Mysterious Pilot

This is a sensitive point. If people start modifying core code because it a module isn't sufficient, then a system upgrade will cause all those changes to be gone. This causes that usually those involved would choose NOT to do the upgrade and rather than move along (and redo all the work) they stay behind (and I give them reason). A chained consequence of this, is that problems regarding older versions keep coming back on the support forum thus increasing the workload. If migration is made easier (I haven't done any yet :-) by minimizing the need of modifications to system code (as opposed to add-on modules), then we all move along forward. I am waiting for some bugs to be solved but I don't know whether my current installation would break (I have not modified any system code so far but need to add some changes). I am curious.

Any way to get Obsessed Blue without having to subscribe to yet another forum?

I concur :-) system time means nothing, it is just the time in real life whereas what it is really important is the simulated time in which the flight is performed, day or night conditions, etc. I hope this is fixed soon as it seriously limits the usability of the program in VAs that want to be more close to "reality".

I am a kACARs newbie but certainly no new ACARS user, this ACARS application is certainly much simpler in what it does than the other one I have used. But that is beside the point, here are some of the problems I found during my first flight: Don't really know what the "Select Aircraft" accomplishes, how would it know which of the many a/c should it load? I mean, For example for this flight could have used my freeware (PAD) DHC6 instead of the Aerosoft DHC6. It forgets to clear out the red "Connection Error" from the status bar, thus leading the user to believe that there is still a problem. It does not check for the actual Flight Simulator Time at which the flight was performed. Instead it shows and uses the computer's System time. This is very important because we want to enforce departure timeliness, actual schedule (not flying a night flight in day conditions) and perhaps even compute extra statistics such as day/night landings. If you use system time you can't do that. It did not detect I rached cruise altitude, nor it detected I was in the descent phase. It went from Climbing to Landed. The Comments field should actually be a multi-line text area, it is more suited for the task and more user friendly. Would be nice to use color coding for the square shaped result areas that are displayed below Get Flight Bid Info, Start Flight, etc. It would better alert the user because black simply appears to be like any other button rather than a message to the user. Does the Clear PIREP asks the user if he/she really wants to clear it? I was afraid to try in order not to lose my first PIREP :-) I am missing the profile feature. Would be more intuitive if the Connect/Disconnect and Log In states are more visible than just printing the status in the space below (that looks almost like a button itself). Color coding really highlights it. Would be nice to allow the user to save a copy of the ACARS LOG on his local hard drive. It can also serve as a safety net so that the user saves it prior to sending PIREP. If the PIREP sending fails and the program crashes then all is lost But all in all I like it, very promising! THANKS!

OK, I am getting ready to prepare for an actual VA inaugural flight and so I chose a flight and came to the pilot briefing form. These are my observations: NOTAMs: I get some invalid security cert. from the supposed FAA site. Anyway, perhaps it would also be nice if one could have a link to a virtual NOTAM to complement a real life one. Sometimes flying organizations have their own airport NOTAMs. Charts. The links for the arrival and departure charts actually points to www.airnav.com to search charts there. It totally omits the fact that one may have also inputted an URL to an airport chart when one created the airport in the database. To make this complete it would be a good idea to complement the airnav link with the link (if any) that the user has defined for THAT airport when the airport was added to the database. I think this was an accidental omission. Weather maps always default to US even though the airports are not in the US. Perhaps it should check the region code (K for USA) to determine whether it applies or not. Better yet, one can configure URLs for weather depending on the region so that the right map (if available) appears automatically.

