SimBrief

SimBrief user interface

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Welcome back to another blog post. It has been a few weeks since the last post, so let’s get caught up. We don’t have any newly completed features to show. However, we do have some points to consider when creating a balance between functionality and ease of use in TFM’s user interface.

More features aren’t always better.

 

For the past few weeks, we have been working on the SimBrief flight plan features. Several areas of the flight plan have lists of things like airports, aircraft settings, waypoints, etc. One could say that it is better to build a nice looking user interface which has all of the bells and whistles. On the other hand, a balance between user interface and ease of use is in order. Creating a highly complex user interface to allow column reordering, hiding and showing different columns, and allowing these settings to persist across restarts is good to have. It means the user can customize as much of the user interface as they wish. However, we don’t want to create busy work for the user, forcing them to lose the whole point of TFM or the SimBrief flight plan features. So, what does this mean for TFM? Read below.

 

The SimBrief window

 

The SimBrief window is split into different sections. The window mirrors most other TFM windows with the tree view on the left and the content on the right 2/3rds of the screen. Our focus today is the SimBrief navlog.

 

The navlog window

 

The navlog window has a list view that displays the waypoints in the flight plan. The most commonly used columns are present. They are ident, type, name, distance, and altitude. There are around 40 other columns that aren’t included in the list of waypoints. To access them, bring up the context menu for the navlog list, then click on more details… A new window will open. The remaining information will appear in the text field in the more details window. To close the more details window, press ALT+F4. You will also have the ability to hide and show columns that are included in the navlog list. To show or hide them, bring up the navlog’s context menu, navigate to show/hide columns. Open this menu to see the columns and their current state. Click on a column name to show or hide it in the list. The other sections of the SimBrief window will have similar features to help customize the user interface.

 

The next preview build

 

The next preview build will come when the SimBrief window is mostly finished. We hope to have it done and released as a preview before Flightsim Expo in June.

SimBrief, first officer, and Flight sim expo 2023

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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.

 

Flight sim expo

 

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.