SimeonWilbury

Does the PFPX weather service support historic weather? That's what I use for pretty much all my flights (especially long-hauls)

20 minutes ago, VHOJT said:

They're still around - they fix things if they go wrong - e.g. weather server etc.

It's basically just a completed bit of software - no new additions.  For the most part, it is better than Simbrief.

Simbrief is useful to export the route to an aircraft that PFPX might not support.  Also offers good SIGWX overlay over the route.  Wheras PFPX has good profile view of shear/turb.

I have found Simbrief's SIGWX charts to be weirdly different from the current real-world ones from time to time.

I highly recommend PFPX to anyone looking to have absolute control over their flight plan.

For example, I can excatly set the fuel policy I want down to the last detail, including the types of reserves and flight levels etc. that I want to use in depressurised/engine out scenarious.

I can also calculate a decision point for all engines operating - a "sort of" redispatch, but without altering the way contingency fuel is calculated.  Useful when planning for Australian airlines!

Yes, Pfpx is still my go-to flight-planning software, Simbrief is not a bad alternative but the additional level of customisation in PFPX was always nice, also a fan of the integration the Leonardo Maddog has with it. I'll admit I never used their weather server after the trial for that expired, saw no point when I had ActiveSky to patch in; only thing I miss is having oceanic tracks loaded in by default rather than having to pull them in manually.

Nice to know it's not abandonware, but it would be nice to have some minor updates.

Aerosoft stopped selling and providing support for it I think

no idea what's happened with the actual devs, whether they've just stopped supporting the stuff or outright gone missing. The site still being up means they're still paying the bills for that presumably.

It is nice they are adding this, I've also been clinging on to PFPX/ Topcat for many years despite them being pretty much abandonware at this point, it's increasingly long in the tooth now so as things go forward I guess I'll have more of a reason to use Simbrief going forward.

1 hour ago, mozart said:

The entire suite of Navigraph products is fantastic.

The only thing missing in SimBrief is an aircraft profile of the Concorde and the possibility to plan "Concorde-style" routes. A much more complicated untertaking I suppose, but that would really be great for flying the FSL Concorde. Right now I plan the route more or less manually, then create the route using another profile (an A350 for instance), and then let the FSL Concorde board computer do the rest of the job. It works, but it's not great.

This would definitely be a nice feature, a tick-box along the lines of 'avoid overland routes' would make supersonic flight planning much faster and more convenient. Although that being said said, I've been having quite a lot of fun drawing up my Concorde flightplans manually in Navigraph Charts.

I've already got some FedEx ops planned for the freighter version that I'm looking forward to trying (naturally it includes a trip to Kai Tak 😁).

I also hope the P3D version will prove on-par with the MSFS version - I have cause to be optimistic from the other stuff I've read from the devs, as apparently there isn't too much between the two sims insofar as the dev process is concerned, but we'll have to wait till release to see how that bears out.

I'm happy with P3D for the time being. So long as I keep my VRAM usage in check my performance and stability is pretty fab, with the exception of the FSLabs Concorde that tanks my frames more than I'd like.

But I'm not expecting third-party content to pick up any time soon. The TFDI MD11 is still releasing for P3D which is nice, but most devs seem to be givng P3D pretty short-shrift these days. It's a shame as I would quite like to give v6 ago, but I spent enough effort getting my v5 install where I like it, and v6 will seem to require exponentially more compatibility-tweaks.

Would be lying if I said succession planning wasn't on my mind - MSFS still isn't my cup of tea but depending on what releases there are in the next year or two (and what FS 2024 looks like when it releases) I may end up giving it another look.

Haven't checked on my sim, but to be frank my scenery outside of airports is a bit barebones.

As for up-to-dateness... Well... Kai Tak still exists in my Sim World so I'm not too fussed on that front 😅

I will be following this with great interest

Am one of those who previously has opted to stick with P3D - partly because I fly mostly in historical weather (and also I fly the 747-400 and FSLabs Concorde a lot).

Not 100% sure when I will pick up MSFS, or if I will wait till 2024 has settled in, but this is looking like the main barrier keeping me from upgrading so far being removed finally.

WIth it having been this long I think it's safe to say we've been abandoned at this point.

For an MD80 in P3D I can only recommend the Leonardo Maddog, still a really stellar aircraft.

A few thoughts on my end

• Iirc the shallower bank-rate was(?)/ is to maintain climb performance on the LHR-BAH routings? Or at least that was the intention. There doesn't seem to be much impact on climb performance with HDG-hold method in your case, but I'd be interested to see this on a heavier-loaded aircraft in case it makes any difference
• I think you might also be able to do the equivalent to the HDG-hold without engaging the Heading hold by setting the INS to 'manual' so it doesn't change waypoints as early. Same effect I think but no changing modes on the AFCS.
• I don't use an EFB (beyond navigraph charts) or anything that makes me worry about whether I get registered as 'hitting' waypoints or not so it doesn't bother me (and the curves look nice on the ground-track to me lol), so not much of an issue to me personally, but if they can get some fine-tuning into the next update that makes things more accurate I'm all for it. I've no idea how things were calibrated in the actual aircraft so I'm speaking from a certain level of ignorance.

