Month: April 2016

Saitek, A2A, And Wanting To Have Your Cake And Eat It, Too

Posted on by Basement Fly Guy

My favorite aircraft in P3D is A2A’s truly remarkable Accu-Sim Cessna 182 Skylane. It looks, flies, feels, and works as close to the real thing as I can imagine a simulated aircraft can look, fly, feel, and work. But it does not seem to communicate well with the Saitek Pro Flight Switch Panels or Flight Information Panels. In matters that have been better documented here and here, the Switch Panel doesn’t play nice with all the appropriate 182 switches (the alternator and battery switches in particular for many people, and the avionics switch for me as well), and the FIP’s tend to report incorrect readings on the RPM gauge and several of the engine / fuel gauges. While none of this is Earth shattering stuff, these issues can be an annoyance in the least, and sort of a problem if you’re trying to learn and follow actual startup / shutdown procedures or if you’re flying a realistic sim where RPM and mixture matter for procedures and performance (which I am in both cases).

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Tom Tsui’s Awesome C172 Gauges

You can kludge and configure your away around the switch problem (although I wasn’t able to get this to work for me), and I’ve simply saved my default “cold and dark” P3D scenario with the battery and alternator switches already on, and assigned the avionics switch to a toggle on the throttle quadrant. But there seems to be no workaround for the FIP gauges. Tom Tsui at FSX Times has been working to get these things to play nice with each other, and he finally tossed in the towel and asked for his money back. Me, I’ve been torn between flying the A2A with these concessions, or the Carenado 182, which works great but honestly (and with respect as it’s a great piece of software) just doesn’t feel as realistic to me as an airframe. When I fly it I find myself missing the A2A.

I have noticed one odd thing, though, and it’s that the RPM gauge seems to work for me some of the time. I’ve had some flights where it seems to be reporting the correct data, and then I’ll have a flight where it doesn’t get over 1,500 RPMs. I don’t know if that’s true or just my impression, but it seems to be happening, and I don’t know why that would be other than something interfering with the communication between the panel and P3D.

It looks like Tom and the creator of the SPAD.neXt alternate Saitek drivers have been working on a fix for all of this. I hope they are, that it works, and that it’s available soon. In the meantime, it is what it is.

Problem Solved (Mostly)

Posted on by Basement Fly Guy

As I posted yesterday, I’ve been on the hunt for a memory leak in the basement sim. I devoted a good portion of yesterday to the job, and rather than mess with uninstalling and installing things one-by-one, instead I uninstalled everything (EVERYTHING: the sim, add-ons, aircraft, textures, land classes, instruments – all of it), and started from scratch with new installations. My method was to install the sim first, and then install an add-on, run the sim to test stability, exit, install
the next add-on, repeat.

The results? Everything worked great up to the very last add-on, the GTN 750 GPS software from Flight 1. There were no problems with memory, but soon after adding it Prepar3d started to throw some crashes, as did the RemoteFlight connector. I uninstalled the GTN, and a much more stable sim returned. I’m not sure why those would conflict, but that seems to be the case, and I hope I can find a fix because the GTN 750 running on the 7-inch touchscreen in the cockpit panel is an awesome tool. I also installed SPAD instead of the Saitek drivers, but it actually was making communication with my panels more SkyVector__Flight_Planning___Aeronautical_Chartsdifficult, so I uninstalled it and went with the latest drivers from Saitek which worked fine.

But GPS or not, I’m left with a spectacular flight simulator. I’m getting 30-60 frames per second, with the A2A C 182 Skylane, high graphic settings, high-resolution textures, max scenery and autogen settings, Active Sky Next live weather, AI traffic, and MultiCrew Experience running in the background. Today I took a 3-hour VFR flight from Newport, OR to Albion, CA (KONP OTH CEC FOT ENI KLLR – click the image at right to see the route, which was VOR navigation the whole way), and had not a single hitch.

