Landmark Events... hopefully without marking the land

[Darnit696]

So TG and I did our first multiplayer longhaul flight on Saturday. A whopping 9hour 47 minute run from Jhb to Heathrow in a 747-400.

I hosted and TG joined and left and joined and left as the day would allow...
It was really cool.

Things that we/I learned...

If you take off in South Africa at 10:35am .... its gonna be dark when you get to Heathrow.

There are a lot of airports around Heathrow...

If you are a wiseass and enable the Jeppsen real weather updated every fifteen minutes, well then, wiseass thats exactly what you will get... so dont be all surprised when you fly over London ... in the dark... and its overcast.

A 747 takes a lot of runway to land.

Its a very long and boring flight... you will run out of clever things to say about the GPS after 10 minutes and out of things to say about flying after another 10.

You can minimise your flight and run it in the background while you play GW. :) (this was a VERY significant discovery)

GW does not lag while running FSX in the background... I suspsect however that BF might.

You can go to your child's graduation and your brothers wedding and still get home in time for the landing.

Its pretty over the Sahara at sunset...

It was still worth it...

Oh and one thing I could'nt figure... no matter where I parked at Heathrow they would not allow me to use a jetway or refuel... I kept getting the message "You need to be parked at a park bay to use the jetway or the fuel truck" I rode the place flat and kept the pushback busy... I must tried dozens of spots all over the place no luck...


Last but not least... made it with 127 000 lbs of fuel to spare.

:D

EDIT: One last but not insignificant note... FSX is a miser when it comes to bandwidth usage... in 4 hours it used only 110 000 packets out... When TG went to do all the domestic stuffs it slowed to almost nothing...

[Alluvium]

that sounds soooo cool and so scaryly much like a job at the same time :p


so you do a real time flight , tag team style, that is funny :p

i would just crash stuff into buildings :(

[Nismo007]

Darnit - Did you find out how to skip all the other waypoints in between?

[TG]

Click cursor... select the target waypoint in the flightplan, click menu.

[Darnit696]

Yes and that loads a new flight plan to that target... I did this over the Med and nearly got into a spot of bother...

I thought I'd skip all the little way points over the Med and go straight to METT or something like that.. so after a little fiddling I got it to do that... then when I checked it was the ONLY waypoint on my flight plan in the GPS :yikes:

Fortunately I found that If you press SHIFT F10 and bring up the kneeboard then you can see your flight plan on "paper" so I was able to find the airport code for Heathrow (which is now forever buned into my memory EGLL) I loaded it and that stopped the sweating... :o

[Nismo007]

:D I still want to join you guys to go in for the landing, I can land all the small prop aircraft but the airliners are still a mission!

[TG]

Man, I did the area 51 mission the other day. Hoo boy did I cock up the landing on that baby. I eventually put it down off to the left of the runway, and then managed to veer back on to the runway sideways, all the time with brakes on full.

I think the passengers would rather take a fast mover than my flight again :p

[Albereth]

Took a 747 for a drive from Rio to Cape Town. ATC is great and all that, and they keep you to your plotted course. The GPS doesn't seem to get the same routing and kept on trying to return me to Rio.

Interesting course in that it isn't direct. There is a huge dog leg north. I know that aircraft don't like to be too far from land but I though that you had to be within 3 hours of an airfieldonly on anything less than a 747.

[Sminty]

so how do I get to be a passenger on these "flights"?

I won't mind as long as TG is landing the bird.

[Albereth]

Sminty, I think you'll need to ask TG and Darnit - I think they pulled it off the other night

[TG]

It's quite simple actually - when you figure out the niggly bits. You obviously need a copy of Flight Sim X. And you'll end up being co-pilot (although control can be passed to you).

You need to log on to the multiplayer, and locate the correct flight lobby.
We usually take flight training as it's empty so it's easy to find the game - however if your mate is on your buddy list, you can just click him and join his game.

The person hosting needs to have "shared" his plane, and the person who wants to hop in to a shared plane needs to make sure that he hasn't set his own plane to be shared. Then you can simply select 'Join Plane' or whatever the heck the option is in the session lobby. If the person who wants to be co-pilot HAS selected for his plane to be shared, he will discover that the 'Join Plane' (or whatever the heck the name of the button is) will be unavailable.

That's the only niggly bit that they fail to mention anywhere that I've noticed.

Bandwidth usage is minimal. When I was still on 384k, and my wife and I couldn't play any BFx(xxx) game online together, I could easily play FSim with Darnit while she [-]got slaughtered[/-] played online.

There was at least one sync-related issue that we saw... for e.g., the autopilot speed selector displayed differently, but we managed to manually sync it by dropping it to 0 and then re-setting it to where we wanted it.

There are numerous voice chat options for the hosted session. By default, you can speak to other pilots in the session by holding down caps-lock. There is a setting you can choose where there are multiple radio "channels", and you need to set your radio to the same channel in order to talk. Or there is 'free chat' where you don't need to press anything in order to chat. That, we discovered, is not really a good idea, especially after Darnit was subjected to me noisily blowing my nose. ;) -- I completely forgot that I could manually mute my mike :p

Anyway, being a co-pilot is quite fun. Although you can't physically fly the craft (unless the pilot passes control to you), you can still flip switches etc, adjust auto-pilot and whatnot.

Oh - and as long as the host has not shut down the game, you can pop in and out of the session as you please.

[Darnit EDIT: Being incredibly lazy this morning I just highlighted the most important part of all this blather. :p (Its in bold in case anyone wunders)]

[Albereth]

If you don't mind I'll copy that over to the wiki

[TG]

Go ahead ;)