Posts by Armitage

  • The "Landegerät: Helicopter Emergency Medical Services"

    Quote from Jugac64

    Would it be possible you add an automatic traffic pattern generator for any selected airport? It could be interesting for training. Ideally with guides. I hope you like the idea.

    Like in Landing Challenges: Martha's Vineyard (KMVY) - Flight-Sim.org? The generator can build landing patterns for any airport known to the AviationWeather API. I uploaded some more examples at Landing Challenges - Flight-Sim.org

    I also uploaded HEMS mission with included scenery at missions -FS4 & FS2- - Flight-Sim.org. Work in progress, feedback welcome. ;)

  • The "Landegerät: Helicopter Emergency Medical Services"

    The release of the "Landegerät: Helicopter Emergency Medical Services" is almost there, so I can already give you a sneak peak.

    What is it?

    The "Landegerät: Helicopter Emergency Medical Services" strikes again

    The "Landegerät: HEMS" ist a HEMS mission generator. You will be able to fly missions as an emergency medical helicopter, fetch patients and bring them to the nearest hospital.

    Basically you feed the Landegerät a list of heliports, hospitals and possible emergency sites, and it will build random missions with real-life weather. These missions are compiled into the good ol' custom_user_missions.tmc, and will also have a scenery/poi-file which spawns some cars and persons on each emergency site. (Credit for this goes to ApfelFlieger .)

    Because the Landegerät is a Node.js application (and even worse: a CLI application), this might be to tedious to install - but you can hope for other users to share their generated mission files.

    How do the missions look like?

    Glad you asked: I build some custom mission files for you to test. There are four sets of HEMS missions, two for San Francisco and two for Lüneburg, Germany (custom scenery required). Per scenario you get missions for the EC135 and the UH-60, with 10 missions per file.

    How would the mission editing look like?

    HEMS mission generator

    The "Landegerät: HEMS" uses GeoJSON files as its data source, so there is one for San Francisco and one for Lüneburg as an example. You can craft your own GeoJson files using free tools like geojson.io - or import already existing GeoJSON files to modify these.

    What are the next steps?

    1. I will try to release the tool in the next few days... ahem, or weeks.
    2. I will release some more missions files, so you do not have to install the tool.

    Interested in rolling your own missions? If you build some GeoJson files (documentation on how to do this can be found here) I can happily build missions files for you and add these to the Landgerät site for you (and the rest of the world) to download.

  • Searching for simple method to add stock objects to scenery

    This is very beautiful, thanks a lot ApfelFlieger - you will be credited in the final tool.

    The missions generator now not only creates the missions, but also creates the POI files which have an ambulance and a police car waiting at every possible emergency site.

    Oh, I also found a property to make Aerofly fly over a given waypoint, so you will definitely pass the emergency site as well as the the hospital you need to fly to.

    I will do some test flights, and post some mission files as well as the tool itself.

    P.S.: Obviously I cheated in the screen shot, but I had to change the livery. ;)

  • Searching for simple method to add stock objects to scenery

    I am building a HEMS mission generator. The actual custom missions work like a charm, but currently it is rather hard to spot the emergency site, because nothing is there.

    My idea is to place an already existing model for an ambulance or police car at the emergency site. I found some models in ...\Aerofly FS 4 Flight Simulator\scenery\xref\xref_vehicles and came up with a TSL file which looks like this:

    The coordinates are supposed to be on the Lüneburg airfield, but I cannot see the vehicles. The tm.log does not tell me anything about my file.

    So here is the question: can anyone point me to a simple solution to spawn vehicles in Aerofly FS4? I found multiple manuals, but most are meant for building new 3d objects as well, which is out of scope for my little project.

  • Challenge guides

    Fun fact: Some tutorial flights state in their missions description a cold and dark start, but they always start with the engines running. Obiously cold & dark is missing, even for tutorial flights.

  • Challenge guides

    Jugac64 For the Missionsgerät? Good idea, manually placing a target plane or setting the altitude to -1 is quite tedious. I see to the checkbox on the weekend.

    I implemented it quickly, it is now a hidden option under "Navigation" > "Hide guides" if you have the expert mode enabled. It exports all checkpoints with the altitude set to -100 without altering the flight plan in the Missionsgerät in any way.

  • Challenge guides

    I finally evaluated some methods of hiding the virtual guides in challenges and came up with two working solutions (with one being proposed by Jet-Pack (IPACS) some time ago):

    • You can either lower the altitude of any checkpoint below terrain niveau for them to disappear,
    • or you can place a target plane right in front of the aircrafts starting position - on passing the plane the guides disappear, but the mission continues.

