Hi everyone,some days ago, Ray Proudfoot suggested the following ...
> If anyone wants to talk about Radar Contact then post a
> message and I'll chip in. I've been on the beta team for
> the last 9 months and we're still testing new features!
> BUT, don't post here - create a new thread.
so I am happy to do it. Please, Ray, jump in!
For those of us, who have no idea what Radar Contact and
similar software is about: It is a complete ATC (Air traffic
control) system flightsim add-on simulating all the
communication between YOU (the pilot) and the controllers
down on the ground. It is used offline, so there are no
additional online charges in contrary to flying online with
VATSIM, IVAO etc.
I have been a happy user of ProFlight98 in the FS98 days,
then later with FS2000 switched over to "Radar Contact"
after learning that the features were superior compared to
ProFlight in certain areas. I currently own RCv2 (I believe)
with one update.
While I preferred the user interface of ProFlight - I found
it much easier to use some well known Ctrl-Shift-<key>
keyboard shortcuts to directly address things instead of the
slowly responding one line cursor walking menu system in
Radar Contact - the flight features included were amazing. I
still have not taken it to the limit.
However, there have also been some glitches. One that I am
experiencing sometimes, is bad vectoring when targets are to
close to each other, so for example, if I am performing my
short mail service flights for Tradewind Carribean Airlines
and there is not much distance and no waypoints to the next
airport.
Does RCv3 now handle short distances better?
It seems also a bit complicated to position the aircraft at
the terminal as the adventuring system used in RCv2 and
earlier underwent some changes, and if I understand
correctly, is going to by phased out in one of the next
versions of flightsimulator. Earlier one could load a
situation file (stored position, time etc.) and then run an
adventure on top of it. Thus it was possible to run GPWS
add-ons or RCv2 and other things. This seems to be handled
differently in FS2002.
I have heard, that RCv3 is no longer being run as adventure,
but as a seperate application. I would be interested to hear
details about this, especially how performance drops by
running an additional application side-by-side with FS. I am
still on a 4 years old 450 Mhz rig here and basic scenery is
still flyable even with RCv2 activated. What kind of
additional app is there, is it slow Visual Basic stuff or
fast C-Code?
Does it integrate with the standard AI airplanes or do I
still have nothing flying around me? Am I able to listen to
any ATIS on the way?
Is it possible to integrate real weather, so update from
time to time and have the runways etc. calculated depending
on it? I am not sure if this was already possible with RCv2.
I can also imagine, that having a seperate application
instead of precompiled adventure allows to have dynamically
changes in the flightplan, maybe redirections to another
airport?
Is there a seperate database like with FSNav that has to be
scanning the installed scenery?
What else has been vastly improved since RCv2?
What problems did you detect?
What are the highlights?
How do you compare RCv3 to competitors, maybe ProFlight
(don't know if there still is a new version of this around)?
Do you expect any upgrades regarding FS2004?
Can we expect RC to be still be ahead of an upcoming FS2004
with improved ATC? Is it still worth the money?
Regards,
Guido
-OLR.PL v1.82-
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