JaneRachel

57 minutes ago, Fielder said:

If you have a switch that stays on or off, then assign set parking brake to it. Guaranteed to work!

I spent some time with a guy from the MSFS dev team early this morning. It turns out not to be a parking brake issue.

Its a weird calibration thing on the pedals themselves. We had to recalibrate a number of times and then it works. I can confirm for anyone seeing this, don't mess with your parking brakes, it is a red herring. Resetting the parking brake on and off just temporarily resets the toe brake calibration.

The poster above was correct in that in the game device calibration, you have to ensure that after calibrating your pedals the cursor in the calibration window sits and the bottom right hand corner of the window. It took us a few attempts to convince it today! Once that calibration is finally successful the problem goes away. (We tried this with a number of pedal manufacturers). It seems to be an issue in the windows game device calibration.

Again, it is not a parking brake issue, that just temporarily unsticks the brakes, so avoid going down that rabbit hole if this happens to you. It is a pedal calibration issue confirmed now.

Hope that helps others who may see this issue! Happy to help out anyone who also sees this happening.

all the best (and thank you Fielder for your help!)

Jane

this is now happening to me since SU15...

any advice would be most welcome,

many thanks

Jane

A quick update, as it may be useful for people.

It transpires that GSX can cause seriously bumpy taxiways!

A solution is posted here...

Troubleshoot - GSX Causing Bumpy Terrain, Double Parking Spots & Broke – Macco Simulations

1 hour ago, Mace said:

Although I don't have that scenery, I would experiment with Photogrammetry ON vs. OFF and see if it helps.  Photogrammetry setting is in MSFS options under "Data".

 

thank you, I will give it a try!

Hey All,

Has anyone else seen an issue with this scenery? All of a sudden I am now facing sudden hills and craters on the taxiways (so steep the aircraft can get stuck!).

I have reinstalled but to no avail. Also turned up the mesh resolution as far as it will go... but still huge issues.

Any advice would be most appreciated,

many thanks

Jane

5 hours ago, fluffyflops said:

im sure theres not 100s of people working on su15.

Typically these days we have a primary product team, then a much smaller support team to do the followups. The support and tidy group is usually entirely separate from the teams leading flagship titles. We are lucky that the sim has proven popular in sales, which makes a support team cost effective to create all the service packs. Sometimes in the lifecycle of a product we have to draw a line on service packs simply because the cost to develop the pack outweighs the current strength of sales revenue, based on a calculated "per head revenue" generation of everyone in the team. Keeping service teams smaller really keeps the costs down and drives that equation of salary vs revenue contribution for each dev to something manageable.

4 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

As some people have mentioned, the roadmap changed when SU 15 was delayed.  If it's true that they are trying to release MSFS 2024 this fall (according to people saying Jorge "slipped up" in the Twitch Q&A a month ago and accidentally inferred the release data for MSFS 2024 was this fall), they are heading into crunch time for MSFS 2024 this summer, trying to polish it off, fix the bugs, and cram in the remaining features before it's released.

They simply don't have time to do an SU 16 release in the summer, and release MSFS 2024 this fall, unless they are way ahead of schedule for what they want to do for MSFS 2024.  But for a large software project involving hundreds of people, it's almost never on schedule.  It's almost guaranteed that they are behind schedule, or probably barely struggling to keep to their schedule. That's the nature of software projects.

Mind you, even for much smaller software projects, like all the planes that are released for MSFS, those are often delayed (ie. Randazzo thought the PMDG 737 could be released in 2020, and it was finally released in 2022). For larger software projects where hundreds of people are involved, it's almost guaranteed those projects fall behind, or the project lead and the end customer eventually decide to "cut" features so that they can stick to the schedule.

Its very much the nature of the games/sim industry. In 44 years in the games industry (and sims too), its not the spec that kills you, but the bugs that suddenly defy squashing. I had a major title held up at EA with a crash bug that took my team weeks to find. It was a simple thing, in a couple of lines of code, but brought the entire project to its knees. We had pretty much every coder and myself hunting through code to track down. Conversely, I have seen bugs that look like they are going to be mega difficult, that I have ended up fixing over a cup of coffee in minutes. You are right about hundreds of people, although in terms of many issues, that boils down to just a few talented programmers to fix, with the majority of teams being art, design etc etc.. The specialist programmers are a minority on most games and sims (for lots of reasons, but I wont write an essay 🙂 ) 

Back when people paid me to be a programmer, rather than to run studios and publishing companies, we had all sorts of issues, for example, with Alien Vs Predator for Atari. It was coded by just two of us, myself and Mike (a very talented programmer). Some days it was bug city which we had to splat like the Aliens. Other days life was smooth. The moral is you can never tell and projects have a life of their own when it comes to shipping dates, despite so many processes we now have in place in the big studios. I routinely factor in a 20% time contingency on every project with the studios that I lead (which indeed can be hundreds of people now).

