bert.laverman

Thanks to all the great tutorials and posting I have learned that Cold and Dark is a rare starting point for a flight, but who can tell me the finer details of the differences between the Long and Short Turnaround states? I can guess from the name what the intention is, but how do they differ in what you'll find in the systems on and off? The FCOM will help you using "verify" and "make sure", but what can be expected?

Yes, they are separately licensed.

I don't understand why you would want to read the screens by digging through the memory. The CDU screens are actually broadcast by the software, as is documented in the SDK header file. All you need to do is to enable it in the options file and tell SimConnect what you want, and away you go. Just make sure you have the latest version of the NGX and all you need is there. I have both NGX CDUs and all three 777 CDUs working this way.

I guess even stronger arguments would be that, given the quality of the latest A318/319 and 320/321 releases (I hope you checked those out, the "Airbus X Extended" release is already "old") from Aerosoft, there's not much of a market left for a high-fidelity addon of an Airbus 320 family. Developing something with more depth would only attract a small number of customers, not enough to cover the costs of developing it. The few people that do complain about a lack of depth in the Aerosoft product range, (check the discussions on the upcoming A330 on the Aerosoft forums) tend to complain about the absence of modeled failures that most (if not all) of the real-life Airbus pilots never encounter in their daily work. So, you're left with going head-to-head against a good quality (Aerosoft also has real-life pilots helping them, and they concur!) settled product with a low price, or else fight for a (very small) niche market that requires an immense investment to satisfy the customers. And I'm talking about the type of user that will crawl through the systems with multimeter and magnifying glass, and call the sim "totally unrealistic" if a single system's response is off by a second. Nope, PMDG has done that investment for Boeing aircraft, and that's what they're good at. And they still have enough growth opportunities there. Cheers, Bert

I was making a short flight with the PMDG 737 NGX a few days back, when I noticed something odd: after takeoff I would lose all lights on the MCP in the virtual cockpit, as well as some parts of the overhead panel. Also, the overhead showed several warning lights that had been off while still on the ground. I later traced this to the moment I raised the landing gear using the Saitek Switch Panel. All switches were in the off position, which I hadn't noticed since I don't normally use them for the NGX. Because my definitions for the NGX mode did not override the "Default FSX Aircraft" settings to "Do Nothing", my first usage of a switch (the gear lever) caused LINDA to send events for all switches to effectuate their FSX counterparts to the same state. The NGX obediently shut down power to some parts of the cockpit. Is there a way to change LINDA's behaviour to do this at simulator start rather than the first moment a switch is used? That way I am prompted to correct the switch positions while not yet in the middle of some procedure...

Just when the discussion was dying down, most votes going the same way, along comes Robert to drop a fresh remark in to stir up discussion. Hey Robert, you wouldn't be using this thread to keep the rest of the forum quiet, right? :ph34r:

Hmm... video stops just before nosewheel touches, so I don't see any "slamming".

Can you provide some more information on what you see in the VC cockpit? Are all lights and displays showing correct content? Does the mouse change to a hand symbol when you hover over a clickspot? After installation, did you get the popup asking to acknowledge that the PMDG DLL's may be run? What version do you have? On a side note: Please sign with your full name. (PMDG forum rules) Please be patient with the server and don't click "Post" more than once. There are now several posts with this topic.

Can anyone tell me if there is a KLM Skyteam Livery somewhere for the 900? I don't see it in the Livery Downloader. I know they only have one of those, but for the 777-300 it is provided.

Also, don't forget that it is basically a question of the market. A "few good men" who absolutely love a certain type of aircraft don't make up a viable market. Even a refresh of PMDG's own MD-11 has been discussed quite a lot, but the market simply hasn't the required volume. On the other hand, if one or more of those aficionados have some cash to burn on it, as an alternative to e.g. going on a treasure hunt on some small island with some water filled holes, they should find PMDG quite willing to take up the job. :rolleyes: Cheers, Bert

Last night during a group flight I was overflying KMSO so as to join the circuit for landing, only to have the NVidia display driver crash. Not FSX, mind you, but the display driver itself. Windows 7 (64-bit) restarted the thing, but FSX needed a restart as well to get everything working again. I retried, only to have exactly the same happen again. This is with Blue Sky Scenery's KMSO AFCAD. I was told by the writer of that AFCAD, who is a member of our sunday-night group, that he used only stock FSX buildings, but he thought there was some known problem with DX10 and some bitmaps in stock FSX buildings. I ran the fixer's configuration dialog, which told me I had a 8-bit option I never heard about turned on, and please don't. After a long search I found the option and disabled it, but this did not make a difference. Now that I think about it, I did not change any setting other than turn on DX10 and install the fixer's libraries, so I might have other things turned on that may cause problems without me knowing it. The documentation I have of the fixer has different dialog layouts, so I don't really know what a reasonable set of settings is. I do know that I get a lot of stuttering (low FPS I suppose) on airpots with a lot of buildings. Who can tell me if the crash is a known thing and I can prevent it with checking (or unchecking) an option? Also, what would be a good set of options in the dialog (v2.7) to enable/disable to get good performance? At the moment I get nice performance alone, but stuttering when using shadows and several aircraft are around, or when there are a lot of (stock) buildings. I saw practically all options in the "Debug" group turned on, which could be an issue, but then again, I did not set anything myself.

I have a Saitek Flight Instrument Panel; the small display with some buttons and knobs that can be used to display gauges. The current LINDA version will detect the FIP and allow handling of the buttons, but I would like to attempt to generate gauge images. I already had something working in C++, but even a first test to call that code from LINDA requires me to know a bit more about how the USB devices are identified and accessed in LINDA. Where can I find information about this? Bert Laverman

I wonder, does anyone have the definite list of signature images for 737NGX, 747-400X, 777, etc? I'm pretty happy with the 777 one, but it is a bit big and I want to add the others. (so blame me for being a show-off. I don't mind ;-)

Thanks for the update, I'll survive until your update. ;-) Could I ask you about the Saitek FIP? I used Linda v1 until recently and noticed the FIP is recognised in 2.5.7 and all buttons/knobs (apart from the up/down ones the driver keeps walled off) show up in the configuration. Saitek themselves are not going to put in any work on the driver for the foreseeable future, but some DCS enthusiast managed to get the display working from Lua. Do you know if this is an possibility with Linda? I'ld love to ditch the Saitek XML gauge parser and was working on my own, if only because the Saitek software doesn't allow you to pin specific gauges to specific FIPs. If you have more than one, it's a toss-up which gauge will be shown where.

I got a new Yoke today and started configuring the buttons, when I noticed that the Hat switch only generated a response for the UP position. If I check in FSUIPC all directions are available as joystick buttons. Linda (freshly downloaded 2.5.7) will recognize the Hat switch as such, but only the UP (and CENTER) positions generate a focus in the configuration dialog. Anyone any ideas what might be the problem?