Pete Dowson

Ah, nasty those -- can be so inconsistent. Good. And no one else has reported any crashes, so I am confident of making a proper user release as soon as I can complete the documentation updates! Thanks & Regards Pete

Good. Thank you for the report! Regards Pete

There are only three possible reasons I know of for this: 1. Your system date is set before the date of purchase of either or both the FSUIPC and WideFS keys. or 2. The FSUIPC DLL is corrupted and its signature is not valid -- look at the FSUIPC.LOG file, it will tell you if this is the case. You can also right-click on the DLL and select Properties-Digital Signature and check it there. or 3. One of other of the keys is a forgery, one produced by a pirate key generator. hopefully this last one is the least likely so check the other two. If there's a signature problem you may need to run the supplied file from GlobalSign to install the Certificate into Windows -- apparently some older versions of Windows (before XP SP1) don't always have this pre-installed. Regards Pete

If you download the FSUIPC SDK from http://www,schiratti.com/dowson and look in the Programmer's Guide you will find these easy using search. View modes are in 8320. QNH is at 0EC6. You set STD by writing 16212 here (16 x the STD value). Pushback status is at 31F0, control at 31F4. Please do use the documentation supplied. I don't learn all this stuff, I have to look it up too! ;-) Regards Pete

Sorry, no. Pete

Well, since air compressibility comes into it I suspect sudden changes in pressure could also contribute. Did you have the pressure smoothing enabled too? Regards Pete

Registered and enabled, I assume? Sounds like you have something seriously wrong with your Network adapter or its driver software as that is the only extra activity going on when you have an active WideServer. Try removing the Network hardware in the Windows device manager,, then re-installing so that it restores the drivers. Regards Pete

It is a daft system -- it was like this in FS98 when the FSUIPC offsets were effectively "fixed" for onward compatibility. I think what happened was that earlier versions of FS only supported a 3 digit ADF frequency, xxx. When they realised you could get decimal parts (there are a lot of xxx.5 ones in the UK) and that South America, in particular, used 1xxx values, they added the Extended value separately rather than change it and presumably have to change a lot of other things. Whilst FS no longer uses this format, FSUIPC kept to it throughout FS2000, FS2002, FS2004, FSX -- and even CFS1, CFS2 where applicable -- just for compatibility, so add-ons can be carried forward from version to version. This was the main reason I wrote FSUIPC in the first place. ;-) Regards Pete

That must be the turbulence simulation. You can turn that off if you don't like it. I didn't do that in FS9 -- the wind smothing there removed all such wind effects, which I didn't feel was right. That is exactly what folks told me happened weeks ago and why I also eventually found a way to smooth it. I've never seen it happen here, so I was skeptical. It certainly has nothing to do with anything I'm doing at all. I think it is related to faulty / incorrect METAR data being downloaded occasionally, just like the couple of reports of temperatures of >60C in parts of Scandinavia! Well, that's why it, and the temperature smoothing, were added. Regards Pete

I think there's an option you can enable to get it to generate stations for you, but whether it gets "real weather" for those or makes it up itself I don't know. Oh, you did have that enabled! Sorry, I don't know what happened there then. To set such whether ASX has to use special calls to SimConnect to create those temporary stations. I've never used that, and I don't know how well it works. I should think the stations need creating well in advance as the weather takes time to be "merged in" and interpolated. Maybe you were going so fast the changes were too late. Maybe HiFi Simulations support can advise us on this. (Jim, are you there?) Regards Pete

Okay. If it is stopping there, and not logging anything else, then it is not reading the DLL.XML file, or that file is wrong in some way. The only thing I can think of doing now is to delete the DLL.XML file, rerun the FSUIPC4 Installer, and see if that gets it loaded. If not, I'm afraid it's over to Microsoft Support because it is beyond me. SimConnect should be reading that DLL file for sure. You are logging in on Windows as the same user you installed FSX as, I hope? Otherwise maybe SimConnect is looking in the wrong place, the wrong Documents & Settings folder. Regards Pete

You are not reading enough! It says "see also offset 0356". And it says not only 1234.5 will have 0x0234 here but also 0x0105 in offset 0356. Please don't quote little bits and ignore the other bits which in this case explain exactly the answer to your question! Pete

No, neither FSUIPC nor WideFS have anything to do with displaying anything at all. What you want to do can be done in FSX just by itself, with no extra software whatsoever. Just set FSX into Windowed mode (the mode with the title bar showing) -- press ALT + ENTER if you are in full screen mode. Then you can size the window the same as any other Windows program, and even undock and move any panels around to where you want them. Best ask further general questions about FSX over in the FSX forum, or check its own Help. Regards Pete

It doesn't sound right at all, especially considering that whilst the winds are varying, they are only oscillating furiously about a central value (the normal "smoothed" value, which may of course also be changing at your set smoothing rate). The oscillations will be no more than 1 degree and 1 knot per unit of turbulence, either side of the mean. Possibly. But it does suggest that we should find out what the effect of the turbulence on other aircraft, for example the default 737 or 747, is like. I might try that tomorrow ... Thanks! Pete

Earlier, before I discovered the extra wind vector values inside FSX, there were a lot of cases where FSUIPC was temporarily losing the fight with FSX over what the prevailing winds at the aircraft should be. This resulted in unwanted wind shifts still "leaking" through. I made a separate thread which had, as its sole job, re-writing the last values FSUIPC wanted -- at a rate of some 200 times per second. This was in the hope that it would prevent the unwanted values seeping through. It helped sometimes, but didn't fix it fully. I was still missing something -- and that "something" was the extra set of vectors I found yesterday. So, having found them I was curious to know if there were any more leaks, and if, in fact, the extra thread trying to block them all was now needed at all. Tests seem to have shown that I have all the bases covered, and that the thread is not needed. So I shall remove it before release. Makes sense for you? Regards Pete

