It’s that time of year again when the FsHub team and I would like to wish all pilots and their families a truly magical holiday season!
Whilst we do have various peices of news and new features to announce (going live soon) and improvements for MSFS2024 users, we’ll save these for another day to ensure that you can concentrate on just “having a great time with your families and loved ones”!
Tomorrow (Christmas Day), for those that refuse not to fly (🤣) there will be three special custom Daily Flight Challenges to choose from, they will of course be holiday season-related destinations – We like to keep you entertained 🫡😉
I want to send a very special thanks to Clorix, Uwe, Aurora, and JimG for their help and support over the past year too; they tirelessly work to provide user support on a voluntary basis in addition to designing and publishing new global flight achievements, this enables me to concentrate on the development and more technical aspects of the FsHub platform – FsHub wouldn’t be what it was if it weren’t for these guys and I would be a nervous wreck (too much to handle 😂) – Thank you so much guys!
I would also like to personally thank all those pilots (users) that have donated to the platform over the past year too, earning Premium status and for helping us cover the on-going hosting costs of FsHub.
Well all that is left to say, for now, is that on behalf of the FsHub team (ballen, Clorix, Uwe, Aurora and JimG) we wish you a truly fantastic Christmas/holiday season and we look forward to providing more updates and features in 2025!
This is probably the blog post that you’ve all been waiting for, for a while now – Finally a SimConnect client for FsHub!!
Firstly, please consider this a public BETA release – It’s been tested by several people and numerous flights have been logged successfully, even helicopters!
If you do plan to help us test this new client, please ensure that any issues (please also tell us what aircraft you were/are flying too – as this is important) are logged via. our Ticket System.
You also need to know that this is also the SimConnect component only – the full graphical client is releasing soon (read more on this below)! This does however track your flights, is super lightweight and is exactly what we’re using in the new graphical client, behind the scenes!
Let’s see it in action…
Once you’ve downloaded and installed the LRM CLI SimConnect client (download link available here) and installed it under Windows, you’ll notice this new icon appear on your desktop:
Double-clicking this icon will launch, you guessed it, “the launcher” – The launcher is really just to provide you (the user), assuming you prefer to use the LRM CLI SimConnect Client (a lighter alternative to our full-blown graphical client) an easy way to set up a flight quickly.
Before clicking it though, you should edit the client configuration file that can be found at: C:\Users\{YOUR_USERNAME}\.config\lrm-client\client.conf – you can simply open this file with Notepad or another text editor!
You then need to set your API token and optionally enable the logging of short flights too as demonstrated here (API tokens can be generated on your Fshub account here):
With the changes to the configuration file saved, now head back to your desktop and double-click that “LRM CLI Launcher” icon!
Once the launcher loads, it will prompt you for the “active airline” (this is the equivalent of using the drop-down menu in the graphical click), here you’d type in the airline ICAO/abbreviation for the airline that you want to fly this flight for, as a reminder, airline ICAOs/abbreviations can be found on FsHub on the airline’s public profile or on the airlines listing page.
If your flight isn’t a VA flight and/or you don’t want to set a callsign, flight number of tail number you can simply just press ENTER at these prompts (skipping them entirely)
Do keep in mind that you can only use an airline ICAO code if you are actually a member of that airline, entering the ICAO code of a virtual airline that you are NOT a member of will result in login failure!
Here is an example, in this quick “demo flight”, I’ll be flying for the virtual airline Alaska Airlines, which, on FsHub, this airline’s ICAO code is ASA and I’ll be using the flight number/callsign of ASA1308:
Before going any further you should now start your simulator and set up your flight, once your aircraft is “on the tarmac” you can start the flight.
LRM will immediately start monitoring your flight as shown here:
At this point you can now minimise the terminal window (LRM CLI Launcher) and fly as you would normally.
For demonstration purposes, once your aircraft has taken off, the terminal window will output the standard take-off stats, demonstrated here:
If the above screenshot is hard to see, the terminal window outputs the following text:
> Took off at 81kts, winds 1kts at 269'
At this point in the flight, the LRM CLI SimConnect client will continue to track and behave much like the current LRM version, it quietly reports your flight progress to FsHub and all web-based features such as Route Planning, Radar, Web-GPS etc are fully functional and supported!
Upon landing, as you might expect, the client will report the touch-down statistics and log the flight on FsHub:
…and again, if the text is too hard to see in the screenshot, the terminal window has reported that we landed successfully:-
> Landed at -284f/m (1.06g) at 75kts, winds 1kts at 269'
Following the flight, you can exit the monitoring tool by pressing CTRL+C to close it and stop the monitoring.
