The cloud height and density slider im the main.mcf have decimal values between 0 and 1. No idea what the numbers translate to. The height could simply be checked by trying it out in FS2 though.
Posts by perestain
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Thanks for all the detail. Maybe I will be looking for something in the middle. I have zero interest in competition or high score but, I do like a little spice added to my flying. I will load it up and see how it goes. Thanks.
Regards,
Ray
Yea to be honest the highscore is more a playful gimmick and a hommage to oldschool games from the past. It's not like you could actually brag with a score that is generated and stored in plain text xml fomat.
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Sorry if I was being naive here. If it really is that much of a legal problem then of course its best to completely stay away from sharing over the internet, even if all the images themselves are available to the public. I guess there's a reason after all why people need to study for years to understand law
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I have always found it questionable that it is considered perfectly legal to download and modify bing map data, while it suddenly becomes illegal to pass those modifications on to a friend. I'm no legal expert, but if you ask me, this sounds like a rule that people who make a business out of creating scenery must have made up.
I mean, the positive side is that it turns flightsimming into this slightly anachronistic elderly man's hobby from the 80ies, where everyone spends hours sitting at home preparing exactly the same stuff for his hobby and it becomes the most time consuming activity of the whole thing. Just like building railroad models tracks, or painting tabletop strategy game miniatures, but in the digital domain. I can sympathise with that, but I believe this is a choice and not a necessity. The technology for sharing is definitely there.
The bandwidth argument is even less convincing. People speak of a few giga or terabytes as if it was this huge amount of data. It's 2018, a a time where millions of people stream hd video over the internet all day long and there are filesharing possibilities where you can upload and download tons and tons of terabytes of data almost for free.
My hypothesis is that people in the flightsim scene actually do not want to just download scenery from somewhere, but rather enjoy spending a lot of time creating it for themselves because it is an enjoyable part of the whole hobby experience. The copyright and bandwith arguments seem more like quick little excuses t justify that. But what do I know...
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Can I specify that I only wish to fly the Learjet 45?
Regards,
Ray
Lets see...
if you play a regular game, you would need to improve your pilot license to level 3 (jets). To get there it takes $61,000 for the licenses and at least 30 missions after which you could afford the licenses comfortably. Unless maybe you wanted to make more cash and got caught smuggling drugs or something. But even after all that you could only rent a learjet if one is available. To fly one everytime you would have to buy one, the cheaper used ones are around $800,000 which takes a significant time to save up to. And while you could probably fly it almost every time, it won't necessarily be the most profitable choice to do so. So flying learjet all the time is more a scenario for when money is not an issue anymore (just like in real life I guess lol). That said, I had one testing game, where there was a phase during which I made a good profit flying several missions with the learjet. But usually once you are allowed to fly jets, heavy charter missions over the pond net the best profits. During my tests I wasn't simming though so I didn't have to care too much about how long the flights would take.
But if you really just want to fly learjet missions and don't care too much about the game progression you could just enable cheats, switch to outlaw mode, (which would allow you to fly anything without license), give yourself a million dollar and buy a learjet on day one.
And then just play as if it was a normal game. The only difference would be that your scores will not officially count towards the highscore. And your stats panel will display that you cheated. Thats it. And if that's actually bothering you, you could modify your savegame with an xml editor to turn it into a normal game again.
Wow, that sounds like a really cool experience!
I agree that some randomness goes a long way to making things feel realistic, interesting and even meaningful with a little imagination. The computer is a clearly defined system where everything that happens follows pre-designed algorithms and can be perfectly controlled. (Perceived) reality absolutely doesn't work that way, no matter what you do there might always be something catching you off-guard. If you want a computer simulation to feel realistic, you need to trick yourself and leave room for unexpected situations to happen to you, which is just more likely when you randomize a lot of variables.
The chances for bad conditions in PJ are not equal btw. There is a bias for higher visibility and lower wind and turbulence, to make really bad conditions more rare. Visibility is internally a value between 0 and 100 and it is calculated by 20*sqrt(x), where x is a random decimal number between 0 and 25.
So for example the chance to have a visibility lower than 20 (out of 100) is less than 4% in PJ.
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I do have another suggestion too. I don't like flights of more than around 30 minutes. Perhaps you could have a setting option of maximum flight time/distance to feed into your random mission generator. Sometimes i load it up and there's no flight i'm interested in - just a couple the right duration and they're in a direction I've just come from or a quick joyride that makes no money. So i close the app and reopen. Recently i did that over 10 times to get something suitable.