I see that the system has two predefined types when creating schedules: Cargo and Passengers . Does it make any difference in terms of financials, points or whatever when you fly a cargo schedule in comparison to a passenger schedule? or is it there just for showing? The system also lets you define multiple airlines which are then selected when creating schedules. This makes it possible to create some sort of "alliance" or conglomerate where pilost can fly one airline schedule or the other (I suppose there are no restrictions, are they? However, here the system gets a bit confusing in that while it allows multiple airlines, it does not separate their financials (for what i have read) nor does it allow the system to have a default page (predefined) with information about that "airline" without requiring the user to write their own modules or stuff to do that. Just an observation. Also noticed that when you define airports you can enter the URL for a chart. However, this is rather simplistic as an airport usually has a series of charts (SID, STAR, APDC, etc.) One could for example have a one-to-many relationship in which charts are defined for an airport and the user can request basic information of a defined airport by means of a phpVMS url. This page could show stuff such as the links to the various charts (if any) that have been defined and associated to that airport and any other information the system has about it. Anyway, I have been playing around a lot with the system and analyzing its overall design, that's why these questions come up :-) I am on my way to launch my VA "conglomerate" (2 local airlines) by January 1st. That is my goal at least... I hope to integrate an exam system and having admissions contingent on being accepted once some theoretical AND practical exam get passed. Reason for that being simple, I don't want amateurs that fly a jet into a 1500 ft. airstrip or fly without having a clue about the instruments or being unable to follow procedures. Most of those people simply fall off eventually leaving you with inactive pilots. Sure, it will be more difficult to recruit but it motivates people to do their best, feel some accomplishment and be "surrounded" by people that are just as serious. Cheerios!

The problem with that is that one is bound to make an upgrade of the system and in such upgrade the modification one may have made to standard forms or logic will simply be gone. There could be a way to add certain features without having to mingle with the production code. I had this problem with some other VA software before. BTW. If you want to have people assigned special ranks like CEO, etc. You can work around it by adding the rank pictures and creating a static page called Staff where you list the staff. In many cases a staff person would also be a sim pilot so he would have -in principle- a regular sim pilot rank and an administrative rank. Anyway, I like phpVMS for what I have seen and played around so far, it seems I may after all have my VA running on January 1st :-)

Obviously that when you run a VA where the sim pilots have to make flights according to preset schedules, you want to enforce at least two things: a) That when necessary (some VAs allow you to use any a/c) the route is flown with THAT specific aircraft type, i.e. C208, B737, etc. Irrespective of livery of course. That if the schedule says departure time is 17:00 local time the ACARS checks during departure that the flight simulator TIME is set to around that specific time. Otherwise if the schedule calls for 21:00 and the pilot departs at 14:00 (daylight) then it would be incorrect to accept it. I was wondering if kACARS checks those things or at least provides the corresponding FS information so that one can validate the flight.

I did not make them inactive, if for some reason they became inactive then there must have been a glitch that reset the active flag by accident.

WideFS isn't that cheap, for that price you rather buy some other add-on IMHO. Anyway, in case somebody wonders it COULD be possible to use ACARS remotely without needing WideFS. How? using the FSX (sorry FS9 fans, it is old and people move on) SimConnect library. With the SimConnect library you can access -via the network- data from an FSX instance running on another PC without requiring FSUIPC or WideFS. One great example (really great) of this use is the Plan-G freeware flight planning software. I used it to run Plan-G as moving map on my old laptop while I had FSX running on the main PC. It worked great and I didn't have to buy WideFS.

I second the idea! people usually fly for more than one VA and having this feature available increases the chances that kACARS become accepted by more and more VAs.

Indeed! only I haven't used PHP in a long long long time (so long I do not wish to remember :-) at a time in my life I left PHP and Unix behind and was lured into the dark waters of .NET and never came back to PHP (or Linux for that matter) until now. Just trying to get my VA up & running asap without having to spend much time coding. Many years ago I used VAdmin but it was poorly coded and incomplete and ended up ditching the project after I had recruited some 5 pilots. Anyway, thanks for the modules, they have saved me quite some time, otherwise I think I would have simply forgotten about starting a VA again. A time saver indeed. I hope to share some of my simple modules when I get my other site up again (same reasons, I hate coding these days).

Well I am fine with English though I might consider supporting Spanish in the future. The "german" post says nothing about historical data. Somewhere it is suggested that the 1970 is because there is a PIREP with data set to 0 but I checked my database and there are no PIREP records (no flights have been filed yet). My TopPilot table is also empty so I don't know at the moment where it gets that December 1969 as start year. What I have done was to add this to your tp_index.tpl just before the while statement in the last part where it generates the historical data list. I don't know if it is correct because as I said, I have no pireps in my system. I just want to list the past 6 months. Now (dec. 2010) with no PIREPS I only get a single item (December 2010) listed in the historical data section. // @DEGT Fixed problem with TopPilot returning data from 1969. $monthsHistoryOffset = 6; // up to 6 months back $startyear = $today[year]; if ($today[mon] < $monthsHistoryOffset) { $startyear--; $startmonth = 12 - $today[mon]; } Perhaps it would be nice to make this configurable somewhere in the module. BTW is it the same to use $this->set(x,y) and Template::Set(x,y) ?

