Your helpful tips.

[reecemj]

Hi Steve thanks for all the tips. They sure help me to know what I can do with IF. Is it possible to put them all in a board index just tips only?

It would be nice to just scroll thru the tips and learn what other functions IF has. I really like that I can go back and see my old post on this site. I forgot how to do subsets and was able to find how to in a couple of minutes without bothering you.

[Steve Waite]

Hi Reece,

Yes would be very helpful and a great idea. I will hopefully get time to do that later on. In the meantime It's great to hear from you so don't worry about pestering me for help.

Best regards
Steve

[Steve Waite]

...here's one:

From the Arport/Home page we can move to a sub-section with a short key sequence using the popup menu shortcuts.

For example we get started and IF's got to the Airport/Home page with the icons along the bottom. To go straight to the flight generator page without using the mouse we can press "ESC" followed by "I" then "F" and the flight generator page appears.

Press "ESC" then "I" have a look at the menu options they can be accessed with the ESC key presses.

[Steve Waite]

Landing and Take Off distances

After a few flights logged, have a look at your stopping distances and also your takeoff distances in the de-briefs on the records page. Consider using the Aircraft Parameters Runway Length setting to ensure airports with runways too short for the aircraft are filtered out of searches. Also we can purposely limit the runway length to test our skill with shortest runways.

We don't want to come to a complete halt to see our stopping distance so IF predicts the distance based on your current retardation when you get down to 30knots. Same goes for takeoff, the distance to leave the ground from near zero knots is extrapolated.

We can set the speeds to what we want in settings.ini:
[Measurement]
StartSpeed=30
StopSpeed=30

If we taxi at 20knots and set off accelerating from there, as we pass 30knots IF extrapolates the starting location so we get a distance as if we started to accelerate from near standstill. On landing, once we have decelerated to below 30Knots the distance to the point of standstill is extrapolated so we get the stopping distance we might have achieved if we kept the brakes on.

[Steve Waite]

There's lots of talk about setting up the affinity of the sims to gain advantage over our "many core" CPUs.

IF was one of the first (if not the first) apps to control the affinity of other apps that we want to run with the sim.

We can use the "Start Other Apps" window on the front page popup menu to set the affinity of other apps. We select the time in relation to the sim when we want the app to start - start when we start IF, start just before the sim is started, just after the sim has started, and when the sim has completed loading scenery. Look in the help system for the keywords to set affinity in these settings. Anyone wants more help but not wanting to join the forum can contact me on AVSIM or the Contact address of the codelegend site.

Generally if the app (like P3D) makes its own affinity settings then we allow it to work that way, we set the Jobscheduler section in the cfg file of FSX or P3D so they manage their own affinity.

IF also has the ability to set the sim to find unused CPU time across the entire chip (expanded affinity) after it has completed its affinity setup. This can yield more (and in some cases less) performance so has to be understood and used carefully. See the installation pages on the forum for notes about expanded affinity - only available from IF.

[Steve Waite]

I was asked why in the kneeboard when we go into the NavLog page and look at the figures, all the waypoints are correct but the times and fuel are different?

Pretty straightforward this one. In the NavLog page you'll notice there's no cruise speed, or anything at all, it is just a basic estimate from the figures found in the aircraft files and some rough calculation for the ascent/descent speeds and so on.

In the Ideal Flight briefing we find the following:


Cruise Altitude: 6500 ft
Cruise Airspeed: 170 Kts

Ascent Airspeed: 135 Kts
Ascent Rate: 700 Fpm
Ascent Rate Above 4000 ft: 500 Fpm

Descent Airspeed: 170 Kts
Descent Rate: 1500 Fpm
Approach Speed (Knots True): 125 Kts
Landing Speed (Knots True): 95 Kts


The values we get are coming from the Aircraft Parameters page accessed off of the Aircraft and Flight Gen pages. We set up our climb/descent/cruise and all the other values - build a flight - then attempt to stick to them during the flight to give the repeat behaviour we need to interpret the performance of the aircraft. Most fuel discrepancies are through changes to climb speed or rate (we can set three phases of climb in IF) and taxi time.

I was just flying a test and all the values in the FMC come out exactly as with the IF briefing (>augmented and Pro versions export the gps components of the plan in FMC formats).

Although I can alter it, I left the stock NavLog page as it is, since we have all the information we need in the briefing for our particular flight.

[Steve Waite]

AI Traffic:

IF's Ai Traffic is not there to compete with or replace your traffic program - although it can. Rather, IF is designed to introduce a handful of planes along the route that you'll see operating no matter what time of day you make your flight.

There will be some in the air timed for you to see during your flight, coming and going from various airports along the way, others might be starting or arriving at your departure or destination..

If these aircraft are venturing away from you or going where you will never see them - they are sent out of the bubble and ejected from the sim *by the sim*. That's important because otherwise memory can be leaked if it is done incorrectly and FSX/P3D will be blamed. That's also happening for other traffic in the sim no matter how it is injected and so IF was noticed in the early days that the sim performed better with IF running. Settings are available to control the culling of Ai Traffic, these are discussed in the Installation part of the forums.

[Steve Waite]

...With airports that have official parking spots these alone can have Ai Traffic operating. No parking spots = no Ai Traffic.

If we start traffic from an airport less than half of the parking count will be available for departures. So if we have 8 spots only 3 may be available for setting off.

If you want your traffic program to put three aircraft there before IF you need to ensure your traffic addon injects the traffic before IF. IF waits till the end to do that so there's no excuse. If there are occupied spaces by your traffic addon IF doesn't get those planes injected for those spaces. Don't blame IF like Flight1 did in the early days, they of course are on-board now.

[Steve Waite]

There's a video on utube with IF10 and FSX in VR. It's a very funny vid done very well. The version he uses actually has a bug which reverses all the runways so he sets off into oncoming traffic landing. Also at the start he looks up and there's a jet going overhead leaving a vapour trail.

The jet overhead is injected by IF10 and the vapour trail is the result of IF10's realistic weather physics at high altitude - no need for a vapour-trail addon when using IF weather.

[Steve Waite]

OK, still in test but new version IF any moment now.

On the forums someone was trying to goad me into talking about IF by repeatedly banging on about Simstarter. A nice app. But it's not comparable to IF because IF is a plan generator that includes a .FLT with the .PLN, and with Pro and >augmented we get FMC files as well, then of course we have all the info in the html kneeboard browser. On top of that we can use IF to start the sim, monitor the flight, collect performance data, move our undocked windows to where we want them and de-caption those too.

If we simply spit out the flight and ignore IF from there it is still a whole lot better than any other auto-planner on the market that just spits out a plan and exports fmc files.

Plans are made from fsAerodata, PMDG, iFly, Level-D, and AXE datatsets, and also the navdataset contained within the sim - so there's all types covered for all aircraft - no other planner can make your plans from that data.

It takes less than two seconds to find and make a route according to an auto-maintained set of preferences for the current aircraft. The full fat flight build takes up to a minute or more depending all the features selected. The basic build time has been halved in the new version coming shortly.

So consider just implementing the plan or the plan and flight file or whatever amount of IF you want to use. Whichever way I look at it, it's better value than any other planner and has a roadmap ahead.