shared cockpit?

[Ignat Ignatov 1146281]

(im not sure if this is the right subforum for this, mods feel free to move it, as it's my first post here )

 

Hey everyone!

 

I got a question about shared cockpit feature and I really hope someone does know something about it, because I'm almost desperate.

 

Some background: Me and a friend of mine are quite keen on flying a 3rd party payware jet airliner as pilot/co-pilot over VATSIM. The bad thing is no one ever mentiones if his add-on aircraft supports the shared cockpit feature. And I mean no one. Neither in the reviewers in different websites, nor the producers themselves. This seems to be some dreadful secret or this multiplayer feature of MSX is completely ignored. I even got a reply from a producer who asks 30/40 euro per airplane stating

 

"we have not tested and do not support any possible issues in multiplayer. There are no specific developed multiplayer features provided."

which got me even more frustrated and buffled. After 2 or 3 weeks research I got the feeling the only aircraft which would support co-piloting is still in production with the elaborate realease date of "2010". Am I missing something?

 

Question: Can anyone recommend / confirm which 3rd party payware aircraft supports this feature? Does anyone fly that way at all? Any information will be greatly appreciated.

 

cheers and thankis in advance

Ignat

 

 

P.S. feel free to PM me if mentioning certain 3rd party aircraft producers would be frowned upon as advertising.

[Charan Kumar]

As far as I am aware (and I mean very limited knowledge by that) the only payware aircraft that allows full cockpit sharing is the MD80 from http://www.flythemaddog.com. It has an FMC and enhanced a/p features, but do not take the acft lightly as it needs a lot of reading the manual, but it will be totally worth it. And a lot of folks fly that acft with sharing both offline and here. I myself am yet to take that leap.

 

Other than that, only the default acft can be flown with sharing. Details can be found here

 

Good luck and keep the blue side up!!

[Ignat Ignatov 1146281]

Hey everyone,

 

An update of the research I was forced to do, if anyone is interested:

 

I have received official statement from PMDG: "The Shared cockpit function in FSX is not currently compatible with the PMDG product line. We attempted to implement this process during development of the PMDG product line but could never get it to perform successfully so it was abandoned. We will be looking at it again on the 737NGX"

Flightsimlabs.com whose Concorde-X is on the [Mod - Happy Thoughts]embly line at the moment also mention technical difficulties:

http://forums.flightsimlabs.com/index.php?...ndpost__p__2766

Airsimmer's A320 is on its way to release and seems it will support shared cockpit.

 

FSX is 4 years old now and quite surprisingly, I can count the aircraft which support shared cockpit on the fingers of ONE of my hands. After digging deeper into the community websites, 3rd party producers' forums, etc., it seems that Microsoft had produced rather buggy and unstable platform in which the shared cockpit is severely crippled and it exists almost only on paper, when it comes to custom gauges/instruments. The thing is that every self-respected aircraft producer does not use the default FSX gauges and instruments. You can see where this is going to.

So the most companies just dumped the shared cockpit feature on grounds that it's too difficult to implement. I have checked almost 95% of the market - CS, CLS, LevelD, PMDG, DA, you name it. Up till now I have found exactly THREE sharable aircraft:

 

Available now:

- DA Fokker 70/100 @ http://www.digital-aviation.de/site/?page_id=7

- L39 Albatros @ http://www.lotussim.com/features-intro.html

- MadDog MD-80 series @ http://www.flythemaddog.com/features.php

 

Upcoming that would support shared cockpit (given they find a way to implement it)

- Flightsimlabs Concorde-X (in final beta testing)

- Airsimmer A320 (not clear release date)

- PMDG 737NGX (somewhere in 2010)

 

Of those listed I can say the DA is awesome company, love their Piper Cheyenne, regretfully I don't feel like flying on the 2D cockpit of the Fokker. The L39 is an awesome bird, but since it's a military training subsonic jet, I imagine we would be frowned upon if we want to fly it online with people in 737s for example, although it has proper GPS navigation and we are willing to fly strictly with SIDs and STARs and everything else that involves ATC.

And lastly (praise Charan and all the aviation gods) the mad dog. This is the only airplane when it comes to flying commercial jet with a friend. Fully functional 2D and 3D cockpit, fully sharable over a custom TCP/IP channel (outside FSX), control panel, custom settings, load and fuel manager, etc. Fully working FMC (less features than the CS 757 FMC for example, but who cares). It does not have its own navdata, but it's built on the PMDG one and thus you use the PMDG one. Simulated failures across every system of the aircraft if you want some thrills. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who wanna fly with a friend, despite its hefty price of 50 euro.

 

Despite it's dark times for the flightsim community, there's a light in the tunnel after all - AeroSoft is making a new flight sim, scheduled to release in Q2 2012. Last night I browsed the forum and I am completely stunned by the scale of the project. It can be found @ http://www.forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?showforum=278. I can recommend reading it, it's quite interesting. The way I see it, the whole flightsim community needs new sim right now, so everyone is invited to help them. FSX is aging and with ACES being booted last January does not help at all. I almost can feel the addon market producers headaches when they try to implement some serious features and being constrained by the buggy platform.

 

Enormous thanks to Charan Kumar

Cheers

Ignat

[Dave Hardy 1023154]

KCFS has 2 shared cockpit aircraft but not airliners.

 

http://www.kcflightshop.com/