JoinFS is also supported by the LRM CLI Launcher too, the launcher can auto-start and auto-stop the JoinFS client too. Should you want to use JoinFS with this client feel free to ask on our Discord server how to configure it if you need.
That’s all there is to it really, a simple icon on the desktop, two prompts for if you want to set an active airline and one to optionally set a tail number (for GA aircraft) or a flight#/callsign for the bigger birds!
Have a play about with it but realised that this isn’t the full-blown graphical client – this is an alternative option for users that don’t want to use a full-blown client, it uses less memory but is used behind the scenes by the new graphical client so your testing would be much appreciated and we’d love to hear your feedback!
Can I try it without uninstalling my current LRM Client?
You sure can! – This installs separately from the current LRM client and can be run independently.
It is best to make sure that you’ve closed your existing LRM client (if you’re using “Blackbox mode”) and you can also kill that FSUIPC session that MSFS has probably launched too!
…you won’t be needing FSUIPC for this 😉
Why are we releasing CLI versions of the new LRM Client?
Firstly for testing purposes – it is much easier if we have a ton of users testing the new LRM SimConnect connector component and we can continue to develop the new cross-platform graphical interface which then directly “talks” to these (Windows, Mac and Linux) CLI applications silently in the background!
Secondly, because it provides a lighter-weight alternative to our new snazzy graphical client which now bundles a ton of extra features (moving maps, flight history… the lot) and we feel that some users – “Power users” perhaps might appreciate a tiny little terminal application that just sits out of the way, monitoring the flight and reporting back to FsHub! Our new graphical client also bundles Aeroconomy features too… something that various users might think is just unnecessary bloat!
We also know that you’ve been crying out for a SimConnect-compatible client – we’re delivering this now so that you can start tracking your flights through SimConnect and ditching FSUIPC altogether, should you wish!
The power of these CLI components means that virtual airlines who have access to developers/people with programming experience can now embed the FsHub tracking functionality into their own fully customised graphical desktop clients and choose whether or not they want to display landing statistics or simply to provide a custom graphical client (completely de-branded from FsHub)!
Where is the full graphical client then?
You may recall from my last blog post that we now have the same CLI components that work on Mac, Linux and now (as of this post) on Windows too.
Whilst I’ve personally been coding away to support Windows, Linux and MacOS connectors for the new LRM next-gen (graphical) client – these components are now completed, they form the foundation of the new client and are necessary in the first instance.
I can say that the testing (by members of the community, Uwe and I) has gone great on both Linux and Mac (for X-Plane) and we’re now at the stage where these components can now be “wired in” to the new graphical client.
I’m also pleased to announce that as of a couple of days ago Aurora has joined the development team to increase the rate at which we can deliver the new graphical client – While I will be working closely with her, she is leading the development on the graphical front-end of the new cross-platform client – meaning that I can concentrate more on the CLI components, the main FsHib web platform and the Aeroconomy platform.
Given that we now have fully working SimConnect and X-Plane connectors working and released to you for testing – we can now concentrate on getting these integrated into the new client interface and delivering a truly cross-platform next-gen LRM client that works on Windows, Mac and Linux!
Want to know more about the technical side?
We’ve published a few wiki pages for our SimConnect and X-Plane connectors (CLI components), details and useful information – more aimed at developers or power users can be found here:
That’s all for today, I’m now heading off out to an 80’s music night with my family, I hope you enjoyed the blog post and new possibilities this provides to you and your virtual airlines!
I’ll be sure to post another blog post about all the other things that have been happening over the past few weeks and a few screenshots of the new next-gen graphical LRM client in the next few days too – assuming I’m not swamped in bug reports 😉
Just a quick blog post to keep you all updated with the latest updates and things happening “behind the scenes” at FsHub!
As you may recall from my blog post a few weeks back and recent updates in our Discord #notams channel, I promised that the SimConnect client for MSFS would be available to test on Friday the 7th of June – I’m pleased to announce that this is still on track and a beta release of the SimConnect client will be available on that date!
There are however a few more things that I wanted to make you aware of that have been going on and released in the last week (these updates have been requested as a matter of urgency due to VA’s wanting to “partner” with the likes of VATSIM and needed a way to prove VATSIM flights.
I’m also super excited to announce that we now have a working X-Plane client for Linux and MacOS too… (read on to see more information about this!)
