rhogen

To answer your question, this experience was with Acceleration/SP2. I never ran FSX without Accel/SP2. thanks, RH

Pete, The FSX file in your SDK has a question mark beside address 3070 in the "write" column. I just wanted to let you know that my ArrestorCables program successfully writes to that address and it works fine, just like in previous versions of FS, but only with a commanding rate change. The key thing that I noticed about writing to that address is that I had to slow down the rate of commanding by a factor of 12 compared to FS9 and prior versions. My timer used to send real time changes to that address at an ambitious 10ms cycle (bear in mind that I'm doing real time changes to the aircraft speed to simulate catapulting and arrestor cables accelerations!). Using that rate of commanding in FSX seriously bottlenecks Simconnect (as far as I can tell), resulting in major delays in the commands making their way into FSX. All I had to do to make things work was to increase that interval by a factor of 12 (120 ms interval now) and increase the scale of the changes sent. One might be concerned about a stuttering effect, but 120ms seems to work very smoothly. The key point being that after Simconnect is overloaded, the rate at which it recovers does NOT seem to be proportional to the commanding rate - it's like it has a clot and the artery just plugs up! I leave it to you experts to understand what's going on in Simconnect at a low level when it crosses that bottleneck threshold. fyi, R.Hogen

Pete, I'm sorry to report that the 3BA0 tailhook offset does not seem to follow tailhook position. I read it out as a double (8 byte float) and simply reported the value every second during flight. The value varies from incredibly small absolute values to incredibly large absolute values, but there's only a mild coupling to the state of the tailhook. What I observed was that when tailhook is in the retracted state, the values are negative and very small (high negative exponents). When I extend, there seems to be a trend toward values closer to zero, but it lags behind the actual FS messages reporting tailhook "up" or "down". If I then retract again there's a trend toward smaller values again, but the values vary widely and the overlap is huge. In short, I saw no way to use the 8-byte float value at offset 3BA0 to determine tailhook position or even boolean state (which is really all I'm concerned with - is it in the extended or retracted state?) FD3 for FS2004 goes out the door Monday or Tuesday, so that's why I've tested this so soon after release. It would be cool to add that (optional) feature to ArrCab. thanks, Rich http://www.speakeasy.org/~rhogen/arrestorcables.htm