Its why sometimes that many of us wish that we made business software which is an order of magnitude easier than 3D software and games, that come with animation, physics et al 🙂

Jane

5 minutes ago, Aamir said:

Hm, weird one - but I know Ben from our team who is responsible is tracking and attempting to fix these issues. I'll double check with him.

The spawn issue we know about, trying to recreate and fix but it's a slippery one.

DEST data is a correct prompt, I'm guessing you've uplinked your winds and not overwritten the already inserted wind data in the APPR page - it's reminding you to update the wind with an actual entry as opposed to an uplinked one. 

thank you Aamir,

Learn something about this bird everyday. Appreciate the response!

all the best

Jane

Loving the update..

A couple of things I have noticed. The aircraft seems to often spawn at the gate with the gear up and promptly slams in to the ground, requiring me to go back to the main menu. I have tried Heathrow and Manchester, same result. It is not every flight so looking for an obvious cause and will report back.

A slight bump on the taxiway and the aircraft sometimes goes a few feet in to the air, even at very low speed (just had this again at the payware Manchester a few seconds ago).

I keep getting repeatedly asked to enter DEST data in the MCDU, even when already entered (I saw this on the previous version also)

Pedantic, wishlist item - button repeat on the MCDU pls so I can scroll through the flight plan etc by keeping the button pressed as per the real unit :)

Fantastic work guys. Such a lot of hard work here that is appreciated by many,

all the best

Jane

A head up for anyone having issues with tablet functionality.

The 787 mod (787-XH) needs to be removed from the community folder and you should be good to go. This particular mod creates conflicts, which are currently under investigation.

all the best

Jane

17 minutes ago, jon b said:

Top tip on this one if ATC delay your descent……”if you can’t go down, slow down”

Wind the speed right back, then when you finally get descent clearance you can crank the speed right back up and the aircraft when in VNAV SPD (Boeing) use pitch to obtain selected speed and so dive at idle power to regain VNAV PTH.

The 1980s technology 747-400 had a very solid and trustworthy VNAV as I believe do the Airbus aircraft, the one on the super hi-tech 787 is utter rubbish in my opinion.

and Jon's advice is really always good! He is one of the most experienced "real-world" pilots here for a major airline I will not name 🙂

1 minute ago, Luis Hernandez said:

I have them both. I fly them both. I love them both. Apart from the lack of WXR and MCDU popups (MSFS limitations, AFAIK) and well, there are not so many differences between each. Well, the FSL VC is too feature-happy for my liking, and that results in me using the 2D panel instead. Not so with Fenix.

I agree with you. If you have P3D only fly the FSL, if you have the new sim fly Fenix. If you have both, feel free to fly both 🙂

Are both perfect, of course not. They are though, both incredible pieces of software and we have to realise that both are developed in a completely different environment within each sim, which imposes limitations and quirks courtesy of the coding of the host sim.

I spent over 15 years as Deputy Editor of PC Pilot magazine and reviewed every airliner release during that time (including the very first release by PMDG way back when). I also spent a large part of my career getting paid to do flightsims for major publishers. My honest opinion is that right now we are in a new golden age of airliners in simulation. We are flying on the desktop with an unprecedented amount of realism.

The standard right now from many developers including Aamir and his team is just incredible. It is great giving feedback to developers to help them grow (nearly all quality developers love you to feedback to them!). Just remember though the incredible standard we are at now from all of these guys. When we can nitpick over minor variations in N1 to the keyboard repeat rate on a CDU, we know we are in a really great place!

It is a great time to fly regardless of your choice of sim and aircraft.

Jane

2 hours ago, Aamir said:

"Feel" is always going to be quite interesting and subjective, I find. If it's one thing I've learned during the course of development, it's that pilot consultants will more or less often have completely different feedback from one to another. What is "perfect" for one, is "no, this doesn't feel right" to another. A lot of the times that comes down to control configurations, calibration, etc, but also interestingly, perception. We've built something that satisfies the majority of them in different areas, but I've certainly run into the case of completely opposite feedback more than once during the basic development of the aircraft. 

