Creating my own First Officer on the PMDG 747-400

[Guest BertusS]

Hallo from NAMIBIA, AFRICA I am a great admirer of the FS2Crew addon to the PMDG 737 series and enjoyed it thoroughly. Now of course, I advanced to the PMDG 747-400 and FS2Crew are not available to help me throwing all those switches, retracting gear, handling flaps, etc. I then went on and bought Flight Companion but found it lacking and too generalized. The First Officer could not handle the flaps (you can see his attempts but nothing happens) and the provided checklists did not fit in well with the aircraft.With XML code I should be able to recreate most of these functions as follows:From the logging facility of FSUIPC I obtain the following46313 *** EVENT: Cntrl= 66587 (0x0001041b), Param= 71025 (0x00011571) ROTOR_BRAKEfor turning the APU selector. Since a lot of the turning selectors use the ROTOR_BRAKE function, it is not a problem to implement them into my coding:(L:RUN CHECKLIST,bool) (L:CHECKLIST DONE,bool) && if{ 71025 (>K:ROTOR_BRAKE) 71025 (>K:ROTOR_BRAKE) }ETC.Now for my Problem:When I want my First Officer to turn on for example the NAV lights, according to FSUIPC659937 *** EVENT: Cntrl= 71281 (0x00011671), Param= 0 (0x00000000) Now I do not have a control "STRING" value anymore but only a Cntrl number and if I put that into my code:Element> (L:RUN CHECKLIST,bool) (L:CHECKLIST DONE,bool) && if{ (>K:71281) }it does not work!If I put this control number in the FSUIPC.INI file and ask FSUIPC to flip the switch using for example keyboard action CNTRL+Z, there is no problem.FSUIPC seems to be quite happy to handle the control number, but is their any way to have XML coding send the number to FS2004?Help will be greatly appreciated.YoursBertus SchoemanBandH@skeletoncoastsafaris.com

[byork 2,259]

Hello Bertus,I'm glad to hear you admire my work.I'll be doing a PMDG 747 version once I finish up the 767 version.The greatest difficultly with FO programs on 3rd party commercial planes is the fact that these 3rd party planes are heavily customized making it very difficult to properly interface with them. Basically the MS SDKs are rendered useless.With the ATR version I just released that wasn't a problem because Hans basically gave me the keys to the castle. For the 737 version I had to use simulated mouse clicks, which works fairly well.For the PMDG 747, lets home Robert releases some kind of SDK so the job can be done properly.Cheers,Bryan

[Guest BertusS]

Hallo BryanI am so glad to hear that, you have no idea!!Will the fact that FSUIPC now show Cntrl numbers for each and every switch in the PMDG 747-400 (it did not show anything on the PMDG 737 series) help you in any regard?In the meantime I will learn to fly the 747 properly and dabble along with my own version of a First Officer.YoursBertus