Additional feature requests for vPilot v2.0

[Don Desfosse]

As Ross mentioned in his thread announcing vPilot v2.0,new functionality requests should be posted in a separate topic. I've opened this topic to capture ideas/suggestions/requests.

 

One request I have is a button in the flight plan window that swaps the contents of the departure and arrival airport fields for folks like me that often do a round trip.

 

One thought that I had and figured I'd float, based on a few recent threads where students don't have the ability to influence university port settings would be an alternative to requiring port forwarding. I'm not a network engineer, so don't know if some kind of uPnP scheme would be an option, but figured I'd throw the idea out there to see if any smarter folks could carry on the brainstorm.

[Thimo Koolen]

I don't know how much it would be possible, but Euroscope's Tower View possibility in vPilot 2 would be really awesome. I just can't get FSInn to work here.

[Ross Carlson]

I don't know how much it would be possible, but Euroscope's Tower View possibility in vPilot 2 would be really awesome. I just can't get FSInn to work here.

 

I'm planning to have an option to enter an IP address for tower view connections provided by vSTARS. It should also work with ES, but I don't know for sure.

[Thimo Koolen]

That would be awesome. Glad to hear that Ross

[David Zhong]

One thought that I had and figured I'd float, based on a few recent threads where students don't have the ability to influence university port settings would be an alternative to requiring port forwarding. I'm not a network engineer, so don't know if some kind of uPnP scheme would be an option, but figured I'd throw the idea out there to see if any smarter folks could carry on the brainstorm.

 

What is the issue at hand? I don't use any port forwarding with VATSIM and everything works (except G-G comms in the controller client).

[Don Desfosse]

I've seen a recent increase of folks that may participate in a university environment that cannot use VATSIM reliably because they don't have the ability to effect port forwarding (and the university won't allow it). May not be possible/practical, but just tossing it out there as a thought.

[David Zhong]

Don, I [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ume you are referring to this issue: viewtopic.php?f=52&t=69758

 

The way to fix this is to get the voice servers/clients to send "keep alive" packets. The voice protocol runs off UDP which is a connectionless protocol. Routers add an entry to the routing table when the client first sends a packet, but the router doesn't know when the "connection" has come to an end, so it has a timeout. If no packets are seen within a certain time, the router will delete the routing entry. I would have thought that it would be fairly painless to have the client send empty packets to the server at frequent intervals and to ensure that the server ignores these.

[Don Desfosse]

Yes, David, exactly. And thanks for that insight. Kieran, is that something we could/should do?

[Mehdi Naguib]

hi addition of a TCAS would be a plus. thanks

[Ben Lim]

How about a double click on controller active, or right click and select to tune active radio?

 

I don't have a radio panel now and that feature would be helpful instead of typing .com1 123.70 all the time.

 

Cheers.

[Niklas Osbahr 1244675]

Hi. I have a homecockpit with two headsets.

There are two requests: Is it possible to set up two headsets? I know that there are double stereo types but I am using USB.

 

And the second: Is it than possible that headset one is on com1 and headset two on com2?

 

Thanks

[Magnus Meese]

Niklas, I have no idea how it's done or what the price tag is, but this simulator has a linked headset setup that provides intercom for 3 stations ("jumpseat" as well), pluss the ability for either pilot to transmit through vPilot. You could try to reach out to the owner and ask about it.

[Niklas Osbahr 1244675]

I guess that he do not have USB Headsets. With to "normal" headsets there will not be any Problem!

So I do not know if it is so complicated to impliment a second in and output also for just one com(but I guess they can be both parallel with one headset).

[Ross Carlson]

It would involve having a second area in the config for choosing the audio device, calibrating the mic, and setting a PTT. I would then have to modify the code that watches for PTT presses and have it look for two different ones. Not terribly complicated but it would be a non-trivial amount of work to add a feature that VERY few users would benefit from.

 

Buy me a full two-place home cockpit setup and I'll definitely do it.

[Niklas Osbahr 1244675]

Ok. I just thought that this is copy and past with changing some variables.

