BenBaron

Hi Pete I sent the file to your mail adress. I would only need a boolean added to the existing g5.csv data indicating whether there is a standart jetway defined, or not. Nothing more needed from my side. Thanks for your consideration. Greets, Benny

Hi Pete, i am basically using the same information from a pdf file I found somewhere on the internet some time ago. It is also based on the works from Winfried Orthmann and might be the same file you are using. There, I also have information about the jetways subrecords, which is located in the file four records below the TAXIWAYPARKING you are referencing above: JETWAY offset length format description contents 0x00 2 WORD ID 0x003a 0x02 4 DWORD size : variable 0x06 2 WORD parking Number (refers to an existing parking) 0x08 4 WORD gate name 0x0a 4 DWORD unknown after this follows a normal scenery object record starting with an ID of 0x0b. This record refers to an appropriate scenery object like {BFCDF52B-9142-415C-8318-03C1B92CA9D9} Greets, Benny

Hi Pete, I wanted to ask, if it would be possible to include information into g5.csv if a parking position has a physical jetway, or not. I know this can be read out of a bgl file as part of an airport subsection and as I am relying on g5.csv to generate my own data, it would come in handy if I could also retrieve this information out of that file. In order to not be messing with the established structure of g5.csv maybe this could go into a seperate file? Just a question, though and if this was too much of a difficulty, no need to mess with it. Thanks in advance and happy easter to you. Greets, Benny

Thanks Paul for the quick reply. I knew I read something about this somewhere, but only looked through some of the original FSUIPC documents and couldn't find it at frist glance. Will try this immediately. Greets, Benny

Hi Paul and Pete...long time no read. I hope you are both doing fine. I got a question because of a weird problem I am facing: I am creating multiple aircraft using the AICreateNonATCAircraft facility via SimConnect. The second parameter passed into this method is defined as "szTailNumber", so this is a unique string I am supplying which is supposed to be set for the tail number of all aircraft. I need this later while reading through a list of AIPlaneInfo objects to differentiate aircraft which are showing my string in the ATCIdentifier property, so I can find out which ones are my mine and which are not and deal with them appropriately. The odd thing is, though, that aircraft which have an "atc_airline" entry set in their aircraft.cfgs will show this instead of my unique string in the ATCIdentifier property while aircraft, that don't have this entry present, will show my string correctly. The TailNumber property is never filled for any of those objects. Can one of you maybe tell me if this supposed to be normal behaviour or if you see another way to find out which are my created aircraft from the AIPlaneInfo object? Greets, Benny EDIT: Although I don't understand the behaviour described above, I found out I can use the FSUIPC returned ID of the object, multiply it by -1 and check it against my stored value in the datatable, to find out if I created this object. So, at least at the moment this gives me the intended behaviour.

Awesome Paul! Thanks for the quick change.

Paul, from what I could see all those ID numbers seem to be negative. Hope that helps. All the best, Benny

Hi Paul, a happy new year to you. I did some tests regarding online traffic at IVAO: as I expected, the 3 static lists for AI traffic are filled and information like position, altitude, speed, identifier and such are visible. Of course, there is no information on departure, destination or gates available. So, maybe you can work from there? Greets, Benny

Ok, I will test this when I get back home to my system where I am also flying online. I don't know how you are checking if the user plane is at a certain parking spot, but I thought that if the online planes appear in the AI Table (which I think they do as they are only AI objects which were released from the simulator control and are controlled by e.g. the IVAO pilot client software) with just their coordinates you could possibly take those and perform the same check like you do with the user plane. If it works, might definately be a neat feature ;). Benny

Hi Paul, so here comes a new question :) : I simply wasn't able to test this out yet, but wanted to ask you beforehand: The facility to check, if a parking spot is occupied by AI, does it also take online traffic into account? Please correct me if I am wrong, but I guess no, as you might be using the internal AI table to query for the relevant information like departure airport, arrival airport etc, which, of course, cannot be filled in for online traffic. But as the online traffic is normally injected as AI and thus should be generally visible, maybe you could check them the same way like you do with the player? I guess, you are doing a check with a rectangle there to determine if the player is at a specific gate or not... . Thanks in advance. Greets, Benny

Very nice, Paul. Thank you very much...this seems to have fixed it. No position shift occured during my last testing. Greets, Benny

Hi Paul, so far, everything is working quite well, but I noticed one weird thing: Upon calling FSUIPCConnection.AirportsDatabase.SetReferencePosition() in a timer I get some sort of spontaneous horizontal aircraft shifts within the simulator where the plane suddenly seems to be relocated some meters left or right. If I don't call it, the shifts disappear and the shorter the timer intervall, the more shifts do occur. They also occur in slew mode. This is in P3Dv3. I am supposed to call this before every call to FSUIPCConnection.AirportsDatabase.Airports.InRangeOfNauticalMiles(), right? Maybe you got an idea what might be causing this as I don't know what SetReferencePosition() does in the background :-). Greets, Benny

Hi Paul, I noticed one thing: once I call FSUIPCConnection.AirportsDatabase.Load(), my RAM usage jumps by around 120 MB. I guess, this is to be expected as there are a lot of strings involved which are loaded into memory. Apart from the fact that we have enough memory available nowadays, so this shouldn't be a huge problem, let me make one suggestion for improvement efficiency-wise: As, at least for my application, I am only going to use a fraction of all available airports, maybe you could add an overload for FSUIPCConnection.AirportsDatabase.Load(), which takes a list of strings as parameter containing all the ICAO codes you are interested in during this session and then only include those into the database? This way, the memory consumption could be reduced considerably, most probably. But I don't know your dlls architecture...so if this was too much of a hassle, no urgent need to bother with it ;-). Plus, I don't know if the airport database is supposed to be freed on FSUIPCConnection.Close(). If not, maybe you could add an explicit call to unload the database, so you are clearing all the internal references to the datatables making them eligible for garbage collection. Greets, Benny