LRM (CLI) Client running on Debian Linux.
VATSIM and IVAO tracking is now available on FsHub!
Assuming you have your VATSIM and/or IVAO user ID set in your FsHub settings as shown here:
FsHub will track any flights that you complete on our platform whilst connected (flying on) either of these virtual ATC networks, the result is that your flight report will be “flagged” as a VATSIM or IVAO flight as demonstrated below, in addition to that, users using the FsHub API will also be able to identify those flights that are flown on VATSIM or IVAO too.
A flight report “flagged” as a VATSIM flight.
In addition, given that flights can now be “flagged” as VATSIM or IVAO flights, I have updated the airline flights and personal flight filters too:
Additional flight list filters have been added!
In celebration of this new feature, there have also been two new Personal Achievements added to the platform, these are named “The VATSIM Pilot” and “The IVAO Pilot” and can be found here:
Shiny new personal achievements!
Improvements are coming to both the Global Radar and the Airline Radar pages in the coming weeks too (as soon as the SimConnect client is released for testing) – this will highlight any aircraft that are flying on either of these networks too (so just hang tight for this)!
Native X-Plane Support on Linux and MacOS is now here!
I’m pleased to announce that we now have a native X-Plane client to test on Linux and MacOS.
Uwe and I have been testing the new client on Debian Linux with the latest X-Plane version and can confirm that it is working great (and logging real flights to Fshub – between us, we’ve logged more than 10 successful flights) and I’m now at a point where I am happy to share with BETA testers that are on either Linux or MacOS.
The eagle-eyed amongst you might realise that from the screenshots shared in this post, the client we’re offering to “test” is a CLI client (Command Line Interface).
The new LRM client (a cross-platform graphical user interface) uses this client behind the scenes to connect to and send position reports to FsHub like the new SimConnect client does too!
This has many additional advantages, including the ability for virtual airlines with “technical” members with a programming background to develop their own front-end interface (for their VA) which communicates with the CLI client behind the scenes.
So whilst the screenshot’d command line client isn’t the “final product” in terms of how it will look (Linux and MacOS users will be able to use the new GUI client too), some users on Windows, Linux or Mac might like to use the CLI client component exclusively as a lighter alternative to running the new and improved full graphical client in future.
A wiki article is now being written to explain how to install and use this on Linux or MacOS (super easy though, just 2 files!) and will be shared tomorrow along with download links for the BETA client should you wish to participate in the testing.
If you’re a Linux or MacOSX user and would like to BETA test this new version, please send us a message here and we’ll share all the information and a download link with you tomorrow!
…so fear not all of those people that have read the recent tech news this past week (Microsoft going to start screen recording on Windows as part of their Copilot AI product), FsHub now has a “privacy-respecting” alternative for you 😉
Pressing on with the SimConnect client…
Anyway, just a few quick updates in this blog post, I’ll now bury my head back into the code and ensure that the delivery of the SimConnect client makes “the drop” date this coming Friday!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these – for numerous reasons, mainly due to many family-related issues that I’ve had since Christmas and prior to that, because I started posted updates furiously over at our forums.
More recently, simply not having the time to actually write and publish these blog posts (they actually take a considerable amount of time, time that I have been otherwise dedicating to replying to support tickets or developing and deploying smaller changes …and of course, the continued development of Aeroconomy and the new LRM client.
…I thought I’d use the blog today however to give you formal-ish update as to the current goings-on at FsHub and what we’ve been doing, what we’ve released and what’s still to come in the next week or so!
Firstly I would like to thank everyone for their support since Christmas and for not giving me too much grief (despite me not being as active as normal) – I appreciated the space and things have been much better over the past couple of weeks and hopefully I’ll be running at “full steam” again now (I certainly have the past two weeks)…
I’ve got a handful of updates to tell you about, some new features that have been released (much needed in order for me to progress with Aeroconomy stuff) and are available now, a new version of the LRM client and a few other bits-n-bob’s to make you aware of.
Anyway, please take a read and details about being able to provide feedback and where to do it can be found at the end of this blog post…
New flight plan departure and arrival time features!
A new feature has been added this week and deployed late last night – this feature now enables you (as pilots) to optionally set scheduled departure and arrival times to your flight reports/plans and in addition, provides a visual representation as to whether your departure and/or arrival was on-time, delayed or late, check this out…
Whilst this feature is optional for flights on FsHub and can add to the immersion, this new feature paves the way for some features that Aeroconomy will need access to and in the next couple of weeks, this feature can optionally be used by Virtual Airlines to restrict route “payouts” or simply accepting the flight report for specific route departure and arrivals times (if they wish).