Well, they intend to make a MSFS version and their dev effort seems to be primarily going into MSFS ports, I think I can gather that much, though they are unclear as to whether the bulk of the effort is going into Concorde or the A32x.

With FSL time-frames I wouldn't expect anything soon in the conventional sense; I imagine they will maybe try to push the airbusses out first before concorde but there is already a very saturated market for Airbusses on MSFS so I don't know how well that will turn out.

At least the GPS spoofing would be no problem for Concorde, given it doesn't have one 😆

I'll need to do a few more custom routes to have a look (so far just Bahrain to Hong Kong via Bangkok), though I haven't had too much problem resetting the accel/ decel points, the VCS seems to follow it more or less ok. The documentation does definitely still show the 'original' points, which I ignore.

2 hours ago, Coldbear said:

I'm also still waiting for supersonic over land

Supersonic over land was added a little back, you can modify the acceleration and decelration points in the HPLX when loading a custom route.

I had a problem a little while ago having not touched the sim for 6+ months where nothing in Chaseplane worked. If I remember rightly I had something weird going on with simultaneous versions of Chaseplane installed on my PC, at least one of which was completely bricked and wouldn't connect to P3D. It's still a little buggy for me to this day (every time I launch Orbx it wants to update it) but it's worked since I got rid of the offending duplicate.

I'm not sure if my symptoms were quite the same as yours, but it might be worth sniffing around your files/ registry in case there is another version hanging around like I found. It is possible that something in ORBX Central is causing it to break in some way.

3 hours ago, Ian S said:

Was there a trick to downloading? Every time I try, my ISP blocks it as an unsafe site?

Didn't have any problems on my end,

If you're still having trouble, I can send you the .zip file and the afcad I made with the updated exclusions (assuming a v5 install) if you'd like.

If installing for v5 you will need to create a fake v4 install so the installer runs.

Thinking pure stability, v4.5 is probably the best option as it's less prone to using up all your VRAM than v5 is, otherwise I would recommend v5 for giving better performance and slightly better visuals.

Oh wow, I am really happy to see this!

Sometimes I'm reminded just how lovely the flight sim community can be at times; this being one of those!

25 minutes ago, Afterburner said:

What about ORBX New Zealand South region?  It comes with detailed scenery and airports, although I can't remember how detailed the NZCH airport is compared to the one discussed here. I have occasionally flown Concorde-X from Sydney to Christchurch on FSX many years ago.

Hm, it does apparently give some custom airport markings and the such, although I can't seem to find that much specifici information as to the airports on there.

If it's just changing up the markings and not really changing up the buildings/ textures much I might just go with NZAA

6 hours ago, SimeonWilbury said:

I'm generally more than happy to use scenery without any support.

And indeed in my searches, there just so happens to be a Legacy FSX Scenery for NFFN, offered for free as it's no longer supported.

Threw that into the sim, redid the exclusions via ADE, and now I have a pretty decent Nadi scenery. Would be nice to see this from more former FSX/ P3D developers.

41 minutes ago, Ian S said:

Flightbeam's Wellington is also very good. Its a challenging airport too, with a short runway, strong winds and water at either end.

Yes, I was thinking about that one too potentially, although 6000ft is probably pushing it a bit for Concorde in terms of runway length.

37 minutes ago, Nurmblitz said:

The Christchurch developer gave his products for free not so long ago. Cannot remember the web address but I´m sure they are downloadable in some shady site.

I think they did up until the end of last year, so I think I missed the boat for that. I'm not against trying the latter though I do try to avoid that when I can.

21 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

An inexplicable decision to withdraw it from sale. Unless something has happened to the author and no support can be given.

I have it installed in v5 and it’s fine. It looks like the default airport is your only option. ☹️

From what I can tell the Developer retired, and no longer wanted to offer any support.

I can understand the not wanting to offer support anymore, but I'm generally more than happy to use scenery without any support.

I might just buy Flightbeam's NZAA scenery instead and use that in place of NZCH, not the same airport but would be nicer than flying into default.

Hi All

I've been looking at adding to my scenery collection as I explore the idea of doing some round-the-world tours in the FSL Concorde.

One of the airports it seemed to visit a good few times was Christchurch in New Zealand, upon having a sniff around there seems to have been quite a good looking scenery by Godzone for v4/v5 (I imagine a few tweaks would get it working in v5 at the very least), but the developer sadly seems to have decided to withdraw the scenery from sale and I no longer appear to have a legal way of purchasing it.

There seems to not be much on the freeware end, so I was just wondering if anyone might have some pointers?

I have Paulo Ricardo's SBKP scenery, which I'm running ok in V5, I had to make a patch for it to work properly in v5 but that shouldn't be necessary for v4.

From my experience, most FSX sceneries will within reason work on v4 perfectly fine, there's plenty of backwards compatibility between the two, and you won't be looking at the kinds of Autogen/ Elevation issues that V5 brought with it's updated Vector Data.

So, with the caveat that I don't own this particular airport (yet...), I reckon you should be fine running it in 4.5.