I also think it's slightly disrespectful to the media guys and pilot streamers to insinuate that they're saying the flight model feels great just because it brings them views. I'd offer an opinion to the contrary, I used to be in that industry after all, and controversy brings far more money and clicks overall. 

All said and done, I'm always happy for qualitative feedback from type-rated pilots, so if you have some points that you'd like me to look at in specific with regard to feel, drop me a DM with the details and I can have a look and see what can be done!

Agree with Aamir here,

Some years ago I led a team with a Red Arrows simulation with the Hawk. We had the entire current Red Arrows team try it out and they were mega impressed at Alpha stage (it was a sim for the RAF to use internally).They were really gushing.

I pointed out their team leader that actually there was a lot still left to do including flight dynamics tweaks and we weren't happy yet. His reply was that they had no idea those things could be done to that standard on a home computer. They were totally in love with the sim as not one of them had any understanding of just how realistic things could be and set their expectations of a high bar lower.  Once we told them what we could do, their perceptions changed considerably and we went from gushing to real technical feedback.

Happy New Year everyone,

Jane

this is active on all liveries. Whether you have failures enabled or not, it is required to keep topping up hydraulic fluid. It is a "gotcha" with the current PMDG releases that you need to keep on top of this, regardless of failure settings.

all the best

Jane

12 minutes ago, RaptyrOne said:

Last I heard, running the integrity check in Steam needs to be considered very carefully as it does not actually run a "check" at all but rather initiates/forces a re-download of the entire program.

I have never seen that happen. I will ask at work and ask Valve as you have me curious. Normally it just runs a file comparision from the server builds.

With my programmer and software engineer hat on, this can happen. Your mention of Steam points me in the direction that you are using the PC version of the software. It is not unusual for data to corrupt on the hard drive as you switch on or off a machine. Most of the time that is barely perceptible. Sometimes you end up glitching a key disk sector and you end up with all sorts of problems.

Downloads and updates can sometimes corrupt in transit to your machine which then propagate the problem, but most of the time it is simple corruption of disk data.

With Steam and if the problem is the app itself this is usually a relatively simple fix. Rather than delete the whole software, simply verify the integrity of the files from the option within Steam (Right click on the app name in the Steam library and select properties and there is an option to verify the file integrity). It will normally fix any corrupted data and get you up and running again.

If the problem lies with Windows or drivers and all the support files that the app relies on, rather than the app itself, this gets a little more complex to fix.

Most of the time though, the good news is, just asking Steam to verify and fix the files will get you up and running again with a Steam based app.

2 hours ago, Alpine Scenery said:

I just wonder how much longer there will even be a pilot at the helm, I guess it might take 50 years or so because people won't feel comfortable without a pilot.
 

If you think about it an aircraft even now could be flown without an onboard pilot. The industry, spurred on by the military need, has got very good at drone technology and control of the drone from huge distances away. We are not far from creating a drone with seats! The technology is there, if not the will to implement it right now.

1 hour ago, Dave_YVR said:

 Talking to a friend who flew the 737 up until about a year ago and is now on the 787 says it's AA SOP to leave the AT on for the entire approach.

Yep, as Stearman said upthread, its really down to individual airlines.

The majority of 737 operators disconnect the AT ahead of landing but not all. On the fly by wire Boeings, the situation is reversed with most using the AT into touchdown. The reason being the issue of pitch-power coupling oscillations is dampened by the software on the fly by wire Boeings which does a much better job of things than the earlier Boeings.

1 hour ago, Alpine Scenery said:

I have failures off, so unless PMDG ignores MSFS failure settings.
I do need to slowly get back to flying full "sim" realism mode, but right now I even have crashes off.

 

it does ignore the MSFS failure settings. The PMDG aircraft has its own failure settings accessible via the CDU.

all the best

Jane

2 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

I'm fairly certain I did, yes. I'm watching a tutorial by 737NG Driver to figure out what I missed. 

come back if you get stuck still. I will help all I can.

all the best

Jane

6 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Almost afraid to ask this in a thread with so many knowledgeable folks. I tried to setup for an autoland but was not able to engage both CMD-A and CMD-B. Had ILS set to both NAV 1 and 2 and ILS course set to course at both sides. I must have missed something though. Any ideas?

you had APP mode armed first before hitting the other AP?

5 minutes ago, Stearmandriver said:

Thanks Jane! 

