otherwise is not very useful.

Edited October 19, 20241 yr by virtuali

2 hours ago, virtuali said:

Once you fully understand this, everything will be clear. So yes, the first opening in the session must always be done with a mouse click on the Toolbar, but then, for the rest of the session, you should always open/close with the Hotkey.

This is ALWAYS what I do and I said that already:  "I always use the hotkey to close the menu but for some reason some time ago it started not opening GSX initially, but does thereafter so I always use the hotkey to close the menu or REOPEN it."

3 hours ago, virtuali said:

You are assuming that GSX didn't work because it needed to be updated, which is not the case.

Once again as you acknowledged the Simbrief banner was not green so no way I'm going to assume it's going to correctly load the plane.  You might revise code to keep it green in this scenario which happened on the next launch of MSFS after running the update so as to avoid this ambiguity.

3 hours ago, virtuali said:

You said yourself you use GSX since it came out on P3D, so I find a bit weird you would indicate these as problems of the MSFS version

That's just it...this isn't P3D version 2.x, 3.x, 4.x and it just flat out doesn't look like it meets the standards already present in MSFS 2020.  I have installed some profiles and STILL had the plane pushed back into a wall.

To be honest yes there's a lot of good stuff in GSX and I use it regularly.  But these types of issues plus the absolutely unreliable initialization behavior at this point in time leave me looking for something better.  When the GSX menu does not open correctly leaving you with this assurance..."please wait.....it might open...,." I no longer wait as a good part of the time it's another waste of time.  Instead I kill the exe and boot and restart Couatl where every time it opens correctly within just as few seconds.

I wish you the very best in better control in what you can do for GSX in 2024.  I'd start by including all profiles in GSX save ones from 3rd party airports perhaps.

1 hour ago, Noel said:

"I always use the hotkey to close the menu but for some reason some time ago it started not opening GSX initially, but does thereafter

As I've said, it's normal you can't open the menu with the hotkey initially, it never worked if you started from a closed toobar.

 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Once again as you acknowledged the Simbrief banner was not green so no way I'm going to assume it's going to correctly load the plane.  You might revise code to keep it green in this scenario which happened on the next launch of MSFS after running the update so as to avoid this ambiguity.

You are now assuming the Simbrief button is Red for some reason related to the update or the lack of it. It's not, they are completely unrelated, if it's red there's always a reason like flightplan expired, having loaded an MSFS default flightplan from different airports, Simbrief not reachable, firewall issues, wrong airplane type, all many reasons EXCEPT the update.

 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

That's just it...this isn't P3D version 2.x, 3.x, 4.x and it just flat out doesn't look like it meets the standards already present in MSFS 2020.

I don't know what do you mean with "the standards already present in MSFS 2020" ? Are there other Pushback utilities that allows you to flawlessly push automatically based on the airport that NEVER have problems and always push into the correct place ?

No, there aren't and if there were, they would be affected by exactly the same issues like GSX, because there's no way to "see buildings", the only data available is the taxiway/nodes/parking spots layout coming from Navdata, so in some cases it's impossible to know that starting from a certain parking will push into a building on one direction, or result with the airplane nose in front of it in the other.

You just can't sort this situations automatically without any knowledge of the buildings shapes, which can't be read in any way (possibly from .BGL, but we don't do that anymore since the Navdata works with all airports, even Marketplace ones), so you really need a Custom Pushback routes in these cases, which you can surely do on the fly with the QuickEdit, or do it in advanced by editing the profile OR downloading a pre-made custom profile.
 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

I have installed some profiles and STILL had the plane pushed back into a wall.

This simply cannot happen if the profile is well made and it's current for that particular airport and, of course, it is the right one for the airport. Of course, it's impossible to be sure that all profiles made by users will always be correct, also considering not all of them might have custom pushback routes, or have them on the gate you tried.

But I assure you, if the Pushback route is correct, GSX will follow it precisely. If you have case to report that, on any given airport profile, there was a Custom Pushback route and GSX didn't followed it, resulting in the airplane pushed into a building, then please provide it and will verify it.

 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

But these types of issues plus the absolutely unreliable initialization behavior at this point in time leave me looking for something better.  When the GSX menu does not open correctly leaving you with this assurance..."please wait.....it might open...,." I no longer wait as a good part of the time it's another waste of time.  Instead I kill the exe and boot and restart Couatl where every time it opens correctly within just as few seconds.

By doing this you are causing the problem, because sometimes the menu appears later because either you just updated (so the model cache is being rebuilt, but there's a progress bar for that), sometimes Simbrief responds more slowly, other times the Navdata API results come later than usual, so the menu might take 20-30 seconds to start, but only once, then it will be very fast, same as after you restarted when there wasn't any need to do that.

Edited October 19, 20241 yr by virtuali

The strangest thing is that I have never ever used the hot key for GSX - forgot it even existed. Always open and close the menu by clicking in the toolbar like all other menus. Just way more intuitive that way. 

Never had a problem. Albeit now I’m thinking what wonderful things have I been missing. What’s the default hotkey?

 

EDIT: To answer the thread - not sure the loading/unloading PAX was part of the alpha? To be fair I didn’t get a chance to try career as I ran out of time.

Edited October 19, 20241 yr by Georgleboui

1 hour ago, Georgleboui said:

Never had a problem. Albeit now I’m thinking what wonderful things have I been missing. What’s the default hotkey?

You might have big problems, or none at all, depending on what you do and the airplane used. Some airplanes (like Fenix), the automation is designed in a way that can also work with the menu disabled, so you might not notice issues.