The way the new feature works is that if you add departure and arrival times in the FsHub Flight Planner (as shown below) or import a SimBrief plan, these departure and arrival times are now set and if they’re present on your flight plan when you land, they will be analysed and added to your flight plan record as shown in the above screenshot.
I didn’t just stop there though, LRM Client 5.7.0 which has now been released for public testing (see below for more details) also supports adding and importing departure and arrival times too 🙂
The logic is as follows:-
An “On-time” status (green indicator) is one that takes-off or touches down before, at or within 10 minutes of the scheduled timeslot (filed in your flight plan).
A “Delayed” status (yellow indicator) is one that indicates if your take-off or touch-down is greater than 10 minutes after the scheduled time but less than 1 hour after.
A “Late” status (red indicator) is one that indicates that your take-off or touchdown exceeded 1 hour of the scheduled time.
I personally thought that showing indicators for both the departure and arrival enables you to better visualise if you managed to “make up the time” such as turbo-ing the COST INDEX 😉 …or taking “the shortcut”!
At the moment, these indicators are only used on the flight report page but on Friday, updates to the world radar will be deployed too and these “real-time” indicators will also be available on “clicked” aircraft within the radar screen (we just want to make sure that no major changes are needed prior to updating the world radar page).
This is optional – If you’re a GA pilot or someone that doesn’t want to have these indicators displayed on your flight reports you can simply disable them or don’t even enter a departure and arrival time and these stats won’t appear at all (they are disabled by default by the way)!
For Aeroconomy this is a much-needed feature that will enable agreements with airports for take-off/arrival time slots – failing to depart or arrive “on-time” will likely incur airline fines – with this feature now implemented into FsHub, this gives me the green light on the Aeroconomy side too!
As the more technically minded might expect to, these “flight indicators” will also be available via. the API on Friday too!
Interested in taking a look at some flight reports with these new metrics?
You can take a look at a few flight reports here to see how this information is displayed (you can hover over the departure and arrival “Planned time” indicator bars if you’re confused as to the colour codes used).
PC12 flight for the Daily Flight Challenge earlier this morning (on-time departure but purposely flew a huge diversion to delay the arrival by greater than 10 minutes).
Downloadable Flight Plans (for your simulator/pilot reference)
A common request in the past has been the ability for pilots to download the SimBrief OFP (Operational Flight Report PDF) in addition to the various flight plan formats that can be selected and loaded into your simulator of choice.
A new drop-down button now appears on the FsHub Flight Planner page that enable’s you to access and download the various files once you have imported your SimBrief flight plans. This new button and the available flight plan downloads options can be found here:-
LRM 5.7.0 is here!
LRM 5.7.0 has been released this morning with updates to the Route Planner window – this ensures those users who use the LRM’s Route Planner window instead of the web-based route planner window can also make use of the auto-import and sync flight plan departure and arrival features within the client too!
Optional text input boxes for adding departure and arrival times to your flight plans (so that you can start seeing your flight departure/arrival performance on your flight reports).
We plan to officially update the LRM client download link on the main LRM Client website on Friday but for now, if you would like to download it and use it, feel free – it’s been pretty stable in our testing so far!
Ps. No need to uninstall your older version, just install this over the top and the installer will deal with all the required changes.
Pps. If you have no desire to use the flight planning features within the LRM client there is no immediate need to upgrade, the current (version 5.6.1) client will continue to work just fine) but it does also have a few other improvements behind the scenes – Uwe and I have been doing a few test flights with it this afternoon and it’s been stable!
UI improvements to various parts of FsHub
You may have noticed over the past 24 hours that various pages on the FsHub website have had little tweaks here and there too – whilst rather small, I wanted to make you aware – these are mainly design/style tweaks and moving some data references around (mainly to scratch my own itch), these include improvements to the panels on the Airport information pages, updates and enhancements to the Flight Planner page and Flight information pages – the other affected pages/changes escape my mind at this point in time though!
A new advanced flight statistics is now available
It’s a small thing but if you ever wondered how many unique airports you have personally visited? This specific statistic is now available on your “Advanced Statistics” page which can be found by clicking on this button on the “My Dashboard” page:
The statistic shows the total number of unique airports that you’ve visited (landed at) and is a rather interesting statistic I think 🙂 – Those who regularly fly the daily flight challenges probably have a ton!