Closing and reopening to refresh the mission board is basically the same thing as waiting, except you circumvent the 1 week game progress atm. I think I might find a middleground here and make the wait button only progress one day, but make loading a save progress a day too. So you don't get an advantage from closing and reopening.
The mission generation is highly dependant on the size of the airport. Smaller airports spawn more short missions.
When a mission is to be generated, the generator looks at all destinations in the game and puts them into several brackets, depending on the distance.
He then decides by chance from what distance bracket a destination is chosen. Here are the chances, in relation to the current airport size:
// Airport size 0: 80% local, 20% short
// Airport size 1: 60% local, 36% short, 4% mid
// Airport size 2: 35% local, 55% short, 10% mid
// Airport size 3: 10% local, 30% short, 40% mid, 20% long
// Airport size 4: 20% short, 20% mid, 25% long, 30% overseas, 5% far overseas
local: 0-50 nm
short: 50-275 nm
mid: 275-1000 nm
long: 1000-2500 nm
overseas: 2500-3500 nm
far overseas: 3500-7800 nm
out of bounds: >8000 nm
If you look for flights that are half an hour long, your best bet is probably hanging around on airports size 1 and 2.
Another option to save time is to skip some of the autopilot cruise, and just fly the take-off and the landing. The mission timer is rather forgiving and not proportional, i.e. for a longer mission it will not make you wait as long before you can confirm the landing.
the formula is atm: missiontimer = 4.3 * (expected time to fly the mission) ^ 0.75 (in seconds)
For example,
the missiontimer lets you wait for 30 minutes if it expects the flight to actually take around 52 minutes.
and it lets you wait a 60 minutes if it expects the flight to take 2 hours and 12 minutes.
The expected time calculation is not very precise though, it just uses the distance and divides it by a fixed cruise speed for that plane, which may not even be 100% correct and does not account for any circumstances whatsoever.
Anyways, rather than forcing the mission generator to produce flights which take a certain amount of time, I'd like to adjust the above formulas and chances, so that it's more playable. That way the mission generation is more robust when more airports are added later.
Maybe I'll just add an option to cap the missiontimer at 45 minutes or an hour or something. That way you could fly all the missions and skip a part of the cruise which is not that exciting sometimes. I simulated a full 900nm flight from Miami to NY in a baron once and I admit it got pretty boring during cruise
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Video with Pilot Journey, hope you don't mind perestain.
Not at all, it's cool to see people having fun with the game. Nice video, I especially sympathised with the landing, because thats how I tend to land oftentimes, even with usb peripherals
I've just finished a few updates, the main improvement is that you don't need to tweak all the sliders for the weather anymore. If you launch FS2 after starting the mission, the plane, time and weather should be set up alright (thanks to a tip from Spit40). You only have to check your starting location and navigation. The newest version also has buttons that link to the LiveATC website (only works for larger airports, but I love it) and to navigational help websites.
Updates are on the first page.
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Updated to v1.01, downloadlink on first page.
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Regarding autosave, how about you treat auto save like the other slots 1,2,3 ? Call it slot 0 allow it to be loaded and saved manually but also it autosaves everything on closedown. Another thought is to put all those autosave files in a subfolder. My desktop is getting busy.
I think I like having more and potentially older autosaves just in case. The autosaves have a number that corresponds to the ingame-day, so it shouldn't be more than 7 at any given time. It's probably best to keep everything in a folder and make a shortcut for the desktop.
Your flight plan solution sounds really cool, I'll try that out myself. I didn't even know oculus home had such a feature. I was using a small notebook and a pen so far...
Which pdf viewer do you use?
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One small addition would be to pick a random time along with weather conditions as opposed to UTC all the time.
Of course I could just put in any time I like, but the whole point is the choice being made for me lol.
Yea, I agree, I felt the same. I put it on the list.
Display More...I'm now wondering about better integration - how hard would it be to get PJ to write the conditions directly into main.mcf so they're ready before you launch FS2?
...<[float64][visibility][0.415914326906204]>
<[tmsettings_wind][wind][]
<[float64][strength][0.504552125930786]>
<[float64][direction_in_degree][261.821612119675]>
<[float64][turbulence][0.174997881054878]>
<[float64][thermal_activity][0.743172764778137]>
>
<[tmsettings_clouds][clouds][]
<[float64][cumulus_density][0.268179297447205]>
<[float64][cumulus_height][0.272736132144928]>
<[float64][cumulus_mediocris_density][0.15]>
<[float64][cumulus_mediocris_height][0.6]>
<[float64][cirrus_height][0.663636028766632]>
<[float64][cirrus_density][0.406822592020035]>
Also is there a way to make journal edits save to the normal autosave location so that when PJ is launched they open by default? I've just written some notes in the journal about my last flight but unless I remember to load them next time I might do a flight and get out of sync with them.
