Dr Vesuvius

Thanks for the tips, g_precentralis. That's exactly the sort of useful feedback I'm looking for. I had to go back and watch the landing again because I didn't remember messing it up, but you're absolutely right, I did pull back on the yoke a little clearing those trees, though luckily not enough to cause a stall. Funny thing is, I actually talk about the "pitch for speed, power for altitude" thing in the video, so I should have known better! Thanks again. Dr V

My 2c... at this point in time avoice Just Flight's Traffic 360 like the plague. Having been very happy with its predecessor, TrafficX, I pre-ordered the upgrade, in order to get more up to date liveries & schedules, plus more GA and Military traffic. What I got was a major UK international airport with virtually no traffic movement (maybe 2 movements an hour), 90% of aircraft being from the same airline, and on the rare occasion an aircraft takes off, it often does so with the passenger doors left swinging open. Oh and a seven month (and counting) wait for a patch/service pack that shows no signs of appearing any time soon. Meanwhile, on my 2004 install,, I'm very happy with my World Of AI traffic solution. Of course the problem with WOAI is that it's based on schedules even older than TrafficX, and with the project dead that's unlikely to change any time soon. But if you just want "plausible" AI it's a fantastic, zero cost solution (except for the cost of your time to download and install all the airlines for the airports you're flying in and out of) Dr V

Traffic 360 from Just Flight. I loved TrafficX, it hit the right balance for me between eye candy, realism and performance. But T360 gave me an airport crammed with stationary aircraft and virtually no movements, and a totally inaccurate mix of liveries (like 90% of planes at the gates being from a single airline). When they did fly, half the time they'd be flying with passenger doors open and other nonsense like that. I may have posted this earlier in the thread, but I'm posting this again today because after waiting for seven months for a patch to fix some of these glaring flaws, today is the day that I've finally given up on it and reinstalled TrafficX. All Just Flight will say is "we're working on a service pack", which they seem to trot out every three months or so.

Hi Dave There are two main reasons for using the C172 in these first videos. Firstly as I say in the video, I'm getting back into flight simming after a six month break and am very, very rusty, so a basic, easy-to-fly bird has helped me ease back into things. Secondly, I'm hoping that as the channel grows it'll draw some attention from outside the flightsim hobby (maybe from the other games I play on there) and possibly inspire one or two new simmers to give it a try. In that case, I want to keep things as easily accessible as possible so that newcomers can dive right in and be doing the same sort of flights in the same sort of aircraft without too great an investment of time and money. That means focussing on the default aircraft and some of the better quality freeware out there. PMDG airliners are nice to aspire to, but not exactly wallet- or newbie-friendly! Don't worry though, I will be mixing things up a little bit and delving into my incredibly modest collection of payware aircraft for one or two flights that I have in mind. Do please stick around and feel free to offer any constructive criticism you may have. Regards Dr V

Episode 2 is up, and this time we fly to an exotic holiday destination...... Blackpool! With luck these videos should be coming out every Monday and Friday for the foreseeable future. As I'm regaining confidence in the cockpit you should be seeing some more interesting aircraft and scenery coming soon. Enjoy Dr V

jcomm I'm using a program called Bandicam, which basically works the same as FRAPS, except it seems to have a lot less impact on framerate.It's a little touchy with FSX though, and seems to split a session into multiple files for no apparent reason (I can happily record hours of Minecraft to a single file with it though) There is a demo of Bandicam available which records up to ten minutes with a fairly discrete watermark, so you can give it a proper trial (unlike FRAPS' 5 second demo!) "Let's Play" style flight-sim videos, with chatty commentary seem to be a new thing - I certainly couldn't find any videos like it lsat year. Now in the last month, at least two other YouTubers have started doing them, Infin8lives and AShadowBoxFSX. There's only so much that yet another "FSX as real as it gets!!! @5.7GHz" wingview video can do to help grow the hobby. Talking directly the viewers and telling them "Hey, this is what I'm doing and this is why it's fun." seems to me to be a much better approach. I'll definitely look into the planes and areas you mention, and if you decide to make some videos I look forward to seeing them. In the meantime, I'm still open to suggestions from anyone else. Regards Dr V

