kaosfere

I love career mode addons. I've spent a lot of time in NeoFly, FSEconomy, and both versions of Air Hauler. Having something in-built eventually would be nice, but can you imagine the uproar there would be from certain quarters if Asobo started spending time working on that while people were still unsatisfied with the core simulation? 🙂 We already get ranting about the world updates from folks who don't seem to understand that the people who are making scenery aren't necessarily the ones building the game engine; in this case they well could be.

I would not encourage people to just copy and use another mod's manifest without modification. If nothing else, it will provide bogus information to the content manager and any intelligent add-ons that show mod details, such as the MSFS Addons Linker. Unlike layout.json, that's a small and fairly easy to understand file. If nothing else, one should open it in an editor and change the "title" field so that you don't have multiple mods with the same titles running.

I've just had a look at the spec of the tile system for Bing Maps here. It's well documented, but I don't think the logic it uses would be supported by Marble, which is what drives LNM's map. It doesn't really keep with the concept of zoom levels with row and column addresses that other mapping services have. Instead, it divides the world up into a series of ever-smaller grids and "builds" the number of a grid tile iteratively. It actually seems more akin to the old Kriegsmarine grid system. Maybe I'm wrong and it can be done if you understand the underlying framework a bit more, perhaps @albar965 could comment on that quickly when he gets time. But I'm not optimistic.

ProATC-X also will gag if you try to start (and maybe end?) a flight at an airport that doesn't have any gates, so if you're planning on flying out of very small strips, you might want to wait and see if that is fixed in the upcoming release.

Unfortunately, as good an idea as that is. and as beneficial as it could be to our community, it would be a legal nightmare that it's unlikely anyone would want to manage. The application of the doctrine of first sale to digital matter is a messy world right now.

This is good to see. Please make sure to let your beta testers have plenty of time with it to avoid any more "oops, this bug made it through because none of our beta testers fly without copilots" boo-boos. If this were a solid product, it would become my #1 ATC solution. [Edited because my first pass sounded nastier than I meant it.]

Good grief, thank you for this! That must be an error in their installer, I didn't have that layer active. What a huge difference it makes. Looking southeast towards Midway and beyond from O'Hare: Before: http://i.imgur.com/HNiKBxr.jpg After: http://i.imgur.com/jRnFSXh.jpg

Yeah, that's vector with secondary and tertiary roads turned on (but without margins/etc for the minor roads)

It looks like fully installed on disk it's about 17GB. I wouldn't be quite so negative. It'll probably be a day or so until things go truly smoothly, yes, but I managed to download the full package in about 5 hours and get it installed with only minor difficulties waiting for FSS to actually allow me to register it. Initial impressions are very favorable. Here's a quick comparison from downstate a bit: http://imgur.com/a/kAsh3

Not a huge deal. I work in IT, it happens. Just sayin...

This. I don't like slamming any product from a small developer, but there is a degree of reasonable responsiveness which is expected of any vendor. Pro ATC has a fairly significant bug which, when flying without co pilot assistance, can cause communications with Control to time out and be unusable for the remainder of the flight. The developer's response to this was along the lines of, "To avoid this, always use the 'copilot tunes radios' and 'copilot acknowledges' settings. This is something we didn't catch in testing because we all fly with copilot automation. It will be fixed in our next release." (I apologize, their forum is down right now, ironically, so I cannot get a verbatim quote. I believe this is a fair summary, though.) Now, bear in mind, as I recall, this information is only found on their forum and only in a section which requires manual authorization via proof of purchase -- in other words, you don't even know about this until you've purchased the product. (I believe these statements are correct. I went to their forum to verify this, but, as I said, it is down. If I am incorrect I will edit this to remove any untrue statements.) This has been the case for, what is it, 9 months? That's upsetting. And it's not the only problem. There's also an issue with tuning radios via external hardware not being picked up by the application in some cases which has hardly even been acknowledged. If you try to fly from an airport with no gates, you get an error and cannot proceed. Etc. Compare this to a less glamorous product -- Pro Flight Emulator 3 -- which has had the latest version updated 11 times since its release in February, including point releases for single isssues like: That's customer service. Pro ATC is a very promising product, which could have some very nice functionality to it, but until there is a better commitment to updates from the developer it's hardly more than expensive abandonware.

