kolaf

If this is not the correct place for this, please forgive me and feel free to remove the post. If there is a better place I would appreciate a pointer. Thanks. We would like to share with you a peak at a project we have been working on for the past half year. It is a flying competition tracking platform designed for tracking and scoring precision flying (FAI, https://www.fai.org/page/gac-precision-flight) and air navigation racing (FAI ANR, https://www.fai.org/page/gac-air-navigation-race) in real-time for real competitions and real aircraft. Precision flying is a competition form where you're presented with a route consisting of several waypoints (gates), and based on the type of aircraft you're flying you're expected to pass the waypoints at specific times. You are scored both on your ability to hit the gate (which is approximately one nautical mile wide) and your ability to pass it at the correct time. Your only is a compass and a paper map annotated with your timing information. This is a challenging competition form which is performed all over the world for GA and light sport aircraft. With the release of Microsoft Flight simulator 2020 we realised that the simulated world is now good enough to perform visual navigation based on real-life charts. We have therefore developed a flight simulator client to replace the GPS trackers usually carried by the competition aircraft to allow you to compete in the exact same competitions using MSFS2020. This is great as a training tool for real-life pilots, as well as loads of fun for real-life pilots and simulator pilots alike. Create competitions with your flying bodies to see who is better at visual navigation, complete in tournaments, or just practices your flying and navigation skills. Scoring is provided real-time on a competition navigation map with whether current standing is dynamically updated and detailed score breakdowns are available for each competitor. We are still in the early testing phases, but as you can see from the video below the system is basically already up and running. In fact, we are planning for its use during the national precision flying competitions in Norway, so this is as real as it gets. If you have any questions or are interested in participating in testing, feel free to contact me, or email support at airsports.no. Also, be sure to check out www.airsports.no if you are curious. Please enjoy this short teaser video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4K7ypnrsgA

I had to reinstall (without uninstall) a second time to get it to be displayed as activated.

Good idea, posted to the feedback page.

Excellent, thanks. I thought I had remembered all the weird locations for relevant files. That seemed to have sorted out the problem, vPilot did now recognise a bunch of new models. It is weird that this was not covered by the FLAI documentation. It seemed to indicate that vPilot 2.1.17 could work with the add-on system without having to touch simobjects.cfg.

Thanks, but I thought this was taken care of by the add-ons.xml system? I have looked everywhere, but I cannot find the file simobjects.cfg. Do you have any hints to where I can find it?

Great to hear, misery loves company 🙂. Inspired by your success with dynamic lighting, I changed my settings and updated the models to use dynamic lighting again. This time p3d did not crash, so this was probably just a fluke.

I'm having some trouble with getting vPilot to recognise the models installed using the new FLAI package. After installing the models, I start the flight simulator and enable the new FLAI add-on. However, when re-scanning the models, vPilot does not detect any changes, and I still only have the default list of planes. A (maybe) related problem was that after installing the models with dynamic lighting, p3d crashed on start-up every time. After reverting back to the models without dynamic lighting, things seem stable. I've tried searching around for information about getting the models recognised in vPilot, but no luck so far. Is anyone else getting this to work?

For those of you who don't want to check it out yourselves I created a couple of short videos that show the effects. The first two videos compare backups just dragging the window over all three screens because with and without the cylindrical distortion fix just panning around the cockpit on ground with a FOV of about 135, suitable for spreading over three monitors with 45° angles. The final video is in-flight footage using the cylindrical distortion fix. It looks much better on three wrapping screens than on one long flat one :-). The seems to be negligible performance it, although the image appears much more draining after being put through the additional postprocessing step. I'm not sure if I'm using it as intended, and I'm equally sure if this is something I will stick with.

I'm not sure if this is new in V4 or not, but I was playing around with trying to fix my distorted view using multiple screens when I found something that might help. I have three monitors for my main display, covering around 135°. When they stretched the single view window over these three monitors I get significant distortion at the edges where everything seems to be enlarged. This leads to things appearing to be closer than they are in your life, as well as the textures appear unreasonably blurred given how close they seem. I have tried setting up a view group covering the three monitors, and while this solves the problem, it reduces my frame rate from 50-60 to around 30 in a FTX region with the same settings. I noticed that there is something called custom cameras but you can create by right clicking and selecting "Custom cameras" that allow you to apply postprocessing filters. One of these filters is called something like "DistortionFixCylindrical". I created a new custom view, added this filter, and the results looked completely different from before. Is it any better? I'm not sure. It appears to apply some magic to stretch and compress the image in an attempt to make it fit better into a cylindrical projection (at least what we is approximate as a cylindrical projection with three flat surfaces). The sides are no longer so stretched out, but the scaling when panning around seems a bit alien at first glance. Has anyone tried to play with this before? If so, what are your experiences and how do you think it looks? I haven't flown enough with it to decide whether I like it a lot since it feels completely different than the original setup without the additional postprocessing.

A completely different issue. I'm afraid I do not believe this worked before, I never tried it. I have a saitek radio panel which I have used the old SPAD to control. Seeing that this was now supported in the GUI of LINDA I decided to have a go. It seems to control my radios okay, but the displays are not working properly. Initially I see only dashes, and as soon as I start fiddling with the knobs the displays turn blank. I was expecting the displays to mirror the radio values?

Thanks for parking brakes. I found no off in the engine starting section. No worries, I can always add it myself :-)

My bad, I did not realise that the parking brake and magneto switches had changed the names. Switching to the one called Breaks PARKING works :-) This might be a bit off topic, but I can know no longer find an explicit parking brake release or eng magneto 1 off. Are these no longer available, or have they been moved?

I meant that FSUIPC 5.1 was correctly recognized on the settings page. Sorry for the poor wording. For the parking brake I use the default fsx parking brake set and release. I can get you some screenshots when I'm back at my desktop.

Did a quick test, it seems to work as the old one, apart from FSUIPC being recognised on the settings page. Magnetos and parking brake and stuff still do not work, but this is perhaps an issue in FSUIPC?

Sorry, I misunderstood what the problem was, then.