FSX SP1 and SDK SP1a

Some details on the updates to the SDK included with SP1 have been posted at FSInsider. It's an interesting read, there are a lot of additions that have come from developer requests. I can't wait to get stuck into it!

Now what?

So beta 2 is out and I hope you are all enjoying that. So far we have only had positive feedback, and no real complaints that it doesn't work. So what's stopping a full release - at the moment it's time. I just haven't had much time with many university commitments at this time. While the main app is fairly complete and stable, there is still the manual and management application to work on, both of which form the rest of the package. Work is slowly progressing on these parts.

A little work continues on the main 3wirex add-on. The experiment with rolling and pitching carriers has been put on the shelf for further investigation at a later date. However, I have been working on another feature addition that I feel is quite important - being able to land on non-3wire carriers. These are carriers that are part of shipping traffic and missions, and so far things have worked as planned, and the feature is pretty much complete.

In addition, there is another ground-breaking feature currently in the planning and experimentation stage that is pretty exciting. I have to say, MS has done a wonderful job with FSX and SimConnect, it is so easy to make very complex add-ons like 3wire. I have a list of thing to do and try, and so far I been able to quickly make them happen with few lines of code. It may not be obvious just flying around, but with the power of SimConnect, missions and gauges I can see an exciting future for FSX.

Something you may have noticed with the defined carrier included in the beta is that it stops when you move to the bow of the ship (I put a note in the docs). After a little more research it seems there may be two factors in play - speed of the carrier and location. It seems that a speed of 30 knots or above stops this happening, and, even more strangely, carriers in the northern hemisphere seem unaffected. So MS has (inadvertently?) left out those down under!

The Future - Maybe

Time for an update, I've been very busy with other commitments and haven't had much time. Beta 2 has been released publicly, you can see the announcement post here at SimOuthouse and Alphasim. So the cat is out of the bag, get a copy and give it a spin.

I've also done a very quick test with rolling and pitching carriers. As you can see from the shots, it works! However, there are lots of problems with the aircraft on the deck. It bobbles about, bouncing around and often crashes or gets thrown off the deck. So it looks like it won't be practical in the near future, maybe if I get more time I can come back and investigate further.


The shots above were taken when I was using an extreme roll angle! The one below shows a more gentle approach with very small roll and pitch angles.

Beta 2 Out

Beta 2 has been distributed to testers. There have been a few improvements from beta 1, but the best news is that no fixes were required! Must be good programming or good luck, I think the latter is more correct.

If you are not a tester then look forward to some good news coming soon. :D

New Feature

I just thought of and implemented a new feature - a pilot log! Every arrested landing is logged to a text file, and a log viewer can be accessed by an entry in the Add-Ons menu.

In terms of a release time, no more features are to be added, just tweaks to the current code and a lot of testing to make sure it works - and I am yet to see it fail. It has turned out to be very robust, I can't break it, I've even tried doing a catapult launch over a wire with the hook down! I'm expecting testing to go smoothly before introducing a wider beta test and eventually a general release.