Hi Paul, awesome...thanks for your work. I will let you know, how it goes when I had time to work with it. You and Pete, have a nice first advent. All the best, Benny

Yes..it depends on the used scenery. Normally, most good Addon sceneries have those gate assignments. But I guess the default ones don't. Very nice that you are going to implement my suggestions. Looking forward to it. Greets, Benny

Hi Paul, did some quick tests with my demonstrator and works like a charm, so far. A huge thumbs up for such great work! I have got two "feature questions", if they are possible and not to hard to implement. The first one could be fairly easy to implement, for my understanding, given the already in-place files-to-database-algorithm for the makerunways files: In the g5.csv file, the last values can be the airlines those Gates are typically allocated for, looking like this, for example: LSZH,E,64,47.461383,8.551179,23.0,64.7,8,7G_,BAW,UAL,AAL,EZY,AWE,USA,QTR,SIA,AUI,ELY,CYP,AFL,MGX,DAL,PGT,RJA,ACA,UAE,SIA,SAA,THA,UAL I didn't find anything about it in an instance of the FSGates class, or maybe I overlooked it? If not, maybe you could add a list with an "FSAirlinesCollection" class for each FSGate and split the airline strings as class "FSAirline" into this list? The second one might be harder to implement and I don't know if it is doable at all: would it be possible to add a reference to the relevant AIPlaneInfo class object to the FSGate class, if a gate is occupied by AI-Traffic? Thanks in advance for your considerations and hard work. All the best, Benny

Interested to see, if they do anything about it, at all. Did some further tests with P3Dv3 at my home computer. The result is definately different than what I am seeing in FSX:SE and also "somehow" more reliable. At least EDDC, EDDT and EGLL are now in the list that is returned by SimConnect when I am positioned at those airports. KJFK on the other hand, is still not :-/. Greets, Benny

Well, I don't know for sure, but in this thread the last post describes that all of those lists seem to be unreliable at one point or another. He connects it with subscribing to more than 2 different types of facilities. Benny

Hi Pete, at the instant, I don't have something quick to show, either, because I did all my testing for a certain project on one demonstrator which is full of crap, now ;). Would need to declutter it first. In the end, it is only a simple listbox which is showing the nearest airports on a button click. Hard to believe that quite a huge developer isn't capable of producing this theirself ;). But if you think something simple as this would prove useful, I could scramble the above together, again and send it to you. Although I didn't test it on P3D myself, as I only run FSX:SE on my development Notebook, this was the relevant part of the P3D SDK sample documentation I used to educate myself on the facility. Greets, Benny

Hi Paul, sounds like a great facility. Does it only produce an "internal" database within your dll or does it create an external file each time the simulator is run? If you would be willing to share something more about the mechanics I might take a look at it :). Greets, Benny

Thanks Pete for your help, so in the end I guess, until now, to get a reliable solution that works with all FSX platforms (and most probably P3D as well) one would need to implement a self-created airport database solution and query it against the aircraft position to find out, where it actually is. Or do you see another way to do it? Greets, Benny

Yes...this is what I am seeing with EDDC, too. Nearest airport is EDBZ, according to 0x0658. What is bothering me with this is that all 3 airports I tried didn't work as I expected them to do. As far as I understood, FSUIPC isn't relying on SimConnect for this facility as stated here by Pete. Plus, also in the FSUIPC4 Offsets Status.pdf it reads "Intl" which translates into FSUIPC "internal" for me, but maybe this changed somewhere down the development line of FSUIPC. So, maybe I should gonna go ask Pete on the matter? Greets, Benny

Thanks Paul, for the very quick and detailed response. Had already tried the FSUIPC logging facilities with the same results, unfortunately...all zeros. But reading through the forums, I accidentally already found on of your mentioned solutions: I wasn't using the latest version of your dll and using the 3.0RC5 fixed the all-zero-bytes problem. But now comes the next one: tried out EDDC, EDDF and KJFK I am not getting those airports in the 6 airports list that are returned by 0x0658...only ones that are farther away. So this looks quite similar in unreliability to me like using SimConnect's RequestFacilitiesList with the SIMCONNECT_FACILITY_LIST_TYPE.AIRPORT parameter which I was testingbefore. But maybe, I am still doing something wrong here? So, any further advide would be highly appreciated :-). Thanks in advance. Greets, Benny

Hi Paul, I am also having a problem with this facility in FSX : Steam and cannot find out what is wrong with it: I am declaring this for testing purposes, private Offset<byte[]> nearestAirports = new Offset<byte[]>(0x0658, 120); private Offset<string> nearestAirport = new Offset<string>(0x0658, 4); but after the call to FSUIPCConnection.Process() I have neither ICAO string in the nearestAirport value, nor in the nearestAirports byte array, which should contain all 6 airport data. All their bytes are zero. Other facilities like radio altitude at 0x31E4, or startup-situation at 0x0024 are working as expected. Should it matter, I am using the latest registered FSUIPC (4.972) and FSX:SE in version 10.0.62615.0, which should be up-to-date, either. Do you have any idea, if it is still supposed to work and if yes, what then might be the culprit for my problem? All the best, Benny

And you are, as always, spot on :cool: . I didn't even notice, that the scenery folder was included, while it was not at the other entries. And I guess MakeRunways uses the path in the scenery.cfg and adds its own "\scenery\" to it, so it was now searching in the directory "scenery\scenery\", which obviously doesn't exist. Corrected that and MakeRunways produced the correct g5 file. But I really don't know why the installer put it there in the first place :???: . Nevertheless, thanks for your help...highly appreciated.