Flight sim expo

Life has been busy over the past few weeks. Most of it related to TFM. This week’s blog post isn’t going to be very long. However, it has important points to take note of during the next few months. Our main topics this week are concerns about first officer pro/next, SimBrief, and SimFlight Expo in June 2023.

What about the PMDG 747?

We will continue support for the PMDG 747 series. However, other matters take priority. We will continue the 747 later this spring/summer. See the following sections for the reasons why we postponed the 747 cycle.

Concerns about first officer pro/next

We aren’t involved with first officer pro/next development. However, we did make some recommendations some time ago on how to make FSO more accessible. Unfortunately, most of those recommendations weren’t implemented, nor plan to be implemented any time soon. This is a cause for concern in the future. To address those concerns, we started working on our own first officer. So far, it is for the PMDG 737. We are starting with manual flows, then will work into auto flows later on. There isn’t a time on when it will be finished, so stay tuned in for future updates. The reasons why we pushed first officer/flows to the top of the list are below.

Accessibility is an unknown in future first officer updates.
It appears that first officer pro/next is expanding into other things, straying away from a first officer addon.
First officer seems to progressively get more difficult to understand and use.

SimBrief support

We are starting support for the popular SimBrief flight planning service found at www.simbrief.com. To support the first officer features in the PMDG 737, we have to move SimBrief support to the top of the list, pushing the PMDG 747 down to the bottom of the to-do list. So far, TFM has support for the basic parts of the navlog in the flight plan. For those who build TFM from source, you can find the navlog by validating your SimBrief user ID (a 6+ digit number) in TFM settings, then pressing right bracket, then CONTROL+SHIFT+B to open the SimBrief flight plan window. Note that the SimBrief flight plan window is under development and will change before it comes out in a preview build.

We are getting ready for Flight Sim Expo in June of 2023. The Expo takes place in Houston Texas, United States from June 23 – 25 2023. We are on the schedule and will give an update on TFM since the last time it was presented at Flight sim expo. For those attending in person, we will be there to meet you face-to-face. We hope to see you there. Updates on presentation time will be announced when we are close to that time.

It is hard to believe time passes so quickly. However, we are already at week 18 in our PMDG 737 rebuild series. This week, we have been working on the new Vatsim mode mentioned last week. We also are applying to be a presenter/speaker at the 2023 Flight sim expo in Houston Texas. Finally, we want to announce the upcoming fall 2022 survey, explained later. With the exciting news let out of the bag, let’s get started!

Vatsim mode

Vatsim is a virtual network of people getting together as pilots and air traffic controllers to provide a realistic flying experience in the simulator. We were given a web service that provides traffic and controller data provided by Vatsim. TFM is going to make use of this data, turning it into a Vatsim mode.

So far, the live traffic tab of the TFM radar is working. You can see the callsign, distance to the pilot, altitude, heading, bearing to the listed pilot’s location, their ground speed, and the rank or pilot rating for each person in the list. You can filter out pilots beyond a provided distance, much like a live radar works. For instance, typing ‘600’ in the radar distance box will only list pilots that are 600NM or less from your current location. We plan on adding other features to the radar. Some of the improvements include column sorting, filtering based on a column, and the ability to reorder columns in the lists.

Flight sim expo 2023

We are applying to be a speaker at Flight sim expo 2023. If approved, at least one of us will make the trip to Houston TX to give the presentation. To anyone who is going, we would like to meet you in person. We will let readers know more when we know the next steps to follow.

Fall survey 2022

Each year, we put out a survey that asks community members to affirm our direction over the next year. The survey typically asks questions about the direction of existing projects such as the PMDG 737 rebuild series, future plans, and queries users about new projects. This year’s survey will be available after Oct 1 2022, and will end on the last day of November 2022. When it becomes available, we ask everyone take 5-10 minutes and complete it. The answers do help us during the next year.

We will see everyone during week 19 of the PMDG 737 rebuild series. Stay tuned!

SimBrief, first officer, and Flight sim expo 2023