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?