Good Day, Flight Gear fans (and the peanut gallery) I've recently started making videos on YouTube, including a series on flight simulation. Unlike most FS vids out there, I'm doing them in a "Let's Play" style, commentating and trying to convey the fun to be had with simming. Although by necessity I'm starting with Flight Simulator I think I'd like to include some Flight Gear content, as I think it's a fantastic project with a ton of potential, and possibly the future of hobbyist flight simming. I'd really like to put Flight Gear's best foot forward, so to speak. So what I'm looking for is suggestions and and advice on things like... What plane to use - I keep running into half-finished and unpolished FG aircraft that give a bad impression. Since part of the mission is to show something that's newbie friendly, I'd be looking for a fairly easy to fly GA aircraft. I'd go with the basic C-172, except the last time I tried that in FG it looked a bit rough around the edges. A bizjet or regional airliner would be an alternative as long as it looks finished and polished. Where to fly - any particularly good areas of scenery? More polished looking airports? Any particular configuration I should do to improve the look of things? I know eye-candy isn't historically the thrust of FG development, though it's making leaps and strides with things like Rembrandt. But it's hard to get viewers engaged and excited about a better flight model if the sim's looking like an alpha version of FS95. In summary... "What's the best the current version of FlightGear has to offer?" Thanks in advance Dr V

Thank you, João. I'm working on Episode 2 now, it should be posted by the end of the week. Obrigado, João. Eu estou trabalhando em Episódio 2 agora, deve ser publicado até o final da semana. Best wishes Dr V

Good day, all I've just started a new series on YouTube entitled "Let's Fly". While many of you are producing some visually stunning videos, I wanted to do something more like the "Let's Play" videos you see for a lot of computer games. The aim is to try to convey some of the fun that can be had with "serious" flight-simming. For the first flight though, just to shake out the cobwebs, I do a simple short hop from my local airfield at Barton to Liverpool John Lennon airport in a C-172 As I mention in the video, I only really started simming last year, and am just coming back to it now after an enforced break of about six months, so I'm pretty rusty. I'd genuinely appreciate any constructive criticism from more experienced flyers. Hatin', rantin' trolls need not apply. Regards Dr V

Last year I gave the previous version of FlightGear a try and rated it "promising, but not ready for primetime" This morning I've been giving 2.10 a trial run and wanted to share my experience and thoughts. The straight-out-of-the-box experience is getting better. I have a fairly standard CH Products yoke, throttle and pedals setup and FG recognised and configured them automatically. There were problems with it assigning conflicting controls to multiple devices which took a little bit of manual config, and I've still got problems with the rudder pedals giving being misread at extreme left/right positions, but at least the days of having to manually edit XML files to get your controls working seem to be mostly over. Next up a plea to the FG aircraft developers. For heaven's sake put some time in on the humble Cessna 172 and get it up to full Production status, preferably with a little more texturing in the virtual cockpit. It's the de-facto standard training aircraft and always the first plane I fire up when I want to quickly test something (whether a new piece of scenery, or a whole new flight simulator) The FG C172 interior looks plasticky and horrible and very FS95, which doesn't give newcomers a terribly good impression. I get the feeling that the team have focussed on the Triple-Seven as the showcase bird for this release, and indeed it looks pretty darn good. But a newbie isn't going to want to start out with a complex airliner like that. One thing I did like is that the aircraft download page at the main FlightGear repository now lets you filter the aircraft list by how complete it is. It saves messing about with unfinished projects before they're ready. Graphically, I think that the default FG is marginally improved over the previous version, but the big game changer in this release is the inclusion of Project Rembrandt rendering in the main release. This makes a big difference in the visual appearance of the sim. But I was rather disappointed to see a lot of heavy pizellation in the shadows in the cockpit. I was a little surprised to see absolutely no buildings at my local airport. If it had been a podunk GA field I could have understood that, but Manchester (EGCC) is one of the biggest (if not *the* biggest) UK airports outside London. I would have thought at least some basic blocky buildings to show where the gates are would have been in order. But the urban area was heavily populated with autogen and looked suitably metropolitan, if not strictly realistic as such. I'm not really qualified to talk about the accuracy of flight modelling, but I did get the impression that FG was significantly more twitchy than FSX, though that might have been down to the wind and weather conditions today. Oh yes, that was another thing, FG automatically downloaded and interpreted the correct real-world METAR weather, something that FSX has recently forgotten how to do. I managed to get both the C172 and the B777 into the air and buzzing around. Frame rates were mostly comparable with what I get from FSX, and looking pretty smooth. But for some reason in the B77 as I flew over a forested area the frame rate dropped to an unusable 3fps slideshow with Rembrandt. Without Rembrandt I got a similar drop to about 8fps. Not great, but it's possible that this sort of thing might be fixable with suitable time spent tweaking the detail settings. So overall I'd have to say my opinion is unchanged. I'm impressed with the improvements and see a lot of potential here, but FlightGear is still in need of a lot of work as an entertainment flight simulator. I can see it making an excellent engine if you were building a full-cockpit sim for procedural training, where videogame quality eye candy isn't required. But if I want an immersive sim that lets me feel like I'm flying in a virtual world, FG just doesn't cut it for me. Yet. I stand by my original prediction - in five to ten years time FlightGear might well be a pretty good replacement for FSX. So in summary I'd advise anyone to give FlightGear a try, but with tempered expectations. Dr V

