JFS & MSFS2020

[stevieb]

@picnic: Yes, it is. Many thanks, I'll follow it up further in that thread.

[wolfmanslack]

Hi Everyone,

I am a new member to this Forum, Firstly a huge thanks to Peter and others that have helped make this a great tool for getting us to be able to fly together in the different sims.

I have downloaded the new Beta version, I have my sim running (MSF 2020) but it does not pick up that my sim is running..

Am I not doing something correct??

[Peter]

Hi Everyone,

I am a new member to this Forum, Firstly a huge thanks to Peter and others that have helped make this a great tool for getting us to be able to fly together in the different sims.

I have downloaded the new Beta version, I have my sim running (MSF 2020) but it does not pick up that my sim is running..

Am I not doing something correct??

Hi, does the simulator button stay red? What happens when you click on it? Do you have FSX or P3D, and does that connect? Does the 1.4.34 JoinFS connect?

Also, could you check the View|Monitor window and see if anything shows up there?

Peter

[JEA]

Thanks Peter, for making a test version available.
Last night I used the test version with a friend, and we saw each other perfectly. Strange thing, I was using test, and he was using the normal version.!!
We were both using MSFS 2020. Then I gave him the link to the test version, which he installed, then changed to P3D. Everything good, with the expected situation that he saw me as a P3D aircraft, but a quick substitution corrected that. He indeed, saw my labels, but as others have reported, MSFS 2020 does not see labels. I did notice, however, that MSFS 2020 ai traffic do show labels in JoinFS TEST. !! Strange one !!!
Many thanks, Peter, for trying to sort the problems......I think we are nearly there
Regards, Tony

[DaveGHERC]

Huge thanks Peter for updating JoinFS and continuing to make it available to us for free.

We tested 2020/FSX/XP today and noted that only the 2020 user needed to use the test version of JFS for us all to be able to see each other.

Substituting aircraft worked as normal in all 3 sims.

In the aircraft list. "Callsign" correctly shows the tail number as set in the ATC section of 2020, while "owner", as we know is the nickname a user has set in JFS settings. Non-2020 users now find that LNM correctly shows the callsign/tail number of 2020 aircraft when connected with JFS.

Copying weather works to a degree. A 2020 user trying to copy weather from an FSX user results in the wind changing, but not precipitation (we used heavy show) and I did not notice if the cloud layer changed.

The recorder works perfectly.

Cockpit sharing (on the ground, tested with all users in C172) works well. Two 2020 users could correctly share and hand over controls with gauges working correctly. However an FSX user taking over controls from a 2020 user found that his RPM gauge did not work and the artificial horizon was in the "off" orientation.
After sharing, the two aircraft stubbornly stuck together, even after pilot 2 left the cockpit and permissions were revoked. Neither pilot could then properly control their aircraft. We BOTH had to close JFS to break the link. Not a big issue IMO.

As an aside, we noticed an error/easter egg in one of the 2020 models. "Cessna 172SP Asobo Air Traffic 00", which I presume is an AI model was used as a substitution - unfortunately it has the lower half of a human figure dangling from the aircraft which drags along the runway on take-off. Quite amusing.

legs.jpg (28.93 KiB) Viewed 9821 times

legs2.jpg (20.81 KiB) Viewed 9821 times

[Peter]

That's great, Tony, thanks for the feedback. I'll investigate the labels. I'm sure there must be a way to get that working if other AI traffic have labels.

Dave, thanks for the feedback, I'll take a look at those minor cockpit issues. I like the dangling legs as well, nice touch. Could be to do with an animation state not being set. Could be a tricky one to track down.

Peter

[Ron Attwood]

Welcome back Peter. Don't spend any time on the dangly legs, they are a MSFS feature. Seen on the odd occasion.

Try as I might I can't find the location required to scan models in 2020. I've checked through the forum but not turned anything up.

Also, on the Scan for models window it says 'Simulator: Kittyhawk'

[Peter]

Welcome back Peter. Don't spend any time on the dangly legs, they are a MSFS feature. Seen on the odd occasion.

Try as I might I can't find the location required to scan models in 2020. I've checked through the forum but not turned anything up.

Also, on the Scan for models window it says 'Simulator: Kittyhawk'

Hi Ron, hope you're well.

Basically, you're looking for the place where the aircraft are located and usually contain the file 'aircraft.cfg'. So, if you use Windows Explorer you should be able to use the search box to locate where those files are. They are either under your main FS installation folder, or wherever your packages folder is, if you can find it. I would go for the brute force approach and use Explorer to search for 'aircraft.cfg' in the root folders of all your drives. Bearing in mind this will also find them in your P3D/FSX installations as well.