So I’m REALLY happy. The sim loads fast and runs great. There are a few micro stutters, but I disabled hyper threading to try to maximize my VAS usage and tomorrow I’ll re-enable it and set my Affinity Mask back to 116, and that should be the end of those. Most important, my memory usage is rock solid, with my available VAS never dropping below 1.3 gig. Now I just need to ping Flight1 support and see what’s up with the GTN. Maybe they know of a fix. In the meantime, it sure is fun flying the basement sim.

The Great Memory Leak Hunt

Posted on by Basement Fly Guy

A few weeks back I upgraded the sim software to Prepare3d 3.2, and as I posted here it generally went great but did create a few issues, one of which was a memory leak leading to out of memory errors (known as a OOM in the sim community). For those who are new to this, both Prepar3d and Flight Simulator X are 32-bit programs, meaning they are written for platforms from the first generations of powerful desktop PCs (which had 32-bit architectures). At some point this is too much inside baseball, but the important thing is that because these programs run on a legacy set of code that’s more than 10 years old, they can only access a total of about 4 gig of RAM (called VAS, for “virtual address space”). So even though my PC has 16 gig of fast memory available, the sim can only get to a portion of it.

As the sim loads scenery, other aircraft, clouds, etc., it fills that memory up, and at some point there’s not enough left for it to run and the software crashes. FSX historically isn’t great at freeing up new memory as you fly over new terrain and the old terrain is not longer visible. P3D is better. But with both, OOM errors can happen when you have lots of complex scenery, aircraft, and add-ons, so you want to preserve your available VAS memory as best you can.

Which is why the memory leak I had after the upgrade was a big deal – it was chewing through my VAS at an alarming rate, even as I was just sitting on the tarmac. At first I thought Active Sky Next was the issue, but a re-install of that seemed to run ok. Then I thought it was Multi Crew Experience, an add-on I use to talk to the computer ATC in my own voice (and that I really love). MCE runs outside of the sim software, so it shouldn’t eat VAS, but it’s in the mix so I’m looking at it. I’ve since re-installed both, and done a full reinstallation of P3D. The VAS usage is better, but still not as good as it should be, and it seems to be worse with MCE running. I’m going to spend some time this morning taking out add-on scenery, aircraft, and the rest, and then adding them back one-by-one to find out what the issue is. I’ll report here when I have it cracked.

In the meantime, there’s a good thread on VAS / OOM management here for those who want to learn more.

New Additions: Cessna Appointments

Posted on by Basement Fly Guy

One of the things I’m trying to do with the basement sim is make it as immersive as possible as a general aviation aircraft without typing it too closely to one particular plane. It’s primarily modeled on a Cessna 182 (panel size and shape, cabin dimensions, etc.), and that’s the GA aircraft I fly most often in the simulator, but I also fly Pipers, Mooneys, and other aircraft, and want the interior to be general enough that I can do this without breaking the illusion.

All that said, it’s more C182 than anything else, and as I’ve been adding appointments to the cabin it’s been C182 stuff that I’ve been looking for. Last weekend I was able to add two new ones, and I think they turned out pretty cool.

The first is air vents. Cessna GA aircraft have air vents that stick out above the pilot / co-pilot foreheads at the top of the windshield (and that come out from the leading edge of the wing where it joins the cabin). Sometimes these look like little stovepipes (on older Cessnas), and more recently they are ball-and-socket vents. I was able to find two ball-and-socket vents from an actual aircraft on Ebay, and last weekend built small side panels so I could attach them to the cabin. I think they turned out really well. Here are some shots:

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With the vents and C812 sun visors, I think the front of the sim is really starting to look like a real aircraft. It also smells a bit like old airplane, which I don’t mind at all.

Also last week I found on Ebay some C182 door assist handles. They match the tan color scheme, and while used, had new brackets so they look great. Here’s a shot of the one on the right side of the cabin:

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From an appointment standpoint there’s really only one thing left to get, and that’s door handles. I’d like to get real ones from a C182 if I can. They pop up on Ebay sometimes, but the prices are often too high, or it’s one one handle instead of two, or they either black or silver but not a matching pair. So I’m just watching and waiting. In the meantime, sometimes I forget I’m not sitting in my basement, which is sort of the point!