Hmm. The FSUIPC4 log looks perfect too. I really cannot see a single reason why your KEY is accepted but fails to work. It makes no sense. The only time that has happened is when the Registration routine can't write to the Registry, but if you ran FSX "as Administrator" it must be able to. Sorry, this case is unique. No other report of anything like this at all. I don't know how else to help at present, unless you'd like to just try that trick of renaming FSX.EXE as I suggested? The next main user release, with the Registration option in the Installer, should be ready by the end of this coming week. I'll send you a pre-release version to try, maybe before then (but possibly partly with the old documentation still). Regards Pete

FSUIPC's temp smoothing tries to control the OAT. The other factors involved in computing TAT might be the ones actually doing the jumping anout. How many degrees per second do you call a "significant chunk" by the way? I have OAT displayed on my PM gauges, but I suspect that's missing on most. Regards Pete

PMDG implements their own systems virtually throughout. Hardly any of the built-in FS controls will be of use. Please check the PMDG documentation. Starting their aircraft is similar to real ones, nothing like anything in FS. The PMDG software may allow you to assign keystrokes, but possibly not to all of the functions and steps needed to start an airliner from "cold and dark". I think they had an arrangement with GoFlight to get their hardware to driver some of the things. Maybe they've done this with other ready-made hardware units. But I don't think they provide the information to end users, as least not without a hefty charge and licensing agreement! Regards Pete

No, SP2 wouldn't have installed them there. I don't know what FSPassengers does -- is it an FSX-specific product? Anyway, the next step is to find out why SimConnect isn't loading FSUIPC4. For that we need a SimConnect log file. If you look in the Announcements at the top of this Forum you will find one there called "FSX Help ...". In there it tells you how to get a SimConnect log file. Do that and show it to me please. It is looking like you may need to do a SimConnect repair, but let's just do that check first. Regards Pete

Thanks. Got them. Not so much needed unless there are smoothing problems, but I'll take a look. Er, sorry, I'm not sure about this. Does it relate to the weather smoothing or anything FSUIPC is doing? I'm puzzled. It sounds like some sort of VNAV bug which should probably be reported to PMDG? That is the turbulence simulation applied by FSUIPC, unless you disable it. That is why I am involving PMDG, to find out why minor wind speed and direction changes affect their A/P so much. It doesn't affect Project Magenta's A/P (though you can see it acting to keep to the path), nor does it affect FS's default A/P. I've also got earlier reports that it is okay with the LevelD 767 A/P. So, it is something in PMDG's algorithms I think. It looks like they have a sign wrong and instead of tending towards a value they veer away from it. If you review the other threads here on the smoothing you will see that this PMDG heading problem is now the only major problem outstanding, and if it cannot be resolved (probably by PMDG) I will have to simply recommend PMDG users disable turbulence (both cloud and wind). BTW no need now to test WITH the smoothing thread. If it is okay without I'd rather do without! ;-) Thanks & Regards Pete

Good. After having it run all night with no crash (but no logging), I started again with Kyle's flight but with full logging. However I'm now in a 737-700 with full Project Magenta instrumentation and it's autopilot. 2 hours into the flight and no problems so far. Looks good. It looks more and more as if Kyle's crashes are indded more likely to be related to scenery or similar. Best Regards Pete

Interesting that you are not getting the ratcheting and other symptoms of the SIM1.DLL "hack" not being applied. Can you please look in any of your FSUIPC4 Log files and see if it says the Wind Smoothing is "fully" or "partially" applied? It'll be a line near the beginning. WeatherSet shows the weather last reported to it by SimConnect. Sometimes there's a bit of a gap between those reports, so it could have been a time lag. Also remember that WeatherSet is showing degrees True whereas the Shift+Z and ND displays Magnetic. I uploaded version 4.241 in the wee hours this morning. That should give you the full smoothing no matter what version of FSX you have! ;-) So, go ahead, please try and break it for me! ;-) Thanks & Regards Pete

That's strange, Peter, because it seems to be working wonders on my beastie and I'm not using Acceleration! Without the extra "hack" in place, which prior to version 4.241 was only in place on Acceleration's SIM1.DLL, the smoothing is still operating but when the wind is changing the simulation engine is fighting my smoothing control. The main symptom of this is a "ratcheting" or little annoying jumping effect on the ASI. The same can occur, though much less often, on the altimeter when the QNH is changing with QNH smoothing enabled, and engine spooling effects have been reported too from the exact same symptom in the temperature smoothing. Worse, is very special rather peculiar wind layer circumstances, the smoothing was not actually managing to stop 50-90 degree wind swings. All that was because it couldn't actually trap the values at the point of change, only later, after they've been actively used elsewhere. In 4.241 I've managed to apply the same "hack" to all possible (non-Beta) versions of the SIM1.DLL -- RTM, SP1, SP2 and Acceleration. Regards Pete

Okay, so either it's realted to the Logging, or it is something related to your scenery or terain or landclass in Idaho somewhere. I left the flight running last night and it was still going this morning. Many hours, no problem. I will try the same with full logging enabled, just to double check. (The hard disk is big enough for the HUGE log that will generate! ;-) I'm in PMDG's hands on that one. I can't figure it out. Unfortunately the chap who is helping has his hands full at present. I'll be changing the Wind Smoothing Thread option to "No" by default in the next version, and maybe remove it altogether for general release. Thanks & Regards Pete

Thanks! I'm off to bed now. I've left that flight running... Regards Pete