One thing worth pointing out that I think is pretty cool (we're using that term very loosely in its most geeky sense here 😁) is that I wouldn't know anything about any of this if it weren't for flight sims and PMDG.  I kid you not, if I asked another pilot at work whether we had a fail passive or operational autoland system, I'd get a blank stare.  "You push these two buttons, we make our callots on the way down, the plane lands itself" would be the approximate response 😉.  Which is good in a sense, as you train people on what they need to know about their fleet and don't clutter their minds with trivia about options that don't apply to their planes... but it's funny to me, just how many options and various configurations are available on these planes that most pilots don't know about. 

Simming is a good way to explore all that. 

Totally agree with you Andrew! I have learnt so much over the years.

I was talking to one of the senior vice presidents at Boeing a couple of years ago. He was talking about all the customisation in the 737 family, comparing to buying a car. Compared to a little car catalogue, he told me that they have shipped hundreds of mods and options, for customers.

1 minute ago, Stearmandriver said:

I haven't either and don't know the details 😉.  I think you'll get a "Land3" annunciation instead of CMD, and so I guess probably no Flare armed annunciation either as that would be assumed by the Land3?  But I really don't know. Try it and report back!  😁

Another thing I *think* but am not sure of, is that fail operational includes a 3rd autopilot axis that allows centerline tracking after touchdown.  On the fail passive systems, you have to disconnect the autopilot after touchdown and rollout manually.  This can buy you a lower RVR requirement for landing, as you don't need as much visual reference during rollout if the autopilot will track centerline.

That RVR requirement difference can be mitigated if you have the HUD though.  If you autoland (or manually land) using the AIII mode of the HUD, it switches into rollout guidance after touchdown, allowing you to track centerline even in very low vis.

Because of the extra cost and equipment involved in a fail operational system, many operators choose fail passive with the HUD.  The HUD is useful in many other ways, and probably still cheaper than maintaining a fail operational system.

Anyway, I'm not certain about some of that, it's just what I've heard. Out fleet is fail passive with the HUD so that's what I know. 

yes to the above and a LAND3 annunciation 🙂

all the best

Jane

2 minutes ago, threegreen said:

That's interesting. Actually, it's amazing that something like this is simulated in the addon. I've followed some discussions previously on autolands in the NG on pprune and it turns out a fair share of pilots were unaware of that particular software version as it was quickly concluded autolands aren't possible on a single channel (barring the legal aspect of it).

I've only ever flown fail passive autolands in the sim as per airline config. What are the fail ops annunciations?

What tends to happen at PMDG is that when they talk about tech/beta team, its not just simmers saying they like this or that. They actually recruit some crazy smart people. Experienced pilots, engineers and even designers of some of the aircraft and equipment. I had the pleasure to be involved in some pretty deep conversations with huge amounts of research from some top dollar experts. Everything is checked out in incredible detail by the team. I learnt more in a week than in the previous 20 years! I am a software developer in my day job and I have never seen such attention to detail elsewhere. I wish I could name just some of the people who have answered questions. It is like a who's who of the aviation business. When I was on the 744 group for example we had the pleasure of being around the most experienced 747 pilot in the world! (that was official - they have quite the job finding someone to do his checkrides with more knowledge!)

On the autoland modes, rather than write copiously (one of my faults I inherited at PC Pilot Magazine 🙂 ), if you look upthread Stearman describes the differences pretty well.

all the best

Jane

12 hours ago, threegreen said:

It's supposed to behave like a real plane though. If it autolands even though it's not configured for an autoland that would be a huge bug. I can't imagine that went unnoticed until now. Maybe you can upload a short clip of what happens at around 100 feet RA.

Again, not a bug, some versions of the system software on the 737 will effectively autoland the aircraft on a single channel. It is just a quirk of the real aircraft. It is however, entirely prohibited to autoland this way. There was a big discussion on this in the PMDG tech/beta group some years ago on this, which led to advice being sought from some very senior Boeing engineers. I need to check which Boeing software the current PMDG is running and also dig out the revisions of the real aircraft which supported this.

The upshot though is that some real NG aircraft would follow this exact same behaviour as it is a software quirk. A quirk that is prohibited to be relied on by flight crews.

Stearman here on the forum (who knows his stuff and flies this aircraft) is giving good advice on the FMA annunciations and how autoland should work. As he mentions though, there are 2 types of autoland modelled, Fail Passive and Fail Operational, both of which display differently, dependent on the autopilot options you have chosen in the PMDG settings. Again, a real aircraft thing.As an airline you can get the cheap and cheerful autoland or pay some more and get the fancy autoland with centreline tracking etc. With the PMDG its all in the options menus of the CDU.

Jane