noffa

You moderated with a steady hand, but I must especially thank you once again for your tutorials. Understanding VOR navigation really changed my Flight experience, and really boosted my interest in flying. I have now bought the PPL textbooks!

MSFT has to make more money on Flight than they did on FS, and they way to do that is to "tax" 3rd party stuff somehow. It seems pretty clear that Flight addons will only be served through the Live games marketplace. We've seen this for planes and sceneries already, only they have all been created by MSFT so far. When MSFT are ready they will release some kind of platform that third parties can develop against, presumably more sandboxed than what I understand was the case with FS. This is pretty standard stuff, and not much different from the Android and Apple appstores. I don't think MSFT would consider for a minute trusting the entire future of the product to third parties like that. I am sure MSFT has the infrastructure to allow devs to test their code without risking copromising everything.

Wonder if that means that there actually is a model of icing conditions, or if that just relates to how (high) clouds form... Edit: jcomm beat me to it :-)

Maybe they are through with the rerun of the Hawaii aerocaches, and that we must now wait for new Alaska ones becomes available (or a second rerun?).

Thanks for the tip, I was just struggling with that one! Good thing they don't script these challenges too strictly.

Save early, save often. I think that was in the manual of an early Kings Quest.

Well, they must move sometimes! This was the view from my office for most of last year's spring:

I fly with a mouse, never set my foot in a cockpit in RL. Like you I am amazed at how well it works, except for aerobatics. Planning to buy a yoke and some pedals eventually, but I fear the fun will just be too much, I spend way too much time in Flight as it is .

It might be that MS in the end needs to open the platform to some degree, if nothing else to keep interest from dwindling. They already have a nice delivery mechanism in the Live marketplace, and they'll be able to tax the contributed content to make some income on it. On the other hand, there's always the technology problems of sandboxes and interfaces, which I understand didn't work great in the FS days, and these are essentially no easier today than with earlier versions of Windows/FS (Maybe Win8 has some stuff that could be used).

I won't be surprised if Flight is never opened. I think MS never made any money to speak of off Flight Simulator, but kept it for sentimental reasons or whatever. A pretty sizable 3rd party ecosystem was created around it, but virtually nothing trickled back to MS. In fact, people invested so heavily in 3rd party stuff that they probably did not want to upgrade when new releases came. Eventually, when the 2009 layoffs came, they killed Flight Simulator and took the opportunity to move to a closed platform. Now, MS controls the platform and the content, and I imagine is quite happy with that.

I kind of was hoping there would be an instrument section, where a Maule auto pilot would become available.

Don't ever stop. +1. It's a good thing that we can share excitement, I read all your posts with interest and joy.

I've flown literally in the treetops, maybe 30 ft agl, and yet have them catch me. Seems the AI is quite indeterministic, I guess that's a good thing...

I wonder if they will model icing for Alaska!

I've flown 30-40 something clandestine missions, and FWIW here's my guess on how the cop AI generally works: If the heading is too close to a direct heading towards destination, the cops will arrive. They first arrive briefly and go away after a few seconds as a kind of a warning. This gives you a chance to quickly pick a heading that deviates further from the destination. If you don't do this, they will reappear, this time for good. Radios and lights might matter, but I'm not sure. I usually fly with them set normally. Also, I always stay low, so I don't know how altitude plays into the mix. Mind you, I have had experiences that does not fit this model. Once I was caught running through the pre-takeoff checklists, not even having left the ground. When the cops appear the second time, you are usually out of luck, but I was able to outrun them once. I think it's a matter of speed and/or being able to break the line of sight between you and the cops. In my case I was flying along a small ridge a mile or two from the shore, so when they appeared I could throw the Maule into a steep dive over the cliff towards the shore, reaching nearly 200 kph. Then, as I reached the shore, there was a 100-200 ft cliff straight up from the water that I could fly behind, thus breaking the line of sight between me and the cops. The cops stopped their circling pattern and continued on a direct heading towards the destination, and continued on that heading when passing it. I stayed low during the approach, but other than that the landing was normal.

Lots of nice videos on youtube, very neat! You can even buy them directly from Icon. http://store.iconaircraft.com/products/parkzone-icon-a5-rc-bind-n-fly

If they do update the servers because of something that's to come with Alaska, it's likely that they do it well in advance of the launch to make room for testing. Otherwise, if they introduce new bugs with the server update, there is no time to react when people download Alaska and stuff starts to fail, and embarrassment and unhappy users ensue...

I guess their telemetry tells them that almost noone have gotten these aerocaches, and that doing re-runs shouldn't annoy anyone except some die-hards on some forum site .

I'm fairly certain we are approaching the Alaska release at a speed of 24 hrs per day!

Like others I have wow moments all the time. If I was to single out a few, the greatest would be earning gold on the harder landing challenges, the Kayak rescue mission, and learning radio navigation from J van E and others. (Since I can't get my graphics card to perform and pretty much have to run on minimal settings, looks and scenery is less impressive at my end )

Welcome to the cloud The interface is not public and is even internal to Flight, so they can change whatever they like whenever they like.

Priceless! Here's a fairly current list of stuff they say at Microsoft both in management and engineering, these would fit right in! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/tags/microspeak/

Reading up on propeller torque it seems I got it mostly wrong. I thought it was mostly about the rotating mass of the propeller and shaft causing the plane to want to rotate in the opposite direction, Newton style. But from what I understand now during a takeoff roll it seems that the propwash would dominate? Does this mean that single turbines don't have a strong torque effect? Edit: very unfortunate spelling mistake. I was writing "mass", but the m key on my laptop is acting up...

Thanks for the tip, looks amazing! For me, Alaska will be timed perfectly, I'm only now running out of things to do in Hawaii.

Yes, me too! I always have to turn on all the stability aids to get a well loaded Maule into the air from short runways. I have to compensate with extreme right rudder, but even then it's impossible to go straight. I thought I was not giving the right elevator input so that too much or too little pressure was on the tail wheel, causing some weird effect. But this seems to happen regardless of elevator input, and the checklist says it should be neutral until the tail rises anyway. Ideas? BTW, I fly using a mouse. EDIT: Ah, I see people have explained this quite well. I knew about torque effects, I just didn't know they were so pronounced on the ground. Thanks! Oh, and phonic_monkey, welcome to the forum! This is a friendly crowd with lots of good info on Flight.