New Utility Release - Aircraft Manager Free

aaaannd…a little update on what else I was working on while waiting on the blockers: New Utility (Coming Soon) - Location Manager

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Free version of Location Manager is out.
If you’ve got Aircraft Manager installed, it would be great if you could give Location Manager a tryout too, and any feedback if you see any issues or conflicts between the two. It’s been tested, but bugs are sneaky like that. I’m sure you’ll find it useful though as well :ok_hand:

Links @ New Utility Release - Location Manager Free - #23 by Sonicviz

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I documented my development journey in a short story @ Aircraft Manager for MSFS - Sonicviz

I’ll write a follow up post on Location Manager soon.

Let me know if you need more detail, or think there’s something else worth writing about!

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Hello!

Update 13/02/2023

  • New free version release, no version number change.
  • Performance improvements + fixes
  • Mandatory install for data migration prior to pro version release, if you want to keep your current tags.

Anticipate Pro version release in the next day or so.
Highly suggest testing with this version first though, especially if you intend to upgrade and edit your current tags.

OP updated.

Thanks!

Seems very vague ?

But if that is truely the case, and you really want more than the 200 chars, one could have multiple keys to hold >200 character data,
ie instead of a key NOTES, you could have NOTES.1 NOTES.2 etc
and assemble the Notes data from Multiple keys.

PITA, but possible

More to the point though, is the question why their is a perceived 200 char limitation, and why that cannot be increased to a much greater size. (say a nice round number like 128K ) - so that it can hold , for example, complete Flight Plans …

Because there are currently unknowns and undocumented aspects to the SDK atm I’m taking a measured risk reduction approach.

Further feedback from Asobo was:

FlyingRaccoon](https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/users/11/flyingraccoon.html) answered • Jan 31 2023 at 12:58 AM

Hello @sonicviz

I ran some tests with keys and values exceeding 256 characters and didn’t notice any problem so I’d say there’s no known limitation.
Let us know if you encounter any issue.

Start small, see what people do with it, get feedback, increase as needed in measured steps.
In this first instance the intent is for short notes anyway, so will see how it goes and what people think they might want to do with it.

Too much potential for disruption otherwise, and the main UI is a key UX, so needs to be reliable.
There are also performance implications with loading/unloading huge blobs of text in the UI, and I’d like to strike a good balance between utility, value, and performance. There’s always trade offs with this kind of thing.

I personally stress tested ~250 planes @ 1000 characters, but just because “it works on my machine” doesn’t mean it will in the wild.

Ditto for the current 200 location limit in Location Manager Pro. It likely does much more, but I’ll run with that for a while and see what the results are like from the real world.

Aircraft Manager pro is up now @ Aircraft Manager Pro + Location Manager Pro now available

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Avaliable now direct from me @:

Also available exclusively from Orbx marketplace:

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Aircraft Manager Free Release Notes V 1.0.3
Released 2023-05-20

  • Added favorites for free

Check the website for download.
Orbx update for free may not happen till Monday.

Edit: Now updated on Orbx as well

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Didn’t realise the pro version also includes a control preset manager. My question is if you change aircraft in the manager, does that also automatically switch the control profile defined for that aircraft or do you have to manually switch this in the control preset manager?

Once you define what preset to load for each device for each plane, then whenever you change planes (be it via the new list view, the preset assigning view page or the built-in large grid of thumbnails page), all banks of presets automatically change for you from then on.

Small note: Depending on how many need to change from the previous presets that were being used before you changed, you need to wait a little while to give the system “time” to set them all for you — but it’s like 5 seconds wait and you’ll be safe.

It’s really really good and I could not imagine dealing with the sim without it now as it’s allowed me to make a few more custom presets per plane that I couldn’t be bothered to do before :slight_smile:

EDIT: I just read that second paragraph back to myself and it’s not very clear what I meant lol
Basically it’s changing one-by-one for you, so the more that need to change, the longer it takes as it’s actually navigating the clunky slow to respond menu behind the scenes on your behalf :slight_smile:

Also, I am not 100% sure if the Asobo default big grid view also changes profiles to be fair as I just don’t even use that any more but I think it does. I’m sure @Sonicviz will jump in to clarify :wink:

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Thanks @Baracus250 , that’s more or less what’s going on behind the scenes. Tricky bit of code tbh, I’m sure Asobo are looking at how they can optimise when if/when they rewrite the UI.

Yes, if you switch planes anywhere it will trigger a control preset switch.

Also, please check the Known Issues on Aircraft Manager for MSFS - Sonicviz for pertinant info about this. eg: Duplicate devices are not supported due to an MSFS bug with them, but some users have found workarounds. I just found out the Velocity One actually shows up as two duplicate controllers under Windows (one under XBOX!) so it looks like they have two chips in it do its magic. Appears to work fine though, it’s a bit of a unique case. I’ll be adding that to Known Issues asap.

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Thanks both - good to hear.

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@Sonicviz Would the following be possible to implement in Aircraft Manager?
To adjust the VR World Scale value automatically based on the aircraft selected? Much in the same way that the controller profiles are selected. The World Scale is a slider under the VR GRaphics tab with a range of 80-120. I’ve found one aircraft where the cockpit in VR is scaled too large and this setting allows me to change it to the correct scale for my tastes. On reading up on this issue, it seems a lot of people have use differing values based on the aircraft being flown. I suspect the ability to automatically switch this setting for different aircraft in VR would help a lot of people fine tune their VR experience and add further value to your application.

Might be able to, but some work involved.

I’ve seen the world scale issue come up with a couple of planes.
Some developers deny it (my cockpit is not too big!!) others go and fix it.

I’m not sure how big a problem it is though.

I was playing with the OpenXR scaling recently, which does much the same thing, but any ingame solution would only use the MSFS options.

Not sure how many people use OpenXR World Scaling vs MSFS option world scaling.

This really isn’t the thread for it though.

You could start a thread on it in VR section to see how a big an issue it is, and if there’s enough response I can take a look at it.

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Thanks - will see what kind of responses there are…

Awesome, thanks. Will check it later, in final testing for big scaling UX update to AM/LM atm.

Thank you for adding favorites to the free version! I had skipped over this because the free version seemed too limited to me but I will be giving it a try now.

Aircraft Manager Free Release Notes 1.1.0

Date: 26/05/2023

  • Complete rewrite of the scaling for a much improved User Experience (UX)
  • Other small UX adjustments
  • Bug Fixes
  • Performance Improvements

Disregard my previous comment. I do have the email, and found it right after posting. I made the mistake of searching my 9 email addresses for Paul@sonicviz instead of searching for FastSpring. My apologies.

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