Kittyhawk. It's a funny one that. That's the information that comes back from SimConnect. I assume it's the code name for the original flight sim project during development.

Peter

[Ron Attwood]

Basically, you're looking for the place where the aircraft are located and usually contain the file 'aircraft.cfg'.

Peter

Aye, there's the rub. Most of the Asobo aircraft don't have an aircraft.cfg

Sorry, Yes I'm as well as an old fart can be, thanks.

[Peter]

Aye, there's the rub. Most of the Asobo aircraft don't have an aircraft.cfg

Yes, some aircraft are protected with DRM, although some aren't. As I've just suggested on another thread, you could switch off 'model scan on connection' in the JoinFS settings and just rely on JoinFS to auto populate the model list which it now does in the TEST version. Don't worry, I'll soon publish a new release version with this change. Basically JoinFS will automatically build the model list whenever it sees a new aircraft in your simulator. The only downside is that if a network pilot has an aircraft that isn't yet listed in your JoinFS then you'll have to temporarily load it to get it into the model list.

Peter

[JEA]

Hi again,
Tried out the latest test version tonight, three of us....initially superb. All MSFS aircraft visable, and smooth as silk. Well, at least two of us were (UK). One of my colleague's lives in Lanzarote, and his internet dropped out many times. We were connected via Global. His aircraft was dancing from side to side, and shaking, until he dropped connection. So I set up a hub, and we tried that, smoother, but he kept dropping off again. So as a final test, the other colleague (UK) disconnected, and I flew away from the airport, and the other colleague then remained connected. This situation remained, until I flew back to the airport, when once again, he lost connection. I assume this is all due to the distance, poor internet and not JoinFS. We are going to try again later today, we will not be beaten...lol
So, initially, we are all pleased with the success so far. Oh, by the way, the session aircraft show in FS Tramp. Once, hopefully, the label problem is sorted, it will be 'the bee's knee's.
Before that, I will be testing with some FSX, P3D and MSFS fliers, so we will see how that progresses.
Regards

Tony.

[Peter]

Hi Tony,

yes, that does sound as though it's their internet connection that is the problem. Out of interest, is it possible to get some stats on his connection? i.e. broadband download/upload speed and latency. There are several websites that can calculate this information. I know of http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest and http://www.speedtest.net. It might be useful to know the quality of the connection.

Glad everything else went smoothly.

Peter

[Dave Torkington]

Hi Peter,

I'll answer directly if I may - I've made a test of my internet connection using dslreports:-

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/66070767

Hope it makes some sense to you! I don't like the sound of 'Bufferbloat'...

Best regards and thanks again, Dave.

[Peter]

Hope it makes some sense to you! I don't like the sound of 'Bufferbloat'...

Best regards and thanks again, Dave.

Hmm, doesn't look too bad really. I get B for Buffer Bloat, but I think that's just to do with high volume traffic and JoinFS doesn't use that much. Your quality is A which sounds good.

Are you doing anything else with the connection when you are flying? What sort of values do you see in the Latency column in the Users view?

Peter

[Lemeser]

Hello Peter, how are you, I use joinfs mostly for ATC with my friends we were using the 1.4.34 version but most of us now have the new MSFS 2020 so we are trying this new test version, the way we use it is by connecting to a server pc running joinfs and getting the info from the whazzup.txt file and for radar scope we use a program called little nav map, the issue we have is that all the aircrafts appear heading north regardless of their actual heading, in stead they show the magnetic variation, do you know what could be causing this?

[Peter]

Hello Peter, how are you, I use joinfs mostly for ATC with my friends we were using the 1.4.34 version but most of us now have the new MSFS 2020 so we are trying this new test version, the way we use it is by connecting to a server pc running joinfs and getting the info from the whazzup.txt file and for radar scope we use a program called little nav map, the issue we have is that all the aircrafts appear heading north regardless of their actual heading, in stead they show the magnetic variation, do you know what could be causing this?

Ah, yes, apparently it's not writing the heading to the correct position in the file. I just need to find out where it is supposed to go. Should be fixed in the next version.

Peter

[BG2518-Bob]

Hi Bob, very well thanks. It certainly has been quite a while.

That's a bit annoying that 2020 doesn't show labels. Do you know if they show when using vPilot? I assume you see labels with 2020's own multiplayer?

The PlanG issue is likely to be related to PlanG. I'll have to check in my old version 3.2.0. As picnic says his old version is working.

Nice to hear that it is all working well. Hopefully I'll be able to get the release version updated if nothing else crops up.