Sad to see that snobbery and One-True-Way-ism are alive and well in the flightsim community. I probably hit somewhere around 3.5 on this spectrum, broken down like this.. Never increases the sim rate - just a personal preference. I like to experience the whole of a flight real time. Sometimes use real world routes - depends on your definition of "real world route". I don't fly SIDS and STARS, but I quite often fire up FlightAware and copy a flight from my local airport. Sometimes use proper airlines on routes - if doing the above, I'll try to get the right aircraft model, call signs and livery. If doing a speculative "where do I feel like going?" flight, I'll use whatever livery and flight number takes my fancy, including the default fictional airlines. (Almost) always follow real-time or weather - the rare occasion when I don't would be if I was flying at night (in the real world) and wanted to do a daytime flight. Using the old "real world weather" function would lead to a jarring mismatch. That said, I've just picked up ActiveSky 2012 which supports historical weather modelling, so that problem goes out the window. My approach is that it's very much a sim rather than a game, but operating within certain limitations based on (a) the FSX platform's capabilities (b) the software and hardware capablities of my flight-sim setup © the simple fact that you're sitting in a room looking at monitor screens, completely lacking most of the subtle sensual feedback a real pilot would get and most importantly (d) my own developing but still limited skills as a sim pilot. I fly a mix of default aircraft, top quality freeware and simpler payware, I don't have the money to spend on top-end complex payware and to be honest at my current level I don't feel the reward for mastering more complex systems would justify the extra effort and expense required. I follow checklists and procedures, albeit simplified ones to reflect the simulated systems. I've setup everything I can to create an immersive feel (voice recognition to talk to ATC, cabin ambience, physical layout of controls, etc), something which is always going to be an ongoing work in progress. "Each to their own" is exactly right. We all have our own criteria for what makes a compelling and immersive simulated experience. But to assume that people who don't do things the same way you are treat their flight simming as a casual game is ignorant at best, and at worst downright snobbish. Plus it does wonders for encouraging newcomers to the hobby.. encouraging them to find a different hobby, that is. Finally I have a sincere question for those of you who answered "5 all the way". How many of you communicate with ATC by voice, either using a live service like VATSIM or speech recognition like MCE or VoxATC, and how many of you still use keypresses? The reason I'm curious is that it was the biggest immersion-breaker for me and the first major upgrade I went for. Dr V

