phawtrey

I'm driving an all-wheel drive Acura; had the TL and now the TLX. I'd never go back to two wheel drive, especially up here in Canada in the Winter. Now, another question is, who makes airplane sounds while driving? :-)

Are you looking to fly fixed wing or helis? The Warthog has a bit of a center detent that I found threw off my fine control when flying helicopters, but it was fine for fixed wing. There are some online tutorials on how to smooth out the center, but this involves disassembly and careful sanding, and lubrication of the ball at the base of the joystick - probably a warranty voider. Cheers, Phil

I had a hard time telling the difference with the new textures, so I took screenshots before and after installing the HD textures; the only difference that I see is that things like the texture on the glare shield and yoke look a little better, but important items like button labels don't look any better, and if fact, some of them are worse (the VOR/DME label under the auto/manual nav tuning button, for example) I really don't see any value to this add-on.

Just a followup to my post; DSD sent me a testing utility that showed that all of the outputs are working so it looks like neither P3D nor X-Plane poll fast enough to catch the short button press signals. I've installed FSUIPC in P3D and set the button polling to 10 ms and this seems to help a bit but still doesn't catch all of the button presses. I looked into writing my own handler that would maybe capture the button presses and then send the appropriate event via SimConnect; I can capture all of the button presses but can only get a few of the controls to accept events. At least I know it's not an issue with the hardware itself. Cheers, Phil

Hi, all, Just wondering if anyone out there has tried the DSD FLT1 button box with either P3D or X-Plane? I just received mine, but I'm having issues with both the rotary encoders and the on/off switches - they're both sending very intermittent button pulses; even in Windows Game Controller properties, where you can see each button press, they're very intermittent. I've tried a couple of different USB ports, both directly on the PC (no hub) and a second computer with the same results. Thanks, Phil

I ran into a similar issue where most of the time, I couldn't engage the reverser lock (even though sometimes the yellow reverse lights would come on), and when I could, when applied reverse thrust, even though the animated controls moved backwards, the plane would accelerate forwards. I'm using a CH Products quad. What I found what that if the four throttles where out of sync at all, which is most of the time, with four controls, I would have issues. My solution was to use the CH Control Manager and putting in dead zones and specific range values at the detent so that when the controls are in the detent, they all send out the same value. Note that if you use the Control Manager, it creates new virtual joysticks so you have to remap your controls to these new joysticks. Cheers, Phil

Ah, you're right, Penz, my bad; I did't realize that there had been another hotfix released. Confirmed that ASN doesn't like this version - reverting back! Cheers, P.

I've been running the ASN beta in 2.5 with this hotfix applied without any issues.

Thought I'd add my two cents here - It's not quite about flying the real thing, or a 737, but I think it's as close as you can get without an ATP. I have about a hundred hours of real time in a 172, but most of my time is in sims, and usually smaller planes; I recently managed to book a couple of hours in a full motion Level-D 767-300 sim, so in preparation, purchased a copy of Level-D's 767 sim and managed to get it running in P3D; the graphics are a little outdated but for the most part, all of the components are there - enough to familiarize myself the with flight deck and handling characteristics. I spend a few hours doing circuits, ILS approaches and landings in various wind and visibility conditions (nothing extreme) just to get the procedures down and to get a handle on things like timing and power settings, etc. During the briefing for the Level-D flight, the instructor indicated that I would probably crash, and not to be surprised if he had to freeze the sim at any point (full motion sims get get pretty rough!) My copilot for this flight (we switched back and forth on roles) had no real flying experience, but a fair bit of flight sim experience; I thought I'd have an advantage having some real flight time, but it turns out it only made me more aware of hitting and holding my altitudes. When we actually did the flights, both of us managed to do the take-off, climb to 3000 in the circuit, intercept the ILS and land without "breaking" the plane; the landings would have been a little hard and passengers would have commented (we assumed we were flying a cargo plane) but they were within limits so nothing would have busted. Some of the flights were even in mild turbulence and with reduced visibility. As for taxiing, in a full motion sim, you get a really good feel for how much you're braking and turning, so it actually isn't that hard - turning is easy since you use a tiller - you just have to remember that you're sitting way in front of the front wheel and you're in a long plane when you make the turns (stay off the grass!) Also, the instructor warned us to be easy on the brakes - they are sensitive, but still require quite a bit of force. So I think is is possible to go from sim experience to fly the real thing, but of course, there's lots of conditions attached; in our case, there was no cross-wind and we flew at dusk so the runway lights were easy to spot - this meant that we could switch to visual and use the PAPI lighting as a guide; we didn't have to worry about most of the systems - we started with the plane powered up and ready to go, including having the ILS tuned in; we hand flew the plane, so we didn't worry about the FMC or autopilot, just the basics including flaps and gear; the instructor gave a few pointers along the way - something someone could do over the radio - but never had to intervene or pause the sim. It's actually quite amazing how close some of these sims get to the real thing; yes, a real plane (and a level-d sim) feel different when you're at the controls - the yoke is much heavier and has a much greater range of motion, the "monitor" is a LOT bigger and there's a lot more to take in, but the response to control inputs, power settings, etc. are all very close. Oh, and if anyone wants to know, was it worth the big bucks? Every penny!