This looks pretty interesting. TBH I have no idea how hard it is to do it in java. But I'll give it a try for sure when I make a new upgrade, this would be a cool QoL addition. I hope there is no coypright or other problem to alter original FS2 files. So far I found it nice to not interfere at all. But preparing the weather manually gets boring rather quick.
Regarding the autosave, I made it only after flights and not all the time to have a better safety net of old files incase the current game gets somehow corrupted. But autosaving after writing in the journal is probably not a problem, because it doesn't happen automatically all the time. I added it to my list.
When I opened PJ it placed me at Wanachen LSPV. That doesn't seem to be in FS2 or any DLC?
I could have made it with fsCloudPort, but instead closed the app and relaunched to find I was at KSEZ which fortunately is in the sim.
Any way I've done my first flight now and I'm a fan. Two thoughts:
1) Wouldn't it be great if it was web based - all scores online, user community input of new ideas even
2) Also great if FS2 had an "import" button that would pull all conditions info from the app (or a URL)
You're right, Wangen-Lachen airport is not in FS2. Ooops, my bad.
I initially took all the Switzerland airports from the list in this thread, thats also when the whole project started:
Switzerland DLC - Airport ID - Sorted by City Name
I found out a lot later that it isn't 100% the same airports as the Switzerland DLC and corrected a few, but I guess I have overlooked Wangen-Lachen, probably because by then it already sounded really familiar after all the testing. I'll take it out of the game in the next update, so this doesn't happen to other people. An easy workaround would be to just take a bus to another airport until then.
I wasn't really aware about the existence of fscloudport when I started. Maybe there should be a way for people to freely add their own airports at some point. The mission generator should be robust enough to handle it. The scorekeeping would need some overhaul though.
I can't explain why your location suddenly changed to KSEZ though. It must be a coincidence that of all airports it happened with the one that is not in FS2. Nevertheless a location change like this shouldn't happen at all, except when the airport database changes. It might be a bug though. Are you sure you have loaded the right savegame?
BTW the online web or multiplayer port is not gonna happen, I'm afraid. I have no clue about that stuff and rather little motivation to learn it from scratch. I have had enough with java for now, I guess :). The other problem is that it is extremely easy to cheat scores. In terms of validity, a forum thread where people just post their score would probably archieve the same thing. To make a actual meaningful ranking of it it would require lots of work and probably a completely different approach. And i must admit I even like it a little bit that it is offline and single player. It somewhat feels like playing in the 80s. When computer games were for lonely nerds and maybe their friends who came over, and nobody else knew about it.
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No worries, thanks a lot for taking your time to openly comment on this.
It's completely understandable that this is a very niche problem and that there are other things to add that will have a much bigger impact.
I'm not up to date on all the development rumours but if something like ATC really arrives eventually I would happily deactivate my virtual yoke for that
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Yeah I did think about that. Disabling the virtual yoke seems like an option, but not ideal
I'm also wondering whether it would be possible to edit the aircraft config so that the yoke responds to aircraft movement (via yoke hardware), but doesn't respond to "vr hands" input.
Couldn't we just ask for a toggle added in the FS2 options to disable touch input to the yoke? It would seem more like the proper way to do it and at least in my imagination quite an easy fix.
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This looks interesting for sure.
The problem I see is that using the gloves with an USB yoke you'll likely give unwanted commands to the virtual yoke as well. Maybe just removing the virtual yoke will do, although I like having it so far. Not having to pick up and lay down the touch controller after every start and landing is probably well worth disabling it though.
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Yea VR hands are absolutely amazing in terms of immersion and for pressing all kinds of knobs. You feel like you are in the cockpit.
Except for yoke and throttle, where I need some tactile physical controller to make smooth adjustments.
I think a mixed setup works very well, using the right hand as VR hand, and having the left hand free for yoke control. I have installed my trim wheel on the left side of the yoke so I can also trim with the free hand, too. During landing I lay the touch controller aside, so I can adjust throttle manually. I couldn't go ever go back to 2D flying, despite the bad resolution in VR. Just looking around in the cockpit and having that realistic sense of depth for all the controls is awesome. And if its hard to read you can just lean a little bit forward, like you would irl, too.
