Posts by perestain

Multiplayer and/or social features could really make things interesting.

VR sim flying is spectacular, but a pretty lonely thing. If people could enjoy some nice views together and even cooperate in the same cockpit that would be a completely unique experience.

I think for something like this to really be comfortable online/network multiplayer would be by far the most practical thing. AFS2 certainly seems to be better fit than most other sims for something like that, it has the best performance and VR controls and it doesn't need endless loading times and tweaking to start a flight. Of course it could well be that this is all not really feasible with the current code or way too far down on the priority list considering the effort that would be needed.

This is really good news. I actually have a lot of fun twisting the radio knobs in VR, so far only for VORs and NDBs. I don't think it will be much a problem to be honest.

ATC would be really cool.

v1.20 is available for download now:

- All supported planes are stored in a textfile, so you can edit them and add custom ones.

- You can now switch between playing with the FS2 airports & custom airports and the full database of over 30000 airports & helipads.

The game can now be customized for any future dlc and custom scenery and also for occasional flights with other simulators.

I'd absolutely get out of this airplane ASAP.

Zu beachten gibts eigentlich wenig, die Einrichtung läuft ja komplett über die Software des Anbieters und was man im Simulator machen kann findet man intuitiv schnell heraus. Das einzige was ich raten würde wäre einen waschbaren Stoffüberzug anzuschaffen für den Teil des Headsets, der die Gesichtshaut berührt, das ist deutlich angenehmer und man bekommt auch auf einem längeren Flug nicht so schnell ein oculus-face.

Für Modellflug fällt auch das Problem weg, wie man das Yoke so befestigt, dass man alle sonstigen Sachen im VR Cockpit erreicht ohne dabei in der Realität irgenwo anzustoßen. Man kann sich da ja einfach in die Zimmermitte stellen mit dem Controller in der Hand.

Was die Kompatibilität betrifft, AFS2 läuft (bei mir) mit Steam VR und lässt sich auch aus der Steam VR Umgebung starten. D.h. ich würde vermuten, dass wenn ein Headset grundsätzlich mit steam vr funktioniert, dass man dann auch AFS2 damit starten kann. Kann mich aber natürlich täuschen.

No luck so far converting lat/long to cartesian. Always off by a few km.

The longer description (beware, math...):

I have used the following approach:

x = r*sin(theta)*cos(phi)

y = r*sin(theta)*sin(phi)

z = r*cos(theta)

with

r = geocentrical earth radius + local elevation;

phi = longitude;

theta = 90°-latitude (standard spherical coordinates are 0° at the north pole and 90° at the equator)

The geocentrical earth radius r in this case is dependent on local latitude (and of course the polar and equatorial radius of the earth). This is due to the fact that earth is not a perfect sphere but an ellipsoid

I have initially tried the following numbers:

r1=6335439m (polar earth radius)

r2=6399594m (equatorial earth radius)

Which resulted in being off by a few kilometers in x and y and a little more in z direction compared to what FS2 does. Being off just very few km is really not all that bad, I'd exclude having messed up the obvious stuff like mixing up degrees and radians or ft and m at that point.

So I thought it is maybe just that fs2 uses a different polar and equatorial radius than the numbers I dug up. But changing them around (even in a systematical way) doesn't seem to solve the problem.

To check that I have varied both radii by about +15km and checked every combination with a stepsize of 1m. Even for combinations where x and y came out perfect, z was still off by at least 10km. (I used the airport TFFF at Martinique for testing).

If somebody notices an obvious flaw in my approach please let me know, I don't do such calculations on a regular basis. I'll check my script has other errors in the meantime. This also was just one test with one airport, so my findings are pretty vague at this point. any tipps are appreciated.

I found a pretty critical bug:

currently the program freezes and becomes unplayable when trying to import customs airports which have no elevation or runway surface info in the database.

I have made a quick hotfix (download on page one) so these airports will be skipped. I'll do an update soon with better import display and information which airports were skipped and for what reason.

I made another quick update, which adds a progress window while importing the custom airports so you can see whether everything is working as planned.

The procedure can take a minute or so if you have many custom airports. There is certainly potential to cut the import time in half, I'll probably do this eventually.

The update is available on page 1.

version 1.13 is up. (first page)

- Includes previous hotfixes.

- Importing custom airports is a lot faster now.

- New button that opens a browser with google maps and shows the selected destination on the mission table. (With all the custom airports I got a little lost when deciding where i want to fly next).

- savegames from 1.10 are fully compatible.

Note:

The "custom_airports.txt" in the download is the one I am using right now, it has bavaria, the canaries, czech republik, madrid, venice, martinique and a few other airports in it. A lot of the smallest bavarian airports will not be imported because some info is missing in the database, mostly elevation or runway length. PJ will show a detailed list during import.