While I agree with your comments about framerate peeping, I have trouble letting this slide, especially in framerate discussions, because while often cited it is dead wrong. The whole "24 fps is all you need because it's what the movies use" disregards the fact that the only reason it works is because film contains motion blur, which smooths out what would otherwise be stuttery motion. The minimum detectable gap varies based upon your own biology and training, but the human "average" is definitely above 24/25 fps. This graph from one study on this shows that the mean gap detection threshold for young adults is under 20ms -- so over 50fps. This page has some demonstrations on the effects of framerate, and includes the note that some Air Force pilots have been able to not only see, but identify a plane flashed to them in only 1/220th of a second. I think it's safe to say they could detect more than 24fps. (Personally, I detect a noticable difference between 30fps and 60fps. My current rig pushes 3440x1440 with sliders way to the right around 60fps usually, and I can tell the difference when it drops to 30ish. Really, though, I can fly fine all the way down to about 20fps. Beyond that small control inputs become difficult.)

It took a little tweaking, but I found a config that, for my taste and setup, seems nice. I went with 0.3 for the terrain shadows, 0.6 for the autogen shadows, and no 1.8 highlight multiplier as suggested for 3.2. This isn't the best composed shot, but it shows clouds, sun, shade, haze, scattering, and reflection all in one. (West of Martinique)

Yeah, somehow the URL got mangled when I cut and pasted. I've updated the original post, try again. Or here: http://www.avsim.com/topic/484853-v32-ai-playerdll/

See this thread, perhaps?

FSPassengers is currently not working with 3.2 It will be updated within one week. I upgraded last night and, after an initial test flight, found problems other than the incompatibilities already discussed. Shadows subjectively look better, but I don't know if it's just confirmation bias. AA definitely looks better on my setup. (23" monitor, 1080p)

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the heck out of P3D now that I've mostly converted from X-Plane and have grabbed a bunch of add-ons. However, I do wish it were a 64 bit application for one simple reason: I could load as many add-ons into XP as I wanted and never, not once, would it die with an OOM. End of story. (Unless, you know, I consumed at 16GB of my system's an in inordinate amount of swap, but a) that never happened, and b) the sim would be unusable by that point anyway.) Yes, there is a lot of technological ignorance from people who have no understanding of what '64 bit' means and why it's not a panacea, but that there is one concrete reason for its superiority in that one aspect.

Thanks, Ed, I appreciate the information there. I'll keep an eye out for news about new releases from you guys and pick things back up when this change comes out. I'm curious, if you have time, if you could explain from a developer's perspective what the FS flight plan interface provides other than... the flight plan? These three applications all work without any plan loaded in the simulator, and for the most part don't seem like they need to explicitly load any plan present as a discrete entity either. (Unlike, say, Active Sky Next, which has an option to do just that). I'm wondering how, for example, PFE, which really only needs to know about your location, vector, and comm settings, because it uses a flight plan provided outside of the simulator, can benefit from loading flight plan info from the sim. I know it's not your responsibility, just curious and you seem to have an understanding of this.

PFE VfrFlight I don't expect a developer to know of or test against all add-ons, don't worry. That's not remotely practical, nor a reasonable expectation. However, it would be nice for a customer to know about a potential limitation such as this beforehand. It's unfortunate that LM won't fix this bug. Any idea if it's still present in 2.5? That might prompt an upgrade, because I'd love to be able to use your add-on with everything else I have. As it is for the moment, I have completely uninstalled the 430/530. It was making too many other add-ons unusable for me. Incidentally, it seems like your uninstaller misses something... I was still crashing even after uninstalling, had to hunt down the Hypergauge in my dll.xml and manually disable it there to get my system back.

Can you identify which data reads in particular will cause this problem? As far as I know, Plan-G doesn't attempt to read the flight plan itself, or at least it certainly doesn't show it. I've just turned off every data type I can turn off that it reads from the sim, including not even showing my plane's location, and this still happens. FWIW, I've turned on IPC read logging in FSUIPC and I'm not seeing anything in particular logged before my crash. Is this incompatibility documented somewhere on your website or documentation? I'm worried now about what other add-ons may not work with the GNS530 even though they don't superficially read flight plan data. ,,, And yeah, now I'm crashing running PFE, and with VfrFlight. This has pretty much become completely unusable since I installed your updated nav data. (It was fine before that... how could that be?)