The number of unique airports visited appears here:-
Virtual Airline Route Improvements
With the addition of the new departure and arrival time-checking/performance analysis, this has opened up the ability for us to add even more features to FsHub – specifically for Airline Routes…
Work will be taking place over the next few days/into next week to optionally enable airlines to add multiple routes (with the same departure and arrival) but with varying flight numbers and more specifically dedicated departure and arrival times.
If an airline decides (adding departure and arrival times to VA routes is optional) to add departure and arrival times to their routes, they will also be able to optionally specify what happens to those flight reports (flights) if the pilot fails to complete them “on-time” – these new features will enable a virtual airline to “discard” flights that breach a threshold or restrict the rewards paid to the pilot – the discarding of VA flown flights will add extra realism for virtual airlines that take flying routes (specifically to the real-world time-schedules) seriously.
In addition to that, a virtual airline can now add multiple routes (“schedules”) but with varying departure and arrival times and thus ensures that flight reports will have the correct flight numbers based on what time of day they were flown!
Virtual Airline Reports
Later this month, as part of our continued commitment to developing and enhancing FsHub (in parallel to our work on Aeroconomy), I will be releasing a “Reports” section in the Virtual Airline’s Crew Portal, this section will enable airline management to run queries such as:-
Most active pilots (by NM flown and number of flights)
Flights by aircraft type
Most/least flown routes
Most/least active hubs
Company fuel burn
Gear damage reports
Whilst this is already possible with the FsHub API (airlines can scrape the data for their airline and build their own reports – and have been able to for many years), this new feature will make it easy-peasy for lesser-technically minded virtual airlines.
Whilst reports can be run by any virtual airline, another added benefit for those “Premium” users (those who have gained “Supporter” status) will benefit from being able to these run reports for longer than the one-week default (“free user”) date range restriction, premium users will also be able to export these reports as Excel files should they wish.
Aeroconomy and the Simconnect client
Things have been unfortunately slow on this front due to the before-mentioned family issues that I have been dealing with since Christmas… Continue reading however for more information and my plans to accelerate this now that things have settled down!
On a positive note, the inclusion of the departure and arrival (time) tracking features that have gone live this week has contributed to outstanding tasks and integration requirements.
We reached 3,000,000 flights!
After nearly 10 years (this October), we reached 3,000,000 recorded flights earlier this week too! Clorix was awake and was able to quickly grab this screenshot as we “rolled over” the 3,000,000 mark!
…a huge milestone – thanks to all the pilots of whom have contributed to this!
Update your FsHub2Discord webhooks!
Aurora (one of our resident support team members here at FsHub) provides the commonly used FsHub2Discord service – this service effectively takes our very complex and data-rich webhook data in raw format and transforms it into pretty Discord messages – Many of the virtual airlines on FsHub utilise this daily.
At the weekend several airlines experienced issues with not receiving Discord messages, this was due to these airlines having not previously seen or taken action on updating their webhook URL’s to utilise the new domain that the service was moved to.
Whilst our team worked with Aurora and she was able to remedy a few issues on the FsHub2Discord side too, the majority of airlines now have working Discord notifications again – if you still aren’t receiving Discord notifications for your airline’s departure and arrival notifications please ensure that you update the webhook addresses in FsHub to use the new domain name – if you had previously missed the announcement from here, please see this announcement on the official FsHub2Discord server.
Bolstering the team
Whilst it’s still early days and discussions have only just started, I’m looking at involving one of my closest friends into the development team to help me accelerate development of all the various things that we’re currently working on – I just have to convince him that working on this “free” platform and collection of other services/software with no financial reward is actually worth it 😉
…If all goes to plan, this will be great as I truly trust him not to break the platform with potentially dodgy code 😉 – We have been (for over 20 years), and do work really well together – I hope that the next 12 months will be able to deliver many new features and land Aeroconomy and the new LRM client in the very near future.
Signing off for now…
It feels great to provide you with some firm updates, new features and a new release of the LRM client today – the recent family-related dramas would appear to be behind me now too – I’m looking forward to working on more features that will be going live shortly and finally getting Aeroconomy and the new LRM (Simconnect) client finalised.
Thanks as always to Clorix, thunfischbaum, Aurora and JimG for their close support in helping with support tickets and creating new and interesting flight challenges for your enjoyment!
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about these updates – feel free to provide your feedback on anything you’ve read in this post either over at our dedicated feedback forum or via our Discord server!