Important:

In case you want to edit the airports.csv and/or runways.csv yourself to make some of the smaller airports playable, use a simple text editor, not MS excel because it can mess up the file and make it unreadable for PJ.

If in doubt, you can always download the latest database files here: http://ourairports.com/data/

After all the coding I managed to fly a bit.

One of my first missions was from Lugano to Ulrichen in Switzerland in the PA Arrow, with offers gorgeous views along the way. I recorded the landing:

Quote from Armitage

Well, the Wettergerät is open source. I tried to build it in a way that parts of it can be recycled for other projects. So if you are interested, you are free to integrate the DLLs / source code into your project.

I will look into the idea of compiling a list of airports from the local files. May be I find something usable, which both PJ and WG can utilize for their own benefit. Like a small tool which build the CSV file with the actual local airports.

Yea the airport data are stored in the scenery folders in a .tcm file.

There are exact coordinates for parking positions too, but in latitude, longitude and elevation in meters.

I have tried to convert those values to the cartesian format that is used in the main.mcf, but so far I was always off by a few kilometres.

It may have used different polar and/or equatorial earth radius in my approach than fs2 uses.

I'm currently trying a numerical approach to determine the earth radii fs2 calculates with, assuming they use a spheroid model of the earth.

Ah, great idea,

automatically detecting all the installed airports in FS2 would certainly be very comfortable for PJ too.

Fetching the official weather data is a nice feature btw. PJ can only create random weather with a bias towards less extreme conditions.

I think with a little testing and some work it should be possible to convert the x,y,z from the main.mcf into latitude, longitude and altitude (or at least distance to the center of the earth) and vice-versa.

We would need precise coordinates of the parking positions or at least the start of the runway for each airport to really utilize this though. The coordinates in the "runways.csv" are rather detailed, if we get a reliable conversion from lat/long to x,y,z at some point it might be worth checking out if those can be used to put a plane into the right position in the main.mcf

Quote from Armitage

How do you get the airport data? Copying it from main.mcf, or is there any other source?

Hi Armitage,

I'm not entirely sure I understand the question fully but I'll try answering anyways:

The economy game comes with data for all the official and payware FS2 airports. You can disable specific payware addons (Switzerland, NL, etc...) in the menu "Settings => Enable airports" if you do not have bought them for FS2.

To play with custom airports (the ones you might have gotten from FSCloudport etc..) it is a little different.

You have to add them manually under "Settings -> Enable airports -> edit custom airport list". All you have to do is enter the airport code for the airport you want to add. For example "EDDF" for Frankfurt Main Airport. Don't leave blank lines.

The game automatically reads those codes on launch (or when you press "refresh custom airports") and then searches for all the necessary other data in a big database. It should display a message how many airports were added correctly.

The database contains data for thousands of airports and runways worldwide, it is located in the Pilot Journey folder:

"airports.csv" "runways.csv" and "countries.csv".

They are not my work, but free to download from http://ourairports.com/data/ and were released into the public domain.

If you want to add a specific airport and it doesn't work at all you might want to have look if you find it in the database, and in theory you could manually enter all the details in there. So far all the airports I ever tried were already listed though.

Before I found that ressource I usually went to sites like https://www.airportnavfinder.com/airport/L25 to get information about airports.

The main.mcf doesn't hold much useful data about airports. The location of the plane is stored in x,y,z coordinates. I've not succeeded to convert that into latitude and longitude so far (didn't try that hard tbf), that's why Pilot Journey is not (yet) able to automatically set the starting location for the next mission.

It turns out that special characters in custom airport names are not displayed correctly.

for example the airport at Martinique "Aimé Césaire" looks like "Aimé Césaire".

I have uploaded a quick hotfix for this on the first page. you only need to replace one file and everything should be displayed correctly.

Thanks for your help,

I made a fix and fs2 should now always start with the mission plane already selected. (including the r22 heli which didn't work in v1.03).

Download link is on the first page. Savegames from v1.03 are still compatible.

Next task will be adding support for more airports.

Creating all sorts of airport data manually like I did so far is probably way too tedious for anyone. My current idea is that you enter ICAO codes into a textfile, and then Pilot Journey reads those and gathers all further info from the databases at ourairports.com and builds its airport list from that. Lets see if I can figure that out...

Hi,

sorry for being sort of disconnected for quite some time now. I managed to do a quick update to include the robinson r22 and the new payware planes from justflight. I also added a button to launch the steam version of FS2.

The download link is on the first page of this thread.

I didn't have much time for testing so let me know if there are critical bugs or errors.

