… And the Community Giveth!
“Thanks a milion this update is God sent for us in VR, with the implementation of shortcut keys I can finally record, replay, FFW and REW all while in VR, just mapped the key to some buttons on my joy and can finally do it all right from VR. THANK YOU !!!” [AndyCYXU, flightsim.to]
It is so nice to hear that - after such a long time without any updates - Sky Dolly is still being used and folks are so generous with their thank you and constructive feedback.
I have had several email conversations with avid flight simulation and Sky Dolly enthusiasts about how to improve the usability, bank angle calculation in gliders and last but not least people letting me know about bug issues they stumbled about.
@JayDee6281 deserves an extra mention here in this context: not only did he promote Sky Dolly in his excellent JayDee YouTube channel (in German) every then and when (completely on his own terms!), but also reported several issues related to pausing/unpausing the simulator and most recently about the “native user interface styles” not being selectable (all those issues should be fixed by now :)). And most importantly he is also very active in developing countless addons for MSFS, go check them out on flightsim.to/discover/jaydee!
Then there is @LilacBadge40509 and friends: they mentioned Sky Dolly on their product page for their FlightLog Analyzer (go check it out!). I assume they are talking about one of the CSV (comma-separated values) formats that Sky Dolly is able to import as flight path. Thank you! In fact, not only is Sky Dolly open source, but I also try to “open it up” with as many other addons as possible, via well-documented import/export formats (and documenting my own “logbook” format as much as possible).
There is also Alex (@thealx2901 perhaps?), developer and founder of the TouchingCloud team who contacted me November last year (2023) for a possible collaboration for their excellent AirshowAssistant (check it out!) that provides real “AI co-pilot formation flying”! I had to decline at the time, for time and other reasons - but kindly pointing to my own source code for inspiration, and telling Alex about the known issue with the “AI aircraft jitter” that exists with SimConnect since the FSX days apparently… when done “naively” by repeatedly sending GPS position data (only) - somehow the AirshowAssistant solved this problem :).
The funny thing is: I heard about the AirshowAssistant a couple of weeks later (in several YouTube videos), bought it on the market place (“how did they do it?” - not knowing that this was the actual product that Alex asked me for collaboration ;))… and just stumbled over his original private message on flightsim.to a couple of days ago - and only then it became clear that this was the very product he was talking about!
I have yet to reply to him to his latest private message - and ask him how they solved the “jitter” problem, maybe he reveals some little hints
To be clear: those are just some very specific examples that shall represent all the countless nice comments, feedback and other email exchange I have had over the last couple of months!
So thank you all so much for your support, community!
And last but not least it warms my heart when I see in what creative ways people are actually using Sky Dolly. Again, this is just one of many examples I have seen - but the most recent and very impressive one (*):
Shared with kind permission from the author @Medevac71.
This is a promotion video for the free ETHB - Bückeburg Helicopter Airfield, making heavy use of the Formation module of Sky Dolly that allows you to “incrementally fly and add more and more aircraft to the current formation flight”.
Having done such a formation video myself I know how much time and effort goes into such a video production. Not to mention the work and sweat that was put into this free addon - so please also check this out!
Oh…and yes: there is a small Sky Dolly bug fix release v0.17.1 available, too
(*) Yes, those are helicopters “in formation flight”, but before you ask: no, they most likely do not implement the new helicopter model that was introduced a couple of simulation updates ago (SU 11 perhaps?). Because there is a long-standing known issue that such helicopters cannot be spawned as “AI aircraft”. Perhaps we will see “helicopter traffic” or at least “spawnable helicotper AI aircraft” in MSFS 2024, who knows…