Greek Airport Project's Rhodes Diagoras International. When I first started flight simming, I set myself the mini-goal of recreating the flight from Manchester to Rhodes that I'd done as a passenger in real life a few years back. So while I was learning the basics and building up to the tubeliners, the first payware airports I bought were Manchester Xtreme from UK2000 and Rhodes Diagoras from GAP. Rhodes was absolutely gorgeous when I loaded it up to test. I could recognise the hotel I'd stayed in and the old town looked fantastic. But when I finally got around to completing the flight, something terrible happened. Arriving round about the time the sun was setting, the framerate started to drop dramatically, until on final approach it was down to an unplayable <1fps. It turned out that there's something in the night lighting or textures for GAP Rhodes that conflicts with FSX Acceleration. GAP say in their forums that they only support the product with SP2, have refused to consider any sort of fix and seem to grow quite irritated when people ask about it. After wrestling with it for some time, even doing a complete reinstall of FSX to go back to SP2 for a while, I've now given up on it and installed the LiveInFSX version of the airport/island. It's maybe not quite as pretty as GAP's, but at least it doesn't turn into a pumpkin when the sun goes down. The other purchase that I'm clooooooose to regretting is the upgrade from Just Flight's Traffic X to Traffic 360. While I can maybe accept that the greatly reduced volume of movements I'm seeing at my local airport (EGCC) may actually be more realistic than the taxiway queues I was seeing under Traffic X, I'm not convinced by the lack of variety of takeoffs : Leaving the sim running I clocked twelve takeoffs in about three hours, all but two of which were British Airways "Speedbird" call signs. The same time period in real life had takeoffs from many different airlines, at least according to Flight Aware. I've also seen AI flights in mid air with their doors opened and passenger stairs lowered. Traffic 360 may have a lot going for it, but there's definitely more than a few rough edges to it in dire need of a service pack. Caveat Emptor Dr V

Stunning! There's a lot of fun to be had getting back to basics and pootling around in an ultralight. I had no idea though that anyone was producing payware ultralight aircraft! Dr V

mgh - I think we've established beyond all shadow of a reasonable doubt that you shouldn't. In its current state of development, FlightGear doesn't meet your criteria for a good, commercial flight simulator. And that's OK, we all have different likes and dislikes and things that work for us and things that don't. Over the years I've come across several popular applications that I just couldn't get along with. The solution - use something else and don't stress over it. Maybe have another look at FG in a few years time when it might have evolved into something more to your tastes. As for the 5-10 years thing, that was based on my experience of the Linux OS. I've only personally experienced one FlightGear update so far, 2.6 to 2.8 and if it wasn't 100 times better, it was certain tens of times better. I don't know enough about the FG development cycle - if we see 2.9 and Rembrandt going gold in the next couple of months then at that rate of development we could see an FSX-beating FlightGear ready for primetime sooner than those 5 years, but for now I'm sticking with the more conservative prediction. Dr V

A lot of people seem to obsess over framerates as the be-all-and-end-all of usability. Personally I think smoothness is much more important. It also depends what sort of flying you're doing - Low level barnstorming where you need quick reactions also calls for a higher framerate. Flying a tubeliner, you can get away with a much lower rate. Visually I find things are optimum as long as they're close to the limit at 30fps. Anything around 20fps is acceptable, as are dips into the mid teens. Once things drop to around 10fps it starts to feel like flying through treacle though I find it just about possible to keep the plane flying. Once fps drops much below that though I have to say it usually results in a crash, since I find myself overcontrolling because I'm not seeing the response to inputs in time. Of course that's just speaking generally and for FSX. I don't think I've seen FS9 drop below 50fps, so it's not so much of an issue with it! :lol: Dr V