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I have this exact issue when I start UJR before starting FS2. My solution is starting UJR only after FS2 has loaded.
Incase you don't use UJR, do you have any other software running in the background which monitors peripheral input? FS2 seems to need some sort of exclusive access to USB peripherals, otherwise it doesn't detect any of them.
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Ok, after a restart I made a few tests, and I was hopefully able to resolve the problem now.
Here is what happened:
Starting up my PC and a fresh game in the baron, the issue does NOT occur at all.
After taxing around for a minute, the issue occurs again.
Engaging and disengaging the yaw damper when the autopilot is off does not reproduce the issue.
The issue is persistent when switching to a Cessna 172. I didn't fly the Cessna with autopilit before so I hadn't noticed.
I restarted the game and the issue was gone. After pushing my rudder pedal once, it was instantly back again.
It seems input from my rudder pedals triggers the issue.
There is nothing coming from the usb pedals themselves during the moment when the issue occurs though. My pedals initially send data on axes 3 and 4 (joystick ID 3) , and I have remapped them with UJM so that the game recognises them as a single x-axis of a virtual joystick (vJoy).
In order to make FS2 recognize that the input is coming from vJoy and not the race pedal, I had to deactivate the racing wheel in the FS2 settings menu during the asssignment. I later reactivated the racing wheel controller, so I could use the shifting gear from the wheel as landing gear knob. (I know I'm a cheapskate with this lol)
The next thing I tried is remapping the USP pedal input to axis Z of vJoy. And for the assignment in FS2 I really made sure this time the rudder assignment is properly deleted before assigning it again, to vJoy axis Z. I checked in the baron, and the strange rudder issue with the autopilot was gone, even after using my newly assigned rudder pedals during taxiing.
Phew, that was tricky, lets hope it stays that way now
I guess FS2 really needs to make sure old axis assignments are properly deleted when the user makes a custom assignment. It might also be possible that there is just something wrong when using vJoy axis X instead of Z. And I still don't understand how the rudder could triggered just from using oculus touch to deactivate AP, but oh well...
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Wenn man keine passenden Aufträge findet, kann man per Bus zu einem anderen Flughafen fahren, unten rechts. Oder auf den "Wait"-Button klicken. Für die Bequemlichkeit geht aber ingame Zeit verloren. Kosteneffizienter ist es mit dem Bus.
Für mich reicht der Timer, nicht aus Reflex sofort auf Landung zu drücken anstatt die Mission zu fliegen. Wenn man da mehr Inspiration und Motivation zum Fliegen vom Spiel erwartet, ist man mit dieser Lösung möglicherweise enttäuscht. Sorry wenn ich da falsche Erwartungen geweckt hab.
Die Verbindung zu FS2 besteht darin, dass es die gleichen Flughäfen und Flugzeuge sind. D.h. man hat die Möglichkeit, alle Missionen auch tatsächlich so in FS2 fliegen. Die Möglichkeit war für mich das Entscheidende. Die Kontrolle ob man es dann am Ende tut oder nicht ist für mich eigentlich unnötig. Man spielt ja zum Spaß, also zumindest ich. Mit ein bisschen Phantasie hat man dann eine fortlaufende Entwicklung, nebenbei werden die Flüge gezählt und die Meilen geloggt.
Ob sich jemand beschummelt lässt sich auch mit vertretbarem Aufwand nicht kontrollieren finde ich. Die Savegames und Highscores sind Klartext im xml-Format, ein Memory-Editor ist nur einen Download von wenigen Sekunden entfernt. Ich sehe für mich keine Rechtfertigung, Zeit in die Entwicklung von Hürden zu stecken, die am Ende keine wären und das Spiel kein Stück bereichern. Das plugin von FSEconomy fand ich z.B. damals sehr lästig und es führte eigentlich nur dazu, dass ich manche Missionen zweimal fliegen musste, weil irgendwas abgestürzt war. Gut, es war multiplayer online, da gibt es ja immer Scharen von Leuten die sich unbedingt gerne selbst betrügen möchten und dann wird es auch für alle anderen eine Zeitverschwendung. Aber PJ ist singleplayer offline, bevor ich da stundenlang sinnlos rumprobiere ob und wie man den Speicher von FS2 auslesen muss würd ich eher noch mich hinsetzen und den Polizisten malen, der einen verhaftet wenn man geschmuggelt hat. Hab ich aber auch aus Zeitgründen leider auch Streichen müssen.