The most common are subsequent menu pop-ups for example when you call Refueling, the menu will close and, after a while the Fuel truck will come. Now, IF you have an airplane with a default Fuel system (mostly default planes), you are supposed to see a menu with the fuel quantity, which can't appear with the Toolbar icon disabled (Dark). But if you never use default airplanes or planes with a default fuel system, you never run into this problem, because there's no fuel quantity pop-up to show, the refueling is done with the airplane system.

Same issue with Deicing: you call it, the menu closes and after some time, when the Deicer arrive, it's supposed to open the menu asking about the fluid type, etc. If the Toolbar is disabled, you'll lose it and the service won't work.

Pushback might have been suffering from the same problem but, since Pushback is important and we know lots of users don't know they shouldn't always use the Hotkey during service, we had to add extra code to recognize this, hence the "Continue Pushback" option, which allow to not break the procedure just because the menu was disabled, since Pushback is another case of a service with subsequent pop-ups.

Another side effect of running GSX with the menu Disabled, is you'll lose all text warning messages, because those are also handled by the menu code itself, since the only way to create those tooltips is from .JS code, which stops running the moment the menu is closed from the Toolbar. This might be or not a problem but, sometimes GSX is trying to report a problem (for example passengers invisible because the jetway didn't connect entirely), but it can't because it has no means to show the text. We tried to mitigate that somewhat, by adding lots of vocal prompts so, if you can't see the text, you could at least hear the voice. Assuming you don't disable it...

But even if you don't run into those issues, although always opening/closing with the Toolbar mostly works (with the above caveats), doing it with the Hotkey is much faster, the menu itself will open way more quickly, because when you close it from the Toolbar, the complete Javascript initialization code will be done again once you re-open it in the same way, while with the hotkey the menu is only hidden, so it's immediately ready to work without going again through its construction.

Edited October 19, 20241 yr by virtuali

5 hours ago, virtuali said:

By doing this you are causing the problem, because sometimes the menu appears later because either you just updated (so the model cache is being rebuilt, but there's a progress bar for that), sometimes Simbrief responds more slowly, other times the Navdata API results come later than usual, so the menu might take 20-30 seconds to start, but only once, then it will be very fast, same as after you restarted when there wasn't any need to do that.

Nope, I've enough times done the "30 seconds" you mentioned and still the thing doesn't launch.  I just tried this with my last flight I'm still in:  

1. Rebooted the PC
2. Started MSFS, and observed for when Couatl first loads via Task Manager.  Then I killed process tree of the .exe.   
3. Then I set up my flight in the World Map planner.
4. I hit 'Fly'
5. This takes you to the pre-load the actual plane at the gate 'Fly Plane Now' or I forget what it says but it's 3 words.  This then normally takes what 15 seconds or so to load to the plane's VC.  
6. Immediately upon hitting the Fly Plane Now button I Restart Couatl.

Then the plane loads and GSX I think immediately loaded itself which I've seen happen before w/o doing this ritual, fully complete with an already green Simbrief indicator.  I've sensed something is wrong with how Couatl launches, when it is actually coded to start in the startup sequence MSFS is doing, creating this unreliable launching.   I'll try it again next time up and report back.

Edited October 20, 20241 yr by Noel

3 hours ago, virtuali said:

You might have big problems, or none at all, depending on what you do and the airplane used. Some airplanes (like Fenix), the automation is designed in a way that can also work with the menu disabled, so you might not notice issues.

The most common are subsequent menu pop-ups for example when you call Refueling, the menu will close and, after a while the Fuel truck will come. Now, IF you have an airplane with a default Fuel system (mostly default planes), you are supposed to see a menu with the fuel quantity, which can't appear with the Toolbar icon disabled (Dark). But if you never use default airplanes or planes with a default fuel system, you never run into this problem, because there's no fuel quantity pop-up to show, the refueling is done with the airplane system.

Same issue with Deicing: you call it, the menu closes and after some time, when the Deicer arrive, it's supposed to open the menu asking about the fluid type, etc. If the Toolbar is disabled, you'll lose it and the service won't work.

Pushback might have been suffering from the same problem but, since Pushback is important and we know lots of users don't know they shouldn't always use the Hotkey during service, we had to add extra code to recognize this, hence the "Continue Pushback" option, which allow to not break the procedure just because the menu was disabled, since Pushback is another case of a service with subsequent pop-ups.

Another side effect of running GSX with the menu Disabled, is you'll lose all text warning messages, because those are also handled by the menu code itself, since the only way to create those tooltips is from .JS code, which stops running the moment the menu is closed from the Toolbar. This might be or not a problem but, sometimes GSX is trying to report a problem (for example passengers invisible because the jetway didn't connect entirely), but it can't because it has no means to show the text. We tried to mitigate that somewhat, by adding lots of vocal prompts so, if you can't see the text, you could at least hear the voice. Assuming you don't disable it...

But even if you don't run into those issues, although always opening/closing with the Toolbar mostly works (with the above caveats), doing it with the Hotkey is much faster, the menu itself will open way more quickly, because when you close it from the Toolbar, the complete Javascript initialization code will be done again once you re-open it in the same way, while with the hotkey the menu is only hidden, so it's immediately ready to work without going again through its construction.

TIL I’ve been using GSX completely wrong. 

15 hours ago, Noel said:

One major annoyance happened this morning:  loaded MSFS, launched PMDG 738 to the departure gate only to learn GSX isn't picking up Simbrief because GSX needs an update.  That's a good 20 minutes wasted because as you know now much kill MSFS to start Live update which takes ample time to run so I definitely don't care to run it EVERY TIME up to prevent this annoyance.  

true  but  now  before i start msfs  i check  for  updates   for  gsx, orbx, pmdg  etc that way i know  i have  the latest update(doesn't  take  that long  to check)