glider1

Thanks. I had no idea what performance was before this update but performance is a key decision I had to weigh up. It seems good enough. It can be kept away from the main sim cores with affinity. It is surprisingly heavy on cpu use but it doesn't matter much if it is not running on the same cores the sim is. The one thing I don't like is that the SQL database process P2A needs runs separately from the app and it cannot be kept off the main sim cores (system forbids it). But luckily it's impact is not noticeable so far because I'm guessing that the SQL process is merely doing quick database lookups not any processing of data.

Thanks Dave got confused about difference between FIS and FSS.

Hi there Flying ORBX New Zealand north island at the moment. P2A doesn't find any FSS for the region. I think that in reality it exists: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dmco17ptd7j7bcx/NZ_north_FIS.JPG?dl=0 Just wondering if anyone knows if it is possible to modify frequencies database. There is nothing in the manual and I read that the feature was removed in version 2. What about doing a naughty and modifying the database with an external app? Any help appreciated, no stress. Cheers

Thanks mixing volumes has become a pain no question. I do think that it would be handy if pilot2ATC had a volume control for the chatter it would make things a lot easier. Right now if you want to turn down just the chatter you have to increase all the other volumes from almost ten different sources including other apps so that the chatter is the correct volume.

I actually didn't want to edit them. I wanted to know what they were because I was attempting to find someone that would open my vfr flightplan. There isn't a FSS or departure frequency listed where I am only tower and approach. I tried opening it with approach but they didn't understand what I wanted. I tried unicom and that didn't work either. In the end I scrubbed the whole idea of opening the flightplan and just filed it and asked for clearance. So I thought I'd give center a go and that is how I found the bug.

Hi Dave I must be the only P2A pilot in the southern hemisphere! Glad that the data is actually there. The center frequencies are also missing in the list of available frequencies in the main display. Cheers and thanks for looking into it.

I think I have an issue with P2A latest version not knowing what the center frequencies and names are for my part of the world Australia-New Zealand. If you look at the image below, P2A doesn't show the names or frequencies for any areas in southern latitudes only the boundaries: P2A ARTCC display Question: What do I need to do to add this data? I already imported the P3D BGL database and it made no difference. I would like Pilot2ATC to list the center frequencies and boundary names for Australia/NZ which it currently does not. Thanks in advance

Yes it can be installed manually. It is just an external app that installs a couple of folders into official locations in the sim, one for the app and another for the clouds. Did you download it officially from here: http://www.luerkens.homepage.t-online.de/peter/ Run the installer as administrator. It is just a command line program so it disappears for a while then comes back When it says it can't find fsx, click yes you do want to install it somewhere else Install it into a dummy location say for example c:\fsx_dummy When it says it can't find exe.dll and DLL.dll say no you do not want to create one At the end you will find in your dummy location, a simobjects and a module folder You now either make an official addon.xml file and install it as a P3D app or You simply copy the files and folders into your P3D installation manually because there is no difference between FSX and P3D folder structure Other things to keep in mind: There really are only two folders to copy, the modules/cumulusX! folder and the CumulusXcloud folder which you put into simobjects/misc. You don't need the DLL at all. CumulusX is standalone but for the cloud folder. Run cumulusX application by making a shortcut of it where ever you want (suggest running at as admin but I don't think it matters?). You can launch CumulusX before the sim starts or after. It doesn't matter. If you get strange movement of your plane every few seconds, it will because you didn't put the cumulusXcloud folder into the correct spot. If it is working, the CumulusX app will be connected to the sim and will show "GREEN" indicators for both thermal and ridge lift Remember that the unregistered version doesn't have extra features such as turbulence effects. The towplane speed and flap angles can't be customised because CumulusX tries to write them to an fsx.cfg file that doesn't exist. It would be great if someone wrote an addon.xml for CumulusX in P3Dv4 because it is just begging to be installed that way.

Great software well done. I have been a long time PF3 user but the voice recognition integrated with MCE is less than optimal for me even though a lot of work has been put into it. I found Pilot2ATC recognition working better integrated with MCE. More variety of ATC situations especially for VFR. Am looking forward to using it as an advanced tool for IFR as well and it looks to be a great way to learn about SIDS and STARS. Happy with the purchase although it is expensive in my currency had a great flight with it yesterday. The background chatter option really adds to it as well. The computer voices are getting better and natural enough with static mixed in. Kudos for the excellent 10 day trial period without limitations really thoughtful way to try out the software. Request though... Could you put an option in to hide your aircraft position? I really like old school navigation. Do want to see the map - just not the plane! It isn't much to ask! Cheers, thanks.

The Indian and Spanish voices in w10 are worth it (but are female again). When the speech pack is around 100MB it is a clue that the quality of the voices will be pretty good.

