Aerosoft

Post surgery update/P3D support

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In last month’s blog post, we covered the heartbeat of Talking flight monitor and what it will take to address existing bugs and to do an in-place upgrade of the entire system. This week, we will update everyone on my surgery and provide some important news about supporting P3D and Navigraph.

 

Surgery update

 

Surgery went well. The doctor wants me off my feet for at least four weeks. This means I can do light weight activities inside. He put a limit on how long I can be on my feet, including how long I can sit at a desk during the day. As a result, I had limited time with my laptop, until my wife found a workaround. Now, I can “sit at my desk” as long as possible. This still means limited times because sitting on the couch with my feet up on my desk chair stresses out my back after a while. At least it is as many times during the day as I want. Doing flights is easy because I can be at my desk until autopilot takes over, then move to the couch. I will keep everyone updated on the next stage of recovery with the next blog post.

 

Navigraph support

 

Talking flight monitor is now added to the Navigraph HUB. Anyone with a subscription should be able to add the current cycle. This is only for the source builds though. If you would like to build from source to test bleeding edge code, follow the directions found at Building TFM from source. We are currently adding support for the database, so no new features will arrive until this is finished and tested.

 

P3D support

 

P3D 6 was released sometime last month. Some significant changes were made to improve the P3D framework and scenery. However, these changes broke support for the PMDG line of aircraft. In other words, PMDG aircraft do not work in P3d6. PMDG announced that after trying to add support for P3D 6, they had deeper problems than just changing some installer files. In the same announcement, they stated that revisiting this problem wouldn’t happen until the 777 and 747 were added to MSFS. This puts the timeframe sometime in mid or late 2024. As reported in the announcement, PMDG most likely won’t continue support for P3D if the changes require too many resources or too much time. Since MSFS arrived on the scene, the market share for P3D 4 and later has significantly declined. Even though more addons and scenery exist for P3D than MSFS, more addons are being altered or newly developed for MSFS. This brings us to Talking flight monitor’s placement in the market.

Talking flight monitor strives to support as many simulators as possible. However, we are also limited in time and resources. Since market value of P3D is declining in favor of MSFS, and PMDG doesn’t support P3d 6, we are not supporting P3D 6 nor continuing new development on P3D 5. Any new development in Talking flight monitor will be focused on MSFS. Keep the following in mind.

 

  • When features are identical in both simulators, we will support P3D5 and earlier.
  • If Talking flight monitor works in P3D6, it is at your own risk.
  • As long as the PMDG SDKs are the same or close to the same, we will support the P3D versions.
  • When the PMDG SDKs are drastically different, the MSFS versions take priority.
  • Navigraph support is independent of a simulator, so works in both P3D and MSFS.
  • We will not support Aerosoft products.
  • We do not support FS2Crew or similar products.
  • We do not support the PMDG DC6, TS4xxx, or similar aircraft.
  • Support for Osobo aircraft requires an evaluation.

Again, we will do our best to keep P3D5 and earlier support going. However, we can’t make promises to the effect. We hope everyone understands our decision to back off on P3D support. In the event PMDG does support P3D 6, we will reassess the situation.

 

PMDG timeline, partial aircraft support

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We get several questions on how long it takes to build support for an aircraft, and will partial support be released to the community. I want to take a few minutes and answer these questions.

 

How long does it take to build support for an aircraft?

The short answer to this question is it depends on the aircraft. It can take a short amount of time for some of the freeware aircraft because they don’t have any panels or controls not provided by the simulator, and checklists are usually short. On the other end of the time scale, it could take a long time if the aircraft has a large SDK and detailed checklists. Each PMDG aircraft has a detailed SDK that provides access to most controls and indicators. On the other hand, the Aerosoft A3xx series SDKs are detailed, but compact. They provide access to most controls, indicators, and markers for the start, in progress, and end for each stage of flight. Each SDK will require evaluating what it can or can’t provide, building support, and testing. Evaluating and testing are the most time consuming parts of building TFM support for an aircraft. Below are estimated due dates for each of the PMDG aircraft.

 

sept 22 2022 737

mar 20 2023 777

sept 22 2023 747

 

Since these dates are estimated guidelines, we could finish early. Each week of the rebuild process will feature a blog post covering the completed items for that week and a video demonstration of those items.

 

Will you release partial support for an aircraft?

In the past, we would release support as we built it – the alpha versions were the released version. Now, we only release a feature when it is complete. Sure, it might need more work, but the feature is still complete. The new ILS feature is an example of this. It is complete, but we can still add to it. From now on, aircraft are part of this decision. An incomplete aircraft means beta or alpha versions, which we will not release. Since TFM is open source, anyone can retrieve the source code, build it, test it, then report on it. You can report bugs, new features, confirm existing bugs, and report a fixed bug. For this, you need Visual Studio 2022, a GitHub account, and a local install of git for Windows. I recommend consulting the documentation for these products to get started with testing preview versions of TFM.

At the end of this week, we will continue our series on the PMDG 737 rebuild process. If you have any new features or bugs to report, press right bracket (]), then CTRL+Shift+I while TFM is running to reach the GitHub issue queue. Try to find existing bugs or features to comment on before creating a new one. Trying to get started and need help? Feel free to fill out the contact form. We will get back with you soon.