Step 1.. Put on pants Step 2.. ?? Step 3.. Fly!!! Ok seriously though, it depends what sort of flying I feel like doing. GA VFR I'll generally load up an aircraft at an airfield, take off, pick a direction and see what's there. Flying the bigger tin, I've tried to evolve a more... verisimilitudinous procedure.. I won't say "realistic" because I know it's nowhere near what real-life pilots have to do, but it's just enough procedure for me to feel like I'm flying an airliner. This is a constantly developing thing, but at the moment it's something like. 1) Decide departure and arrival airports. Usually I fly out of my local international airport. Sometimes I fire up FlightAware and look for a current departure that sounds interesting and try to fly roughly the same aircraft and livery. If I just want a quick practice or are completely lost for inspiration, I'll fall back on my default flight of CRJ700 from Manchester EGCC to Dublin EIDW in Orbit livery. 2) If I'm doing a flight I haven't done before, I put the details into Plan-G and print out a flightplan, mainly as a handy reference for COMM and NAV frequencies. Generally I fly GPS direct but if I'm doing anything fancy I'd put in waypoint VORs etc. If this is a new plan I'll export it to PLN to load into FSX. 3) Startup the sim, cold and dark. 4a) Go through the full ramp process, with catering trucks and passenger boarding, courtesy of GSX. This happens in parallel with.... 4b) Startup procedures and IFR clearance/taxi clearance from ATC. For all its many, many faults, I prefer to fly under MS ATC direction, again as part of the whole verisimilitude thing. Real pilots can't just do what they want up there, I can't use VATSIM for practical reasons and I haven't seen a replacement ATC package that's won me over yet, so MS ATC it is. 5) Taxi to departure runway, while my flight attendant welcomes the passengers and reads the safety briefings, courtesy of Multi Crew Experience. I gdon't use MCE's flight checklist feature as I've had problems getting it to work, instead I work through my own checklists and use the MCE copilot to handle the mundane button pushing and radio tuning. 6) Fly!!! Like I said, not "realistic", but just enough to feel like I'm following some sort of procedure. Again it's a work in progress and developing as I build up skills and knowledge. Dr V

Yup, good podcast, well worth a listen or watch on YouTube. That episode pretty much spells out everything about Latitude. What surprised me was that towards the end they indicated that Latitude wasn't so much a replacement for the Sim-air concept, though it had a lot of parallels and the two would eventually somehow tie in to eachother. Speaking as a truly lousy pilot who flies to escape from stress rather than add to it, the idea of an add-on watching over my shoulder and penalising my many, many cock-ups does not appeal. This add-on doesn't sound like it's for me. Dr V

Product hacking - taking a product and modifying it to adapt it a different purpose or add functionality to that which the maker intended - is as old as the hills and has been practiced since before the modern consumer age. Producers, especially media and software producers, would love to have this behaviour identified as unethical or even criminal, controlling what you do with products once you buy them, which is why they often tend to identify that with software cracking, or piracy. Getting a piece of software, or an add-on, running on platform it wasn't intended for, is more like the former. Yes it's going against the wishes of the creator, but the question is whether the creator has the moral right to restrict you from doing so. If you bought a bedside table from Ikea, would it be right for them to prevent you from using it in your living room? Now developers like PMDG or Captain Sim have a perfect right to say they don't want their products to be used for professional training, or to say that they won't support their use on the P3D platform. But if someone gets those products working and is able to take responsibility for their own actions and not complain if they have problems or run to the developer for support, I don't think it's right to demonise them by equating what they've done with software piracy. (Full Disclosure : I don't have P3D and have no immediate plans to acquire it. I'm posting here purely because I've been following its development and its licensing issues with interest over the last few months and it's a subject I find fascinating. If anyone feels non P3D users don't have the right to participate in this discussion, just say the word and I'll retire gracefully. Oh and while I'm confessing, I also use IKEA bedside tables in the living room, and a shelving unit as a workbench.) Respectfully Dr V

I've just had this point rammed home to me. Up until a week or so ago I was running Just Flight's TrafficX (in FSX), and with traffic turned down to 50% at EGCC, would typically have 6-12 aircraft taxiing and holding short at any given time and would often struggle to get a word in edgeways with ATC. This was my image of a busy airport. With the upgrade to Traffic360 the volume of traffic dropped dramatically, so that even with the traffic turned up to 100% I'm only getting 2-3 aircraft on the move at any given time. Comparing departure volume with the departures listed on Flight Aware suggests this to be a more accurate representation of real-world traffic. So my current 100% traffic is less than half what I was getting before at 50%. And that's using the same brand of traffic package. So clearly not all 100% traffics are equal. Dr V (PS for the record, in FS9 I use World of AI, and with every airline visiting Manchester installed, I'm getting traffic volumes comparable to T360)