VFR situation in MCE/PF3 is still a work in progress and I have similar problems to you. Changing runway verbally is a pain in the a and would like to know if there is a reliable command for that. On the mechanism I think you have to cross the holding point officially designated at your airport otherwise PF3 doesn't realise that you are ready to transition from taxing to contacting tower. So I don't think you can shortcut the takeoff procedure because the intersection takeoff doesn't trigger the transition. It is worth experimenting. MCE of course still doesn't handle pattern communications with PF3 properly yet and I don't think you can request touchngos either. Please correct me if you have had successes with any of this!

That doesn't always work I found out. P3D closes but on some systems with slow shutdown times it is still in memory while windows 10 is shutting down so W10 thinks P3D is still loaded and runs it on startup next time anyway 🙃 You either have to check that P3D is fully unloaded using task manager, or click on the desktop and press ALT F4 and select shutdown from the menu that popups up. Yeah I know 🙄 I couldn't find an option in the settings to disable this "feature".

Hi Caleb good one glad you got it working. CumulusX doesn't do wave lift. We tried hard to convince the developer to do it. He started work on it but never finished. Modelling wave lift is difficult especially since you have to have a pilot to test the model that has experience with wave lift. Not just wave lift, but dealing with ATC at that flight level and needing oxygen etc. We also tried suggesting it with Active Sky but not sure if they will give it a go. Condor sim does it. Realistically though, the CumulusX covers 95% of all gliding you would ever want to do and it does it very well. Strongly suggest buying the app to support it. It is cheap for what it does and there is always a possibility that we will never see a proper weather simulation for gliders other than it because the tube flyers don't need it.

Hi Caleb. You won't get much ridge lift unless there is wind blowing directly onto the ridge so that when it hits the mountain, it rises. That is what gives you the lift. The fair weather preset is for thermalling and it only has a light breeze. You can modify the preset to add a wind layer blowing onto the slope. Add 20 knots at 3/4 the height of the ridge at angle that blows onto the slope as close as possible. That should do it. Just as in real life, even if the wind is not blowing onto the slope directly, if there is any wind around, deviations in the shape of the ridge can produce small pockets of lift and ridges will also produce more thermals than on the ground if the angle of the sun is onto the slope (think solar panel). There is a lot into it. Enjoy learning the intricacies. By the way, the free version has things missing like turbulence effects so it is a cut down experience.

Anyway well done on getting CumulusX working. Pity it is not "officially" supported but unofficially it is fine. It is one of the most stable reliable apps I own in P3D. You don't need to run the DLL. The exe standalone version works fine. The DLL version is legacy. Fingers crossed that Active Sky people are working on building the same quality or better into there weather engine. The performance cost is very small these days and they could include an option to turn off advanced updraft simulation if they wanted to.

Hi Caleb no probs thanks for helping me over at the A2A forums when I stupidly suggested adding the random age option for A2A aircraft when the feature already existed! CumulusX reads the clouds present in the simulator almost exactly so that if a weather engine (any weather engine) decides on putting a patch of cumulo here and some stratus over there, CuX will put simulated thermals where the cumulo cloud is and put absolutely none where the stratus is. Sometimes there is a bit of overlap. Point is that as soon as you fly close to or under those stratus, expect there to be no lift at all. This is unrealistic. In real life there is still patchy lift unless it is a really comprehensive stratus situation. Similarly, if the weather engine injects any showers, CuX reads this as a 100% kill of thermal lift unfortunately. It is possible to fix the stratus/showers problem somewhat by adding in weather engine thermals so that there is still weather engine injected lifts as well as CuX lift, but the accuracy of those is way way lower than CuX thermals but at least it is possible to do cross country that way and it still challenging and fun. What I do when designing a gliding task to fly, is to download AS2016 weather then switch it to manual and change any stratus cloud to cumulo and turn off precipation too making no other changes. That works well. It is not that bad though! In real life, pilots do want to fly on non-raining stratus free days too! Unfortunately in some respects we have gone backwards with AS2016 not forwards. In previous versions there was a tick box option in the weather engine "depict stratus as cumulus" which was great for gliding but it made all the tube flyers unhappy because cumulo is more performance heavy than stratus coming into the big airports. In AS2016 they improved performance by preferring to depict stratus whenever the weather conditions are ambiguous. As for skyforce, I asked one of the top simulator glider pilots around what he thought. He wasn't sure but thinks that no matter how many different types of clouds the weather engine knows about, the simulator itself doesn't, and so neither will CumulusX. I haven't personally tried skyforce myself but it would be interesting. It will certainly work with CuX, but stratus is stratus as far as CuX is concerned. We have petioned hard for Hifi to include proper thermal depiction in their next weather engine. They responded positively and said it "is on their to-do list". Fingers crossed. We also badly need wave lift simulation like Condor has so that gliders can soar above cloud tops at FL24 and higher. Cheers