Then I will try via Proxy or an observer Account

[Maurizio Cinti]

The only BIG request that I'd like to see solved in new release is about sound quality.

I think nobody here will feel hurt if I say that voice quality of radio transmissions is far to be acceptable most of the time.

In the "other" simulated ATC network I must (very sorry) say that voice is clear and loud all the time.....

Would it be so hard to adopt the same voice software or at least some other better solution ?

 

Maurizio

http://www.sim737ng.it

[Ross Carlson]

Work is already happening to improve VATSIM's voice architecture. It will take a while ... it's much more than just a vPilot feature, since it affects all client software.

[Maurizio Cinti]

Well, I really do hope voice will be better than now in new development

Keep up the good work guy !

 

Maurizio

Www.sim737ng.it

[Reinhard Brantner]

Hi,

 

Another nice feature for the client V2 would be, if it would be possible to undock the several sub elements of the client window. This means, that if we would be able to move and resize ATC, chat and input windows according to the screen layout, this would give great flexibility. And by defining these positions and size information in the config file, would allow to start with different setups.

 

Best regards

Reinhard

[David Ayoub 1274315]

Would it be possible to look into transmitting aircraft position/performance data via P2P in addition to parsing to the VATSIM servers? Those of us with fast internet connections could see aircraft moving much more realistically, while those with slower connections wouldn't be penalized and could still see traffic transmitted by the VATSIM servers.

 

I hope this was clear enough and I might be dreaming in technicolor. Good luck with the update. I'd also like to second the voice quality improvement, I found FSINN had much better voice than vPilot for some reason.

[Pierre Ferran]

As suggest before, a very interesting feature would be that vPilots starts sending mode S EHS data, so that'd be the aircraft indicated airspeed, mach number, selected altitude in the autopilot, the true airspeed and the vertical rate.

 

Some of this data would be very good for helping new pilots, and making sure everything will go to plan. Plus it'd be a lot more realistic for quite a few countries. I know that controller client would have to be updated to use that data, but we have to start somewhere

 

If there is anything I can do to help implement this, just ask !

[Anders Moen]

Weird request, but default output volume: can it be lowered?

I've set my vPilot to max 15% and turned up the sound in Windows instead and I never have any problems hearing ATC (unlike very very many people, as you can see in a couple of posts in this thread as well).

 

I've given a few people who have been struggling a lot hearing ATC transmissions this suggestion, and they too say it's a lot better this way.

 

Thanks

[Pierre Ferran]

Another simple thing that would be nice is a "CLEAR" button in the flight plan window, that just clears all the fields.

[Simon Kelsey]

Niklas, I have no idea how it's done or what the price tag is, but this simulator has a linked headset setup that provides intercom for 3 stations ("jumpseat" as well), pluss the ability for either pilot to transmit through vPilot. You could try to reach out to the owner and ask about it.

 

I'm not familiar with that particular simulator, but I do have some involvement with a similar project and the same thing is all handled externally from vPilot via IP-controlled audio mixers -- in very simple terms (it's a bit more complex because the ACPs are all wired up as well and so it's not just a simple one input-one output setup) all the headsets go in to the audio mixer and the output of the audio mixer goes in to vPilot.

 

When you press the PTT in one place, as well as sending a PTT command to vPilot it also sends a command to the audio mixer to mute the other mics.

 

Weird request, but default output volume: can it be lowered?

I've set my vPilot to max 15% and turned up the sound in Windows instead and I never have any problems hearing ATC (unlike very very many people, as you can see in a couple of posts in this thread as well).

 

I'm not sure what the relationship between the vPilot output level slider and the Windows sound settings etc is, but I can attest that I've also noticed the vPilot slider has very little effect on the actual output level except between about 0-10%.

[Semir Gebran]

I would love to have a more intelligent handling of the performance, where the radius and the max aircraft count are governed by rulesets similar to those for AI. For instance the range radius value would increase the higher the aircraft is ( up to a limit ) while the aircraft display count would decrase ( down to a limit )