I'm currently contemplating an overhaul for the airport list. Ideally I'd like to store it in an external xml or csv file so everyone can just add custom airport data for themselves. There's a few issues to overcome for that, especially with savegame compatibility and scores, so it might take me a while. It'll probably be worth it in the long run though.

By the way, if anyone has the duchess, it would be nice to know how it is correctly abbreviated in the main.mcf. I haven't bought it yet, so the automatic selection when launching fs2 will likely not work, fs2 will default back to the c172 in that case.

Wow, those heli pictures are amazing.

Switzerland DLC was the reason I got interested in FS2.

I'll add it in the next update, no eta though since I'm still pretty busy. I think I have to rework the way planes are organized and chosen by rng. Right now it's not really expansion-friendly. I didn't really think a lot about upcoming aircraft back then.

As a quick and dirty workaround until then you could just allow yourself to fly a R22 whenever you rent a pitts (same amount of seats) and then edit the journal entry manually. Fuel cost and range will be a little off, but they're not that accurate to begin with.

Yes, that's exactly what was happening back then, a slow rudder increase to the left for one second and then a sudden return to the middle. It hasn't occured since to me but it's nice to hear you found and resolved it. It made some approaches a little more exciting than necessary, hehe

Quote from Spit40

Hey perestain I have another idea for an improvement. I've used Pilot Journey for every flight i've made since you launched it. I love the variety of time and weather it generates so i've been thinking of other aspects of my flights which i don't tend to vary but i could.

How about if PJ did some ATC style things like specify what runway you should land on and whether you had to join the traffic pattern or should fly straight in?

That sounds like a cool idea.

I have tried pilot2ATC for Xplane once and all this flightplanning and ATC stuff is very fascinating, but I'm afraid it's also well beyond the scope of my aviation knowledge or programming abilities. For example it would probably be wrong to set the active runway randomly, since it is has to depend on the conditions and whether it has a published IFR approach etc etc. Also I would probably have to manually research all that info which I barely understand for all the runways on all airports which would take a lot of time.

To add more realism, right now its probably best to do the flight planning manually, i.e. use the navigation link to http://www.airportnavfinder.com to get published depature and approach procedures, decide the runway based on wind and conditions yourself and then head to https://skyvector.com/ and create an actual flightplan along the published VFR or IFR routes (whatever applies) and edit that flightplan into FS2 as closely as possible. http://www.navfltsm.addr.com/ is an excellent ressource for learning how the navigation works. But I am really just a beginner at following all that stuff myself and far from being able to create automated results that are convincing here.

I could of course add some random occurences, things happening during flight, like a sudden change of destination. flying an extra round around the airport, some dramatic stuff, engine failure which you had to manually simulate or things like that. Its on the idea list, but I can't promise very much right now, I'm currently too busy with my actual work to heavily delve into a big PJ update.

Quote from Jet-Pack

x, y, z is the karthesian position in space relative to earth's center, rotated with earth reference frame. X is towards 90° East meridian, Y towards 0° and Z up I think. And it's an ellipsoid model of the earth...

Wow, thats that's pretty cool. Thanks a lot for the insight. For some reason I expected spherical coordinates for that shape but the values just didn't make sense for that.

PJ already switches planes.

The problem with positioning is that main.mcf does not use lat/long values but 3 parameters which are presumably x/y/z coordinates.

This would be a hint towards the earths surface possibly being modelled as a flat projection and not as an actual sphere or ellipsoid.

Quote from Spit40

i'll make a note of where i see them too. We can take a stab at it empirically.

As for fuel burn i see that vary according to throttle/mixture but suspect the total doesn't reduce.. i don't see fuel mentioned in main.mcf.

I would expect height in ft. to be just a linear function of the value. I'd suggest just checking min and max height, and then maybe one or two to other values in between just to confirm. Should only take a few minutes, but I cannot do it atm because I have other work to do.

Edit: And yea theres no fuelburn or weight. Would be cool to have it as it would make it more of a gamble to fly a mission with very little fuel and connect PJ even more to the sim. I'd have to add a "I have run out of fuel and performed an emergency landing"-button haha. The problem though is that the fuelburn calculation in PJ is dead simple and doesn't even account for weight. It probably would need an overhaul to be adjusted to a fuelburn simulation in FS2. And for that we'd need to first figure out how exactly the fuelburn in FS2 works. Otherwise the PJ calculation might drastically differ, so that in theory it could happen that you could never reach your destination in FS even when PJ estimated that it is within range for example. Unless someone from the developers would share some information this would include some heavy testing to get it right for all the planes.

Yea I'll figure that out eventually, it would be cool to display height values in ft. in PJ