Ideal Flight Accessibility phase 2

[Steve Waite]

Nothing to do with SAPI.

In the sim there's a clock ticking once a second. Every two seconds the next speech is picked up.

So it's not instantaneous in those cases because it's not an event in the sim. SAPI and IF are instantaneous.

If you click on a setting in the form it is instant there because it is an event.

So the upshot is that I wish you wouldn't try to guess how it works and what SAPI denotes

[Steve Waite]

So if you try going into the Voice settings form and checking something that's said instantly, because it's a true multitasking program and nothing happens to cause any delay anywhere else as well.

That's what's been noticed by several users. So they must be comparing to other programs

As I said, the speaker when given a task can keep going to the end of the sentence word or the end of the text. That causes confusion. For example, waiting till the end of a word kind of makes a new sentence that doesn't make sense. It works as better, the feedback, that we know the old description is being spoken over. Allowing descriptions to queue up or having some kind of automatic way to distribute calls is complicated and unnecessary I think. From experimentation I'm currently playing with settings that allow the time to last out for some rather than others. Sorting out some prioritisation. But in the end it makes no difference so long as more important items are spoke first in each round. I'm setting to One second internal so it responds slight quicker for switches. Some items like VS need less.

Also the way it will say 2500feet, Altitude Lock 2500feet seems cool to me.

When we change the alt a few times in a row we get for example, 2500, 2600, 2700, 2800feet, Altitude Lock 2800feet then ends. or the description is overspoke with some upcoming item, which may have happened up to two seconds ago. It's the way it works since we can't respond to all values as events.

[Steve Waite]

So I rather suspect that if one has prior experience of SAPI, being some kind of laggy process or creating symptoms evident in the simulation when speaking, that's not SAPI that was a symptom of those other programs using SAPI.

As can be seen in Ideal Flight the use of Windows SAPI is instant and also has no effect on the simulator. The program also chooses cores outside the main task cores of the simulator for extra care and attention to detail.

[Steve Waite]

If you are interested in what is going on under the hood. The values can be checked every frame, every sixth of a second, every second and so on. So when we have it set to every frame the recognition of the value change is instant. When we set to six per second, that too, seems instant. However, at one or two seconds before speaking the next value to change, we get one or two seconds to hear what was said.

If we check in task manager when IF is running the voice, we can find clsp.exe, that is the codelegend program that is fed messages and reads a memory mapped file that is being filled with text from Ideal Flight, that then invokes the SAPI voice we chose and mixes it into the channel we chose at the volume and rate we chose. IF is sent information by the simulator on a timely basis. We don't force the sim to send everything every frame. Or even every sixth of a second if we need not. We can, but in these circumstances that's unnecessary.

[Steve Waite]

Also for the record I love IF's go to approach feature. I use it to practice ILS landings now that we have speech to tell us when nav1 has the localizer, however the only way I know if the glideslope has been captured is when IF starts reading information about the GSI. Even then, I'm not sure if that necessarily means that I have captured it. When it says 0 percent GSI I'm pretty certain at that point.

The 90% 80% CDI and so on is when you are detecting the NAV. If you are on AP APP then it will turn onto it outside of 100%. When is says 100% it means 100% of the detection swing on the needle. That's up to the manufacturing of the instrument.

Also when the AP is detecting that NAV it is also down to the instruments and their specification - 100% as being maximum deflection on that instrument. We look in the technical details of the instrument.

The GSI similarly is up down, the slope itself, so we are below or above the slope projected. 0% 0% is bang on the slope and straight down the line.

[Steve Waite]

So for example we can think of the CDI being perhaps plus or minus 60 degrees, and the slope being plus or minus perhaps 10 or 15 degrees, depending on the instrument. So with the HSI instrument the needles will swing between 100% of their travel either side of centre.

[Steve Waite]

Similarly with flaps, which it was asked can we have in degrees. With flaps we can have those in degrees or percent because those values are represented in the simulation. However we don't necessarily know the swing of the HSI as that is nominally set as a +/- approximate range in the simulator. For example HSI CDI and GSI values in the sim are +/- 127 and 119.

[Steve Waite]

I've included a slider control to allow time between callouts.

The flaps callouts now include simple and detailed in degrees or percent.

The HSI callouts are now selectable as well.

[Orinks]

Does the slider for specific events control everything, including when autopilot value changes are spoken? I have VS announcements turned off but the amount of times Tramp changes the VS on climb and the value is still spoken drives me nuts currently.

Nice to know about flaps and the simple and detailed options. I'll test them all to see what I prefer.

[Steve Waite]

Have you unchecked the second speed checkbox?