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What is - most likely - included in FV 1.11


pellelil

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In this topic I plan to describe the features that are most likely coming in version 1.11. Some of the items are fully implemented, some will be work in progress. Everything is subject to change, and I can't offer a deadline. Feel free to comment, ask questions and suggest other features. 

 

It have only been a few days since 1.10 was released:

 

However I have already begun working on version 1.11. The main theme for version 1.11 is update of the data-files, including the bundled flightplans. All obsolete flightplans will be removed from the installer, however the installer will NOT touch any of flighplans you might have installed.I plan to release a list of obsolete/removed flightplans so you can use this list with the Enable/Disable flightplans window introduced in version 1.10 to disable these flightplans if you choose to do so. I've always believed in giving credit where credit is due, so in version 1.11 a tool tip will show who created each flightplan when you hoover the mouse over the active flightplan in the combo-box:

 

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The installer will not overwrite flightplans already on your computer when you run the installer. So I will suggest you remove old flightplans before running the 1.11 installer, to have the updated flightplans (containing author information) being installed. All new flightplans will be installed (if you choose to do so). I consider removing the BizzJet flightplans from the "normal" installer and put these into a separate download/installer as I guess most users don't fly BizzJet? Let me know what you think.

 

While importing the new flightplans I will update the supplied data-files as well. As of now 5 new aircraft have been added. Some of these are not in use as of now, so they will be using a fictive ICAO-code until the real one is known (but at least the aircraft will be available when we start to see flightplans utilizing these).

 

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In version 1.10 a new form was added to enable/disable flightplans. In version 1.11 this form will get some additional attention. For one a "Delete selected flightplans" button have been added in the left side of the form (showing sub-folders). The "Delete" button in the top will fully delete a sub-folder and all its content, whereas the new "Delete selected flightplans" will only delete the selected flightplans. Its only possible to delete flightplans that have been moved to one of the sub-folders (at least there will always be a "Disabled" sub-folder, but you can add more yourself). As mentioned elsewhere the "Disabled" folder is special in that it can not be deleted, nor can it be marked as enabled:

 

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In version 1.10 a sub-folder always contains disabled flightplans (these flightplans will not be loaded into memory). However in version 1.11 you are able to mark a sub-folder as being enabled. In the screen-shot above you can see the sub-folder "Vanilla_BizzJet" have been marked as enabled due to the check-box in the top of the screen being checked. So even though these BizzJet flightplans are placed in a sub-folder, they will be loaded into memory. This makes it very easy to quickly enable/disable flightplans without having to move the files to/from the root-folder. For the same reason the two buttons between the two list-boxes have been renames from enable/disable into "To sub-folder" and "To root-folder". With these changes there is little-, to no- reason to manually open an explorer window and manually move/delete flightplan files,

 

Newly imported flightplans will always be imported into the Root-folder, but using this form they can easily be moved to another sub-folder afterwards.

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Still not 100% happy about the "Enable / disable flightplans" form I changed it some more and gave it a few additional features. If you look at the previous screen-shot you will see the left side is dedicated to the "Root folder" and the right side is dedicated to the sub-folders, But then I got to think, what if you want to move a file from one sub-folder to another sub-folder? Then you have to first move it from sub-folder1  to the root and then move it again to sub-folder2.

 

So therefore I decided to put a folder combo-box on the left-side also. The first item in this combo-box is "[ROOT]". This item is only available in the left side, and its the default item. The "Disabled" sub-folder is only available (and default) in the right-side. All other sub-folders will be available in both sides. The buttons "Add new" and "Delete" to add/delete sub-folders are only present in the right-side and it always related to 1. level sub-folders to the ROOT-folder. Likewise the "Delete selected flightplans" button is only present in the right side.

 

Previously the form had 3 radio-buttons that let you decide what the program should do in case of duplicates when moving files. In the new updated version there are 5 radio-buttons split in 2 sections. The first section of 3 radio buttons is identical to what we had before. The 2nd section contains 2 new radio-buttons and these lets the user specify what to do in case of duplicate files when copying files.. In other words when one of the first 3 radio buttons is active files will be moved and if one of the last 2 radio buttons are active files will be copied. Last but no least the buttons to move/copy files between then 2 list-views was renamed into "To right-side >>" and "<< To left-side"

 

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Finally there is no longer any need to navigate to the UserData folder and manually edit the settings file in case you want to change any of the settings, as a new settings form have been added. This form is a work in progress, as I have some additional things I an considering to add. Anyway here is how currently look:

 

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If/when you click the OK button the map will be reconfigured for the changes and the flightplans will be reloaded using the new settings.

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Still trying to minimize the need to navigate to to to the UserData folder to manually edit the files there (BTW; You should remember to backup this folder along with the flightplan folder). So in version 1.11 it will be possible to edit the UserAirportRedirect.xml file directly from the program. In the past you had to close down FV, manually edit the file in a text-editor, and then reopen FV afterwards. Now you simply open this from via the menu, do your changes, and click the "OK" button:

 

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I am guessing many of you have not totally got the meaning of these redirections, but once 1.11 becomes ready for release I plan to record a video showing whats new in version 1.11 and go into detail with some of the new changes. I have some additional things I like to implement regarding the airport-redirection however I think that will be for a future version.