Peter

I know nothing about vPilot.
Yes, do see labels within 2020's multiplayer.
The Plan-G issue was resolved by using their option 1 (of 2) Simconnect within their version Build 232

JoinFS (other than labels) seems 100% to me.

Cheers

[Dave Torkington]

Hope it makes some sense to you! I don't like the sound of 'Bufferbloat'...

Best regards and thanks again, Dave.

Hmm, doesn't look too bad really. I get B for Buffer Bloat, but I think that's just to do with high volume traffic and JoinFS doesn't use that much. Your quality is A which sounds good.

Are you doing anything else with the connection when you are flying? What sort of values do you see in the Latency column in the Users view?

Peter

Hi Peter,

I've tried to eliminate any demands on my connection while trying to find the cause of my dropping off JoinFS. So I've turned off AI Traffic in MSFS, I've switched off 'Live Weather', lowered my graphics setting to 'Medium' from 'High End' and I'm not using any browsers in the background.
However, I do use Teamspeak. I will test in a session without using TS.

I'm seeing Latency from two other Users of around 100Ms with spikes up to 400Ms about every 10 - 20 seconds.

During last nights JoinFS session [of about 2 - 3 hours on MSFS] I dropped off the JoinFS session at least 20 times. At the same time, I dropped off Teamspeak too. At our next evening testing I will leave TS off and see the results.

I have also experienced JoinFS 'locking up' at random times [during last nights flying it occured 5 or 6 times] so that the main window and any other windows open are not clickable at all. Unfortunately I can't see whether the lock ups are related to spikes in the Latency.

Regards, Dave.

[Peter]

Hi Peter,

I've tried to eliminate any demands on my connection while trying to find the cause of my dropping off JoinFS. So I've turned off AI Traffic in MSFS, I've switched off 'Live Weather', lowered my graphics setting to 'Medium' from 'High End' and I'm not using any browsers in the background.
However, I do use Teamspeak. I will test in a session without using TS.

I'm seeing Latency from two other Users of around 100Ms with spikes up to 400Ms about every 10 - 20 seconds.

During last nights JoinFS session [of about 2 - 3 hours on MSFS] I dropped off the JoinFS session at least 20 times. At the same time, I dropped off Teamspeak too. At our next evening testing I will leave TS off and see the results.

I have also experienced JoinFS 'locking up' at random times [during last nights flying it occured 5 or 6 times] so that the main window and any other windows open are not clickable at all. Unfortunately I can't see whether the lock ups are related to spikes in the Latency.

Regards, Dave.

Interesting. Those latency values don't look too bad to me. Bear in mind that these aren't the same as network ping values. These ones include all the extra time in processing the data with JoinFS, so they look reasonable.

Given that your Teamspeak also dropped out, it sounds like an issue with your system. It's also interesting that you found JoinFS to be unresponsive. That will certainly cause dropouts since no processing will be happening at all. Have you tried looking at Windows Task Manager and monitoring exactly what's happening on your network card and also on your CPU. Is the CPU getting maxed out? Have a look a the process list and sort by CPU to see if there is a process hogging the machine. It sounds like your system isn't running as smoothly as it should be. If the CPU is getting overloaded, you may want to look at any software you have running in the background, perhaps a bit of system maintenance, such as checking your hard drive free space. I've seen some systems before where simply uninstalling unused software and removing things from the task bar can vastly improve the responsiveness of the machine.

Peter

[Dave Torkington]

Interesting. Those latency values don't look too bad to me. Bear in mind that these aren't the same as network ping values. These ones include all the extra time in processing the data with JoinFS, so they look reasonable.

Given that your Teamspeak also dropped out, it sounds like an issue with your system. It's also interesting that you found JoinFS to be unresponsive. That will certainly cause dropouts since no processing will be happening at all. Have you tried looking at Windows Task Manager and monitoring exactly what's happening on your network card and also on your CPU. Is the CPU getting maxed out? Have a look a the process list and sort by CPU to see if there is a process hogging the machine. It sounds like your system isn't running as smoothly as it should be. If the CPU is getting overloaded, you may want to look at any software you have running in the background, perhaps a bit of system maintenance, such as checking your hard drive free space. I've seen some systems before where simply uninstalling unused software and removing things from the task bar can vastly improve the responsiveness of the machine.

Peter

Hi Peter,

Thank you very much for your analysis and recommendations! No I haven't tried monitoring Network, CPU usage or a process draining resources... I'll certainly investigate tomorrow and report back.

I'm also still considering my internet connection as a potential cause because we are part of a Fibre / Microwave network supplying our village [we're living up in the hills!]. However, I have to say that when using JoinFS for years with FSX, P3Dv4 and P3Dv5 I've never had such an issue.

Best regards,

Dave.