@SimPilot: I was getting an error in your default installation that said it was the wrong argument in foreach, exactly the line where you iterate through statistical records returned by the data layer. I have no PIREPs filed in my system as I want to iron out all system quirks before doing PR. I found a slight oversight in your code that could be fixed by changing that PHP code in touchdownstats_index.tpl as follows: <?php if ($stats === NULL) { echo '<tr><td colspan="5">No PIREPS match search criteria</td></tr>'; } else { foreach($stats as $stat) { $pilot = PilotData::getPilotData($stat->pilotid); $aircraft = OperationsData::getAircraftInfo($stat->aircraft); echo '<tr>'; echo '<td>'.PilotData::getPilotCode($pilot->code, $pilot->pilotid).' - '.$pilot->firstname.' '.$pilot->lastname.'</td>'; echo '<td>'.$aircraft->fullname.'</td>'; echo '<td>'.$stat->arricao.'</td>'; echo '<td>'.$stat->landingrate.'</td>'; echo '<td>'.date(DATE_FORMAT, strtotime($stat->submitdate)).'</td>'; echo '</tr>'; } } ?> It is always good to check for NULLs ;-) Also decided to add this to the table code above that script as follows: <table ....> <caption>Touchdown Statistics</caption> : </table>

How do I configure how far back in time I want the reports to appear? by default they start somewhere in 1970! I only want of the previous 6 months to a year.

Don't know why my posts are appearing twice lately...

It would be nice to be able to specify -on an item by item basis rather than as a whole- whether a download is public (anonymous & authenticated users) or just members only. It is not enough to just hide the link because anybody that knows the system can place a hot link to the item even if it does not appear listed on the public area.

I had the same problem of all flights in the schedule (airports too!) disappeared after I did an export. Never go them back. Yet the database still had all the data, very strange.

A static page (rather than a forum thread) would do you wonders. The fact that you will have your logo with link to your site at VA's site all over, and that you also have links to VA's using your software would be mutually beneficial and Google Robot likes that kind of thing too, the more the merrier.

For the sake of correctness I thought it would be okay to point out that in the Add Schedule form there is a field improperly named "Flight Level". This field expects a number indicating the amount of feet from sea level at which the flight is to be conducted (cruise altitude). Flight Level is a number in hundreds of feet for altitudes above the Transition Altitude. The notation of a flight level for 12,000 feet would be FL120. The Transition Altitude (TA) varies from country to country. For example in the US it is 18,000 feet whereas in The Netherlands it is around 4,500 feet. So it is the TA at which point you start referring as Flight Level instead of Altitude. Altitude is used below the Transition Altitude, for example 12,000 feet, which would be FL120 in The Netherlands but 12,000 in the US. Given that the field of this form expects an altitude, I think that to avoid confusion the corresponding label should be changed accordingly for the sake of correctness. Or it could be labelled "Cruise Altitude" (even better).

Thanks a lot! got it to work that way.

I am experimenting with the creation of custom add-on modules, at the moment without DB access. So I have a module PHP file that goes in modules/MODULE_NAME and the template file in the templates directory. Now, on the module file I process all input parameters that may be given on the URL as well as predefined class variables. What if I want to access the value of one of those variables of the module file back in the template? For example if I defined "var $testMe = true" within the module class that extends Codeon, how would I go about accessing this variable value from my template (TPL) file?

What if I have defined a class variable in the module class (the one that extends Codeon) and want to access that variable from the TPL (template) file?

The default skin (crystal) only has a content area that covers the whole width. I would like to use a skin that has a side column on the left and probably also one with side columns on the left and right in addition to the main content area. I have seen them in some of the other VAs, looked all over the SKINS forum but apparently all the skins are either outdated (don't work well with .944) or just dead links to sites that no longer exist. Anybody has one such current skins?

The default skin (crystal) only has a content area that covers the whole width. I would like to use a skin that has a side column on the left and probably also one with side columns on the left and right in addition to the main content area. I have seen them in some of the other VAs, looked all over the SKINS forum but apparently all the skins are either outdated (don't work well with .944) or just dead links to sites that no longer exist. Anybody has one such current skins?