Hi. I'm having a problem with the GNS 530 running in P3D alongside Plan-G. This is a combination that has worked fine for me in the past, but whenever I try to connect Plan-G with the Mindstar GPS active I reliably get a P3D hang and need to force kill it. In the exact same flight, without the Mindstar GPS, everything is fine. This is on Windows 8.1, with P3D 2.4. The Windows event log shows an application hang error: The program fsx.exe version 10.0.61637.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Action Center control panel. Process ID: 8d34 Start Time: 01d05b5174501aea Termination Time: 84 Application Path: F:\Prepar3D v2\fsx.exe Report Id: 0cd4073f-c745-11e4-8267-60a44cae5854 Faulting package full name: Faulting package-relative application ID: And then an application error: Faulting application name: Prepar3D.exe, version: 2.4.11570.0, time stamp: 0x542314d3 Faulting module name: API.DLL, version: 2.4.11570.0, time stamp: 0x5423155e Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x00005001 Faulting process id: 0x39d8 Faulting application start time: 0x01d05b51d92009b1 Faulting application path: F:\Prepar3D v2\Prepar3D.exe Faulting module path: F:\Prepar3D v2\API.DLL Report Id: 3100b5eb-c745-11e4-8267-60a44cae5854 Faulting package full name: Faulting package-relative application ID: This is showing the binary as fsx.exe because I'm running with the Estonian Migration Tool to support Ideal Flight, but this same thing happens without Ideal Flight and with the EMT virtual FSX install disabled. I can replicate this whether I have Plan-G connecting via SimConnect or FSUIPC. Other applications using both SimConnect and FSUIPC work fine, as, again, does this setup without the GNS running. Any help? Edit: Oh heck, one thing just hit me as I was thinking back over my troubleshooting: this actually worked fine when I was using the stock navdata, at least for the couple flights where I had it. It only began being an issue once I installed the up to date realnavdata product.

Yeah, looking at BlueSky vs what I've seen with Ultimate, I very much appreciate the autogen layer Ultimate provides. It's probably also worth noting that Ultimate doesn't just do the vegetation -- there's building autogen as well, which is very apparent in the shots I took over Salt Lake City which I'll post later. I didn't see much or any over Blanding, but as the developer states elsewhere on these fora his building data is acknowledged to be incomplete based upon his sources and software available; he has a plan for improving both his vegetation and building layers. I have to say I'm impressed with both his openness about the shortcomings, and his comments regarding wanting to provide evolutionary improvements to his product; it could become even better as time goes by if his ambition pans out. I'm optimistic, and very glad I jumped on these. (I'm actually thinking about buying Guam even though I don't fly there much, just to have it and support him.) Actually, although it's not as apparent when you're looking at these stand-alone, if you load all the images into an image viewer and switch back and forth rapidly between them, it's obvious that MSE, at least, uses different source data. This is more obvious over Salt Lake City; there are roads present in the other two that aren't in MSE, and it looks as though there are spots where both new buildings have been built and others have been torn down. I thought about looking at Google's historical images to see which was more recent, but my gut impression from what changed is that MSE is probably older imagery. I couldn't tell from what I had if BlueSky and Ultimate had different sources, but this was partly because Ultimate's autogen buildings obscured some of the underlying. One of the things I might do this weekend is run the same comparison but with the Ultimate autogen layer off to see how the underlying images compare in that way. I can also try getting the Ultimate autogen layers working with the BS scenery, that is a very interesting thought. Edit: One more thing to add to the potential tradeoffs between the three is that, as Scott mentioned, BlueSky also comes with an improved mesh. I'm already running FSGlobal Ultimate so it doesn't make a real difference to me, but that's another plus for BlueSky if people aren't already using a high-res mesh.

OK, I've been taking a few comparison shots in Utah between Megascenery, UltimateVFR, and BlueSky. It's late and I'm tired, but I figured I'd post one set. These are all over Blanding, taken around mid afternoon with clear sky. Megascenery: BlueSky: Ultimate: To my eye, Megascenery comes off distinctly worst, with BlueSky and Ultimate being close. Mega looks blurry, weirdly color shifted, over-saturated, and under-exposed. You can maybe just barely see the slight resolution advantage that BlueSky has, but it's minor enough that every other time I look I end up thinking that Ultimate is actually superior there. Aside from that it the two seem highly comparable. You could probably decide based on whether you were more interested in the slightly better clarity of BlueSky, if you even saw it, or the autogen of Ultimate. Frankly, I find Megascenery very disappointing here, and that pattern holds up for the rest of the pictures I've taken so far (which I'll clean up and post a little later this week or this weekend). I took images around the state (here, Salt Lake, Mount Pleasant, Canyonlands) and in all of them Mega ends up looking like a low-rent reproduction to me. I don't have any other of their scenery to compare to, so maybe Utah is just a bad state for them, but I'm kinda glad I only paid $17 for that package for this comparison. :}

The "sharpness" setting on most TVs introduces artificial edge enhancement -- it actually alters the picture to add information that's not there. It makes sense, when I think about it, that having sharpness on would fight the effects on anti-aliasing, so yeah, I can see this. In general, though, I would advise that the first thing anyone does upon buying a new TV is to go into the calibration settings and crank "sharpness" down to 0. And then disable any mode like "Vivid" or "Enhanced" because those are designed to make a TV stand out in a bright showroom, not to actually represent the image that gets sent in accurately.

Close! JS-32. http://www.x-aviation.com/catalog/jetstream-p-92.html The image itself is from somewhere around Bern, I can't recall precisely where.