Agrajag

Pete, LONG time since my last post here. Things just working great. I finally decided I wanted to use the [Programs] loading feature and I'm failing miserably. I'm trying to autoload/close Lorby's Axis and Oh's, fsltl's flight injector and TrackIR5. On first run the first two loaded, but TrackIR gave an error 740, which seems to be a permissions issue. Given that I went in and in Win11 I selected each EXE, went to Compatibility tab and set each one's check next to Run As Administrator. All three thus should not be running as that, but to be sure I did this to all three apps. I then reloaded. This time both Lorby's and TrackIR5 gave an error=740. I don't get what I could be doing wrong. Any insight? And thanks! Hope all is well.

Kind of a bummer for me as I like to be as current as possible. Having retired flights there takes me out of the immersion.

A bit late to the party, but just picked up KEWR and this schedule really makes it fun. Thanks. Two quick questions if you're still out there @ATC AlaskaGuy: 1. I had a US Airways flight. I thought they disappeared in 2015 with the AA merger. 2. I had TWA 819 show up. I can't find any airline listed as TWA other than the obvious one that disappeared 20 years ago. Who is this carrier? Again, thanks for all the hard work on this.

No problem John. Thanks for letting me the situation. As noted, I'm glad to help the effort. Good luck waiting out the SimConnect issue.

Pete/John, When MS left the community I jumped ship to X-Plane at v9 so I've been gone from using my FSUIPC for quite some time. I see my v3 and v4 purchase in SimMarket and just wondered -- once the SimConnect mess is fixed by Asobo and FSUIPC is fully out, is there an upgrade discount to get the license? If not, that's fine. Glad to support the work again. Just don't want to pay anything more than I really need to. Thanks, and so glad to be back on the FS side again. Hope all has been well the last few years....

So you re-typed United as "United" and it worked??? I found if I say, "Jaaaaaaaaaaaaazzz" it will work, but that's not sustainable. heheh.

I guess I'm used to my background where data disks and such were a common thing. You wouldn't expect to be given next year's new data for the game you bought last year. In fact, to make MORE money franchises like Madden decided to just make you buy an entirely new game every year instead of just buying the new data for a perfectly fine and working older game. As noted, there is a hint of this being different in the way FT goes about it. I would LOVE to see the numbers comparing the sales of just the airport with no RC. I do already know a couple other people that told me they couldn't care less about the real carriers. They just enjoy the juggling aspect of the game. If you're into the real carriers then your mindset will default to feeling that nearly everyone would want that. The way I choose to view it is that the cost of the airport, as I want it, is the price of both pieces. I justify that, almost entirely, due to knowing how small this community is. I also think two markets are crashing together and causing confusion and challenges. The mobile market, where games are often well under $10, is creating a whole generation of buyers that feel the cost of games should be much lower. Trust me, as a QA professional, one thing these people are not factoring in is that a PC product is a TOTALLY different world than a phone product. The phone product builds to a very defined specification to work on say, Android. The variations are minimized and if you don't think your product will work with X phone you simply turn off that phone as an option and that phone cannot install your game. On the PC the sky is the limit and there are literally countless combinations which means support is exponentially harder. Also, for what it's worth, this is an odd situation for me as I am usually on the other side of these arguments. I used to write a column for the major gaming publications that was mainly about consumer advocacy and calling out nearly every publisher for terrible practices. I have a trail of upset publishers in my wake. In this case, what I see is a very small publisher trying their best to make a go of a game in a market where no one will ever get rich off sales. It's sort of a no-win situation so I'm just glad anyone is trying it. Go look up ATC Windows. It's from a great guy (and mainly housed on Yahoo) Alan Key-Williams. It's a wonderful product that really nails the TRACON model. It was in beta for years and had a comparatively huge following with lots of community interaction. Then he realized he'd hit the wall and needed to raise funds so he started charging for it. When the beta versions expired the interest started to dry up and now it can go months between people posting anything about it.