Driving pedals are rigged differently to rudder pedals (at least they used to when I had a set, and if they're designed to simulate a real car's pedals, probably still do.) Driving pedals have one axis per pedal. Rudder pedals have a single axis and are rigged so when you push one forward, the other one comes back, like they're pivoting around a point in between your feet. Most rudder pedals also have two more axes, one for each pedal, which are usually mapped to what are called toe brakes. These are used when taxiing to help supplement the rudder/nosewheel steering by applying the brakes on one side of the plane. Push both toebrakes down at the same time equally for full braking. So you could probably configure your racing pedals as left and right toe brakes, but I don't think they'd be suitable for a rudder control. As for how to taxi - as RCITGuy says, the slower the better. From a starting position slowly ease up the throttle until you're just about able to move, then once you've started moving drop the throttle as you build up momentum. Throttle back a little as you approach a turn, and keep your speed under 25kts (or if you're in an aircraft where the speed indicator doesn't "come alive" until 40kts, just keep it "dead"). You might find it easier to switch to an external view for taxiing, though some might feel that's cheating a bit. Personally I suck at taxiing, still swerving all over the place, but I'm slowly improving. Dr V

I've had a response on the Just Flight forum about my low volume of departures with Traffic 360. They're saying that because T360 is using real-world schedules, whereas Tx didn't, I'm just seeing a reflection of the real-life traffic volume. I'm not sure I buy it. But I've turned up the traffic slider to 100% and have had a few departures in the last half hour, which looks close to the volume of traffic that FlightAware is reporting in the same period. The mix of carriers seems to be a little off, with T360 giving me a constant stream of British Airways (about 80% of the departures I'm hearing are Speedbirds) compared to the varied mix FlightAware shows. It just goes to show you what another poster said - not all 100% traffics are equal. It sounds like TrafficX at 50% was ridiculously over-busy compared to what T360 is reporting as "real" at 100%.

Two missing from the list: Crazy ATC that doesn't do what ATC should do. AI that's unaware of the player's position, so they'll happily ram straight into you both in the air and on the ground.

Another possible reason why LM want to steer clear of the entertainment market has just occurred to me. Marketing. LM may feel, rightly or wrongly, that putting a version of P3D out as an entertainment product, might weaken the brand as a serious professional product. You see LM's primary focus is on the profesional market right? And in addition to the basic licensing fees, they probably also have a revenue stream from bespoke projects and specific implementations of P3D for customers, contracts for the sort of money that makes the hobby market look like spare change. Now imagine you're a stuffed-shirt, soulless bureaucrat, a project manager for either a small government department or a medium-sized business. You're tasked with the project of implementing a training simulation system, something you don't know anything about because that's not your job, your job is to deliver the project on-time and under budget. You have nerdy minions assigned to you to do the "actual work" and understand things. But, when the options are presented to you, you do a bit of googling and find out that one of the proposals is based on a computer program that's also sold for personal entertainment. "A game?" you cry. "We're in a serious business. We don't want to be playing computer games!" and that option gets consigned to the bin. Short sighted? Maybe. But from personal experience I've seen major decisions made on equally shaky logic. Put it another way... you know how prissy some simmers get when you refer to FSX or X-Plane as a game? It's like that, but at the corporate level. Dr V

Yeah, I was thinking £40 per addon, which seems to be the ballpark for major functions like weather engines, voice comms or ground services. Or how about VoxATC, a snip at £99? Not criticising the prices as such, just amused that we spend so much on enhancing a £15 game.

There's another app I've heard of, AISeparation, which speeds up aircraft in front and slows those behind, to give you more breathing room on approach. Never used it, but heard positive things about it.