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Thanks for checking.
I fly in VR with a Cessna yoke and trimwheel from Saitek and the pedals of a Logitech DFP racing wheel as rudder pedals. I have installed vJoy and UJR to make this work.
Button 1 of my yoke is assigned to autopilot "master", and pressing it engages and disengages the autopilot as expected. Except when the autopilot disengages, additionally the rudder moves to the left for about a second, and then returns to normal position. I have tried this in parking, it happens everytime.The other way I have disengaged the autopilot is by reaching forward with my oculus touch controller and touching the "AP" button on the virtual panel in the cockpit. To my surprise this also makes the rudder move to the left for a second. This led me to believe that it might not be just a controller assignment issue, because I'm not using any peripheral input except for oculus touch to replicate the issue. But I don't know how FS2 works exactly, so I might be wrong.
There are for sure some unexpected things going on with the controller setup when you change assignments without deleting them first. For example when I first installed my rudder pedals they would also increase and decrease throttle despite this was definitely not shown in the configuration. I could fix that problem by deleting all assignments for throttle and reassigning them.
It turned out that the original assignments were still working additionally even after I had remapped the axes that controlled throttle and rudder. After deleting my assignment for throttle, instead of being unassigned, it showed the previous assignment which just happened to be the axis of my rudder pedals.So far I had no luck with a similar approach for the rudder/AP situation, but maybe just resetting them to default will help. I'll try that next time before I fly.
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Hi,
everytime I disengage the autopilot in the Baron 58, the left rudder is automatically fully pressed for a second or so.
At first I first suspected it is just an issue with my controller assignment but I double checked and the rudder is only assigned to my usb pedals, to nothing else.
The issue also occurs when I disengage the autopilot in the VR cockpit directly, with my oculus touch hand, without pressing any real world buttons at all.
Is this a known bug and is there a fix for this? Any tipps or ideas?
In the meantime I have adapted by compensating with the right rudder everytime I disengage AP, but the plane is still jumping around a bit and I can't imagine this being intentional.
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Yea, it has more or less everything except chicago, for which I haven't bought the dlc yet. I skipped a few military airports here and there, and I believe one or two smaller ones from Netherlands and Switzerland might be missing, too. Totally would have loved to do some Area51 alien stuff or military missions, but there is only so much time and I rather wanted to somehow finish the project than get lost on the way. It got a little out of hand as it is already.
Otherwise they are complete with ICAO and coordinates, runway length and elevation. The program calculates all distances based on latitude and longitude with the haversine formula.
I got a lot of data from airportnavfinder.com, and if you click on the "You are at ..." in PJ you will be linked directly to the airport nav info on that site.
Airports are
137 California
29 Arizona
11 Nevada
22 Utah
29 Colorado
19 New York
9 South Florida
2 Germany Helgoland
29 Netherlands
33 Switzerland
and Innsbruck.
For the most part of development I was using only switzerland, because I wanted to fly there, an then later bought NL and NY to check the mission generation for longer distances. In the end I wanted to put them all in.
Btw is the Chicago Meigs DLC just that one airport? Because I could easily add it in at some point, it would even be compatible with old savegames. I kind of hope for more Europe DLCs or maybe the Carribean. I know somebody made a Martinique addon, but I haven't checked it out so far...
Update: Next flight to Carson City, but I got rather lost in the Baron because it doesn't have GPS and visibility was not the best. I had set some VOR radio frequencies but either there is not a good one for the Carson approach or I'm too bad at navigating. I stumbled across South Lake Tahoe airport and did my smoothest landing there so far.
For video making I don't really see myself delving into that. I'm rather happy the program runs now and I can finally fly a little. But I imagine it's not so hard to figure it out for yourself. You can activate standalone mode and cheats in the menu, give yourself some money and just click on some buttons and see what happens. There's also some basic help for most of the gameplay mechanics if you press F1. It would be cool of course if someone else made a video.
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Hi Ray!
Well I didn't really start actually using PJ with the simulator until just now because I was so busy coding and fixing stuff.
But I just finished a nice little VFR flight in a C172 just from Hayward Executive (KHWD) to San Carlos, (KSQL) .
It was a plane transfer mission for $ 232
I did a little detour to the north to take a look at San Francisco at 3000ft and managed to find the golden gate without looking it up beforehand on google maps :). I need some practice with the landing though, but its getting a little better ...
I realized that California has a big advantage when it comes to the starting airport in PJ in a new career because around half the airports in the whole game are in CA and the program just picks one at random.