Then don't spend that amount. The game is entirely playable as shipped with three airports. I too find the whole Real Color, Real Traffic approach a bit different, but there'a a reality here with this sort of product that's dramatically different from many other products and that's the size of the community. I've gotten first-hand professional experience with that community going back to the very first ATC product on the PC. It's a SMALL community. Very few people, comparatively, enjoy this sort of simulation over other related sims like flight simulators. It's a subset of a subset. Just look at the industry. Where is Wesson International today? They were the first and built a multi-award-winning product that was highly respected and they couldn't make the business model work selling the product as a whole. Where is Xavius today? They sold the second-most popular ATC simulator, and the tiny team there also couldn't keep the lights on. The two companies were both forced to move into selling a professional level product to the ATC industry. So, if you're going to make it in this sector (no pun intended) you need to find new ways to generate additional income. No one says you need to own every single piece of a product. I own X-Plane, but I don't own every piece of add-on software made for it. That would cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars! Sure, those products come from different companies, but only because that community is so vibrant. There were times when X-Planes community wasn't very active and you had to make due with pretty much the core product. I own seven airports in T3D Pro. I bought them over two years. Each one was a minor investment generally under $25 each. Most people spend more than that at a movie and get two hours of entertainment out of that. I've certainly gotten more than two hours of entertainment out of each of these airports.

Very much so. For what it's worth I've done a lot of audio work in TTS and SR. I've tried every variation of Jazz I can think of. What file can I look at to see what the game is expecting me to say to be clear? I assume it's the airlines file? If so, that says "JAZZ" which is what I'm saying.

The problem may be that you're holding a the Left-Shift key at that point. It may be awkward to add a key to that. Perhaps like the C key for "Correction", but it's still potentially strange. Right now when playing I use my left index finger to hold that key. With this I'd need to switch to making it my pinky or such so that my index finger could be ready to hit the C key. Plus I could miss and hit B which means breaking concentration to look up to see that the box clears. My goal would be to not have to bother with any of that. Have the code see the mistake and just respond like humans would makes it all clean in the end to my view.

They generally don't give a correction. You'll hear it in real life. They MAY say "Ignore that" or "Correction", but often they don't even do that much. The way I see it is that you have responses in a queue somewhere and I ASSUME there's a short delay in case I speak again quickly after each command. So, even if I give several wrong commands in a row, as long as the LAST one is correct, you can simply delete all the previous ones from the queue. "American 1289, Runway Niner" "American 1289, Vacate" "American 1289, uh" "American 1289, Taxi to Ramp." That would result in receiving "Taxi to Ramp, American 1289" with no mention of the other "commands". Or as mentioned, you might optionally, randomly respond with "I think I got that. Taxi to the ramp, American 1289." For what it's worth this would tie into a much bigger feature I'd like to see which we worked into older ATC software projects that allow the controller to provide varied commands (instead of always using the exact same phrases) and, more importantly a large matrix that allows for every response to actually pull randomly from a list of set responses. The end result is that session feels entirely realistic as the pilots end up using very varied responses. What might be useful for you, given that you use a TTS engine, would be to have all these responses in an XML file and allow users to edit it so that they can go ahead an add as many as they want. You could provide like say, three per response and a user could add 30 per response. All you need to do is read the XML on load, find out how many each response has and have them ready. It's just text so the overhead is minimal, but the result is pretty amazing. Thus, "Taxi to Ramp" could be the main response, but also under it have: "Taxi to the Ramp" "Off to the Ramp." "Head to the Ramp." "Heading to the Ramp." And so on. In one product we worked on we had pilots that had such a deep list of responses that you rarely felt like you heard the same ones twice in the same session. Using playback parameters we even could take common phrases like, "Taxi to the Ramp, American 1289" and have it sound a bit different each time. Sometimes it would emphasize "Taxi" and sometimes "Ramp". Other times it would drag out a word like American so that on one playback it was "American" and on another it was played back as "Uhhhh Merican 1289". The sky is truly the limit on this stuff.

So here's a simple one I suspect many of us have experienced: I begin to say, "American 1289, Runway Niner....." and then we realize we meant to say something else so we key right back up and say, "American 1289, Taxi to Ramp". We then get back, "Taxi to Ramp, American 1289" and then something like, "Negative", or "Can you repeat?" So my suggestion would be that if the code receives and incomplete or somehow faulty command for an aircraft and then immediately gets another one, either simply ignore it or, at the most append something simple to the start of the response to the second command like perhaps, "Uh, okay. Taxi to Ramp, American 1289." It saves time and is more realistic.

Mine is, yes.

Correct and correct. It's oddly perplexing given that, aside from the lag issue I mentioned, the recognition actually impresses me nearly everywhere else.

Nope. That works! Thanks.