More on TCAS: TAs and RAs missing?

[Cheyenne Chief Pilot 829]

Or are they inaccurately implemented at present?

 

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I can see that the aspiration of this product is rather impressive (as is evident from this - corrupt - panel state here), but it also seems that some of the systems are not really ready for release yet?!?  

 

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[Cheyenne Chief Pilot 829]

An odd situation yesterday (version was still 1.0.0.5c):

 

Had the non-threats and the close proximities, when one of the symbols turned into a red square (RA), but the automatic callout was "Traffic! Traffic!" (TA).

[The Dude 6537]

Clearly a case of artistic freedom by the dev.  

[Cheyenne Chief Pilot 829]

Looks like Hans himself voted you down for your reply.  

 

With that amount of artistic freedom, I'm just glad Hans didn't do the external modeling. Or the liveries.  

 

 

 

Bombardier Canadair Regional Jet Hans Edition:

 

[Hans Hartmann [OLD] 1419]

...and it certainly would be a huge improvement over the looks of an actual CRJ.

 

Regarding the TCAS: I'm still trying to find a source for some kind of official formula set for the RAs. All TCAS documentation I have found so far was just as useful as the marketing people who wrote it... Right now, there are only TA callouts for this reason and RA symbols are based on proximity. But since I have more time now, I might as well figure something out.

[Cheyenne Chief Pilot 829]

27 minutes ago, Hans Hartmann said:

(...) a source for some kind of official formula set for the RAs. All TCAS documentation I have found so far was just as useful as the marketing people who wrote it... (...)

 

Hans, I work in marketing, so I duly took offence at your post.  

 

A lot of formulas and conditions in here (ch. 3.15), very much over my head, admittedly. For a mid-level product, I'd be happy to just have some plausible stuff, with not too many false positives and/or false negatives. An authentic "TCAS simulator" would probably be a 20.000 EUR product by itself. (No idea how PMDG have done that since the 737NG for FS9 or how those former addon TCAS gauges work.)

 

https://www.icao.int/Meetings/anconf12/Document Archive/9863_cons_en.pdf

[Hans Hartmann [OLD] 1419]

21 minutes ago, Enter display name here said:

Hans, I work in marketing, so I duly took offence at your post.

That's why I said useful

 

The good old TCAS2v7.dll has been written by a guy from MIT (at least at the time). Even though it's only TCAS 2 v7.0 and not v7.1 it's probably still the most accurate DLL out there.The author gave it away for free to anyone who wanted to use it. However, it's a 32-bit DLL and doesn't work with P3Dv4 anymore. That's why many people had to start developing their own stuff which unfortunately isn't trivial at all. This was one of the reasons why I decided to start with a simplified version and look into details later, when I don't have 2 billion other things to do.

 

Thanks for the PDF. I need to take a closer look before I know if it's helpful or not.

[Airbus666 13]

34 minutes ago, Hans Hartmann said:

 This was one of the reasons why I decided to start with a simplified version and look into details later, when I don't have 2 billion other things to do.

 

This was a good decision. Setting priorities can always be essential.

[hals1010 41]

Hans, FYI (sorry, quite technical):

 

There's a workaround for using old 32-bit DLLs in a 64-bit environment. All you have to do is to create a (COM-)wrapper 32-bit process and implement an interface. The only problem is that the data has to be transferred ("marshaled") between the processes, which is not that effective. Might be worth a try if the data from that TCAS2v7.dll is not that much...

 

Regards,

Jörn