CumulusX works really well in 4.2 still the best gliding addon around for any sim other than Condor. I have logged many hours with it under P3D 3 and 4. The developer is still contactable but he doesn't support P3D we have to "do it ourselves" with the help of the club at UKVGA. The problem you describe is an installation problem. Straight out of the manual page 31: Sudden jump of aircraft to different location: This occurs when the visual models of the thermal clouds were not installed correctly, e.g. under influence of user access control (UAC). Open the distribution archive, navigate to SimObjects\Misc“ and copy the folder „CumulusXClouds“ into the directory „<FSXROOT>\SimObjects\Misc“. The only thing broken with CumulusX if installed correctly is there is no way I have found to change the default speed of the towplane and CumulusX complains when you close it. If you do get it going, consider using AS2016 with manual weather changing stratus clouds to cumulus clouds were necessary (because stratus clouds kill all the cumulusX lift under them), and record your flights with Simlogger which works really well in P3D. Once your gliding has improved, challenge yourself against recordings of real world pilots available at OLC onlinecontest.org and strongly suggest joining the online gliding club UKVGA. If you aren't gliding in virtual reality, download the amazing range of gliders for free at Wolfgang's website. If you are in virtual reality, the Aerosoft DiscusK is P3Dv4 compatible and the DiscusX and ASK21 can be made to work and are amazing in VR.

I'm not sure it does. I have the Oculus software blocked in the firewall for months without problems. I can't use the store and can't do updates (which are advantages for me), but I can use the Rift without any troubles or outside interference.

In theory, PTA shouldn't even include an option to modify the Prepar3D.cfg because it is illogical. PTA is about shader files and that is all. What I do as a hack, is save a default shader file in PTA with any cfg changes I use but no shader tweaks, and revert back to that when I need too. Then, when there is a new shader preset I want to try, I make sure that the option to tweak the cfg in the preset is turned off. Unfortunately, if you are not aware of it, some PTA presets do modify the cfg file.

I agree that it does get a bit confusing. If you have PTA mod for modifying shader files, I think it is best to use it separately from ENVTEX and turn off ENVTEX shaders. ENVTEX specializes in injecting textures. PTA specializes in manipulating shaders.

VR headsets a big help because of the 1:1 scale. Pilots rotate their head in the same way as real world and can focus correctly on visual cues as well as instruments. VR is already good and next year 4K per eye headsets should start to ship if we're lucky.

Thanks. I'm still on P3D3.4 because of the wonderful Dodosim. If the Dodo goes the way of the dodo in P3D 4.0, is the Milviz MD530 the go to heli now for realistic flight dynamics?

Thanks! I guess bumping up the number of cloud layers could help the effect in the eye except for performance. But if the eye is over a non-populated area without much scenery, max cloud layers might be interesting to try. What was it like moving from the max intensity wind into the eye with the plane? Sudden jolts of the aircraft as the wind dropped off? Lots of turbulence? Enhanced turbulence setting could be a good one! In P3D there should also be a change in the light level going from intense overcast to clear skies.

I feel for you. Without electricity, next time can you afford a generator to run your flightsim for an hour a day? Next time you are travelling, if you have the money by a VR headset. Easier to carry around than a monitor and the immersion is great. Does AS16 model the eye of the hurricane? Always been fascinated by that. Presumably there is a wall of cloud off in the distance with clear sky overhead and little wind.

The playback feature is simply awesome Oliver well done! The playback controls even work in VR (unlike AITX). My idea is to detect owners of AITX and put an option into WAMA to replace the simulator recorder with the AITX recorder so that when you hit playback in the WAMA log it does these things: it puts you in the cockpit with the same playback controls as the default recorder but with extra features like being able to switch views from the playback dialog window no load screen just instant switching in and out of the replay and real life (seamlessly) ability to use direct mode for ultimate playback of all controls/lights etc. option to put your view external and displaced from the touchdown spot so that you can conveniently see the landing as if you were standing by the runway. change it so that it automatically records takeoff and landing with two little hot links in the logbook column marked "takeoff" and "landing" under the column entry called "playbacks" Change it so that it says "record when below xxx feet" (where the user assumes that means both takeoff and landing) Wama would have to know whether the customer owns AITX. I'm also assuming that you could add the binary recording code from AITX under the hood of WAMA without interfering with any of the other code which might not be simple and which adds extra code maintenance overhead. Totally ignore my requests if you think it will cost too much time and effort for what it is worth, because already WAMA is outstanding as it is and I respect your judgement totally. Cheers, Harry