    The Missionsgerät now supports both ideas, while the Landegerät uses the second idea optionally - so you are still free to enter the landing pattern with the guides visible if you want to (cheating on guessing the position of the pattern correctly ;)).

    But I have a question that maybe Jet-Pack (IPACS) or other custom mission authors may know the answer to:

    • Has a way to set the livery of the aircraft used in the custom mission appeared? In my opinion this could be the same string as used in the main.mcf. (I am building a HEMS mission generator, and flying these in a police helicopter breaks the immersion somewhat.)
    • Does anyone know how to start a custom mission in cold and dark? I tried coldAndDark, colddark, coldanddark and some other ideas, but none seemed to work. (The HEMS mission generator should be capable of starting in cold an dark to make the race against the time more challenging.)

    As usual I am very grateful for help, and will repay with custom missions. ;)

    HEMS Missions Generator

  • Which Military Aircraft Would You Love To See Most?(Excluding fighters and bombers)

    So trainers count? As we only have the MB-339, maybe some contemporary jet trainer like the M-346 or the brand-new T-7 Red Hawk would be a nice addition.

    Otherwise the V-22 Osprey should be a very interesting addition to the simulation. Tilt-rotor aircraft allow for very unique challenges - and as they are now used to shuttle the U.S. (vice) president around, you can think of some very High-Profile missions.

    But I do not think that we will see new military craft of any kind any time soon appearing in AFS. But for the UH-60 almost all new aircraft of the last few years have been civilian, and most of these airliners.

    ...which is a shame, because I still have a blast doing low-level flight in fast jets in VR. ;)

  • Navigation Database AIRAC Cycle, Navigraph

    Quote from Kaaleppi

    Hello

    I'm playing around with rust programming and the data that is coming over udp connection from FS4, i'd be interested in trying to write an app that would be a middleware between FS4 (and other sims) and other programs like Pilot2ATC, Vatsim or Navigraph and similar software.

    However i'm having trouble finding info about the SDK and header files for FS4, only found the old external dll for FS2, would be appreaiative if i was pointed towards were i could find such documentation.

    You just want to display the current aircraft position in Pilot2ATC, Vatsim or Navigraph? Or do you also need COM and XPDR settings?

    And do you need a backchannel to do stuff in the sim?

  • Wettergerät v1.7.0

    And yet again there is a new version 1.7.5 of the Wettergerät. As it turned out the latest weather in Florida required some fixes to the METAR parser, to make it more robust encountering unusual numbers of cloud levels.

    The Wettergerät is now able to guesstimate the local time for the aircraft position by using Nautical Time. Even though this is most often not entirely correct, it gives you a good understanding about the time of day you aircraft will start at.

    As the idea of working with historical weather was quite new for the Wettergerät, some quality-of-live fixes have been added to make working with date & time less bothersome.

    Hopefully this concludes the streak of new versions, and the Wettergerät can have another 2 year period of hiatus before requiring new updates. ;)

  • Navigation Database AIRAC Cycle, Navigraph

    Quote from Jet-Pack (IPACS)

    The big question is why do you need an external app for flight planning? What features should be added to the Aerofly FS navigation which you currently need the other app for.

    For me as a GA and jet pilot I like the extra information about airways, airspaces, NOTAMs and stuff like that.

    Also it is quite helpful to see contour lines for terrain heights, city names, rivers and prominent features usually found on VFR maps. With Aerofly's satellite images it was not possible to do the mission planning for the Mach Loop or the Sidewinder course.

    But I know that 99% of the users out there love the simplicity of the flight planning of Aerofly, and I am using a rather exotic set of aircraft. That's why I have been using the custom missions to import my flight plans from Skyvector and SimBrief. Up until the last update this was a good solution which did not need any work on IPACS' side.

  • Navigation Database AIRAC Cycle, Navigraph

    I believe there is a misunderstanding what the Navigraph fans are proposing. If I understand correctly it is not about integrating Navigraph into the simulation, but (as far as I understood https://navigraph.com/downloads and https://forum.navigraph.com/t/faq-installi…irac-updates/50) to enable Navigraph to build a nav database which can be processed by Aerofly. Like adding custom built airports or custom built aircraft, but for navigational data.

    If this is actually the way it works, there will obviously be no extra costs to any Aerofly user but for the Navigraph users. Well, almost...

    Because this also requires development work on IPACS' side to make this happen - which could be better spend on features more users are interested in. ;)