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In version 1.11 it will be even more easy to see the traffic going into/out-of a particular Airport. When you open the airport-info form it will default to show the traffic going into/out-of this airport based on the selected flightplan or last search performed on the main form (just as it have always done). However in version 1.11 a combo-box have been added to the Traffic tab-sheet. This combo-box lets you switch between the default value ("Selected flightplan or last-search on main form") or as shown here: "All flights to/from this airport". When you pick this value the program will find/display all flights to/from this airport.:

 

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As the eagle eyed of you might have noticed the form above have had a new tab-sheet ("Nearby Airports"). As the name denote this tab-sheet will show the airports that are nearest to the selected Airport. By default it will only show airports (sorted by distance) that are within 100 NM of the selected airport and it will only show airports classified as "Minor" or above ("Medium" and "Major"), hover using the combo-box you can both choose a greater max. distance (max 500 NM) or smaller size-classification ("Small" or "Tiny"). This feature can be used to find alternate airports, both to the used as alternates for your flights, or as redirection airports in case a flightplan reference an airport you don't have in your sim:

 

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The file format of Flightplan files have changed between version 1.10 and 1.11. In 1.11 the files have changed into a binary format with a new extension. The first time you run version 1.11 you will first be presented with this message-box:

 

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Once you click the OK button, you will be presented with the "Result Viewer" which basically informs you that each and every flightplan have been converted to the new format:

 

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If you restart the program you should not see either of these windows, as all flightplans will then at that point use the new file-format (and extension). Did a test with the new and the old file-format (based on a test with 299 commercial flightplans). The total size of these flightplans is only about 8% of the old format (a reduction  from about 100 MB down to 8 MB). Likewise all the files in the Data folder have also changed to a binary format (reducing the requirement from approx 14 MB to 1.5 MB). Its not a" lot", but for those of you who want to limit the footprint on your C-drive.

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As explained previously the chart tab-sheet of the Airport-info form have been extended by a combo-box that chose the "traffic" displayed on the "Legs" and "Traffic" tab-sheet (it defaults to: "Selected flightplan or last-search on main-form", but "All flights to/from this airport" can be selected in stead). On the "Traffic" tab-sheet 2 new pie-charts have been added to show "Inbound from airport" and "Outbound to airport":

 

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As visible in the screen-shot above, we here see (all) the flights into ELLX (Luxembourg) airport, sorted by departure airport. On a daily average (based on the AI-traffic installed) an average of 6.57 flights will arrive at ELLX from EDDM (Munich), 5 will arrive from EGLC (London City), 4 will arrive from EDDF (Frankfurt) and so on sorted in decreasing order. 


Like with all of the other graphs if you chose a specific weekday, you will see an exact number of flights for that weekday in stead of an average. In the screen-shot below "Monday" have been selected. Not only will you see an exact number of flights for each departure airport, but you will also see fewer airports. This is because it is not every day that ELLX receives traffic for all departure airports that have traffic into ELLX (e.g. there are no flights from EGBB into ELLX on a Monday):

 

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In Version 1.11 I have managed to optimize the search browsers (used when searching for airports, airlines and aircraft). Not that these were too bad before. However in version 1.11 these have become super smooth (partly thanks to better utilization of multiple cores). In version 1.10 searching for an airport by ICAO code (where you enter an ICAO code you know), it was not unsual it would perform the search before you finished entering all 4 letters (depending on how fast you typed) so when you finished entering the last letter (in which case it should re-start the search) the first search was still running so it took a small fraction of a second before you saw the result of the last search. In version 1.11 it's just so much better. The airport- and airline browsers are still by default limited to only display the first 2000 elements it finds (the aircraft-browser have no limit, but there is not even 2000 different aircraft-types in the program). Raising the "Show max" limit you can populate the search-browser with more results but it will still affect the performance if you set up the airport browser to show all 25000'ish airports. But then again why would you want to display 25000 airports and manually scroll the list, when there are so many ways to filter the result?

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No not yet. When I began working on 1.11 I just wanted to add a few features I had in my mind, and then I would update all of the flightplans with the latest released by AIG. However as of now I still haven't imported a single flightplan 🙂 Some of the features I have added will assist me when I am going to import the flightplans, and I wanted to update/change the file-format BEFORE I imported any flightplans, to ensure all new flightplans will be in the new format). Other features was added because of your comments, even though not explicit requested (e.g. being able to quickly see in-/outbound flights for a particular airport, and the new graphs showing in-/outbound traffic based on departure/arrival- airport).

 

I still have a feature I want to add, to assist when importing airports, and then its time to first figure out which flightplans to remove because they are outdated or obsolete, which flightplans to update, and perhaps add new flightplans (in case of new/merged airlines). Planing to record a new tutorial video, with what is new in 1.11 and going into detail with the changes regarding importing flightplans. Then comes updating the installer (change regarding the new/removed flightplans), and finally "the release".

 

I hope to be able to finish it all within the first 2 weeks of July as I will be extremely busy at the last haft of July with other tasks. So you have to be patient for a little while more 🙂

 

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