It’s been a while since my last blog post/update but with good reason – behind the scenes, I have been working tirelessly (between work and other real-world commitments) to bring you all the next generation of the LRM client.
Progress on the next-gen LRM client
For those of you of whom are unaware of what the LRM client actually is (or does), the LRM client is the aircraft tracking software that is installed on your PC and, during flight is sending data back to the main FsHub platform.
As you may know, in the past, the LRM client has used FSUIPC/XPUIPC as “middleware” to communicate with the flight simulator (FSX, MSFS2020, P3D and X-Plane).
Whilst updates to the main FsHub platform have been plentiful and frequent during 2022, the most recent user surveys highlighted that users wanted more of my time and effort to go into improving the LRM client and more specifically to “do away with” FSUIPC.
The last few months I have dedicated almost all of my time to working on a completely overhauled and modern replacement for the LRM client, whilst I’m getting nearer to a release date, I have taken the conscious decision not to rush a release out and ensure that major new features are implemented correctly “from the get go”, I have also taken time to ensure that the new LRM client will be compatible (through the use of a decoupled WASM module) for XBox users once this is fully supported by Microsoft.
The new client has an overhauled (modern) UI and offers out-of-the-box support for SimConnect and X-Plane’s API – in addition to “pluggable” support for FSUIPC too for users who prefer to continue to use FSUIPC as a data connector.
Whilst I will be going on a much-needed holiday in a couple of weeks, once I’m back, I will be full steam ahead to get this released for initial public beta testing… I have personally been testing this in an isolated test environment up until now and have amassed over 100 flight hours. The software seems to work flawlessly (Which is a great sign that a public beta should go without many issues).
New features and user requests for FsHub
In addition to working on the new LRM client, where issues or “bugs” have cropped up and been reported, I have ensured that they have been fixed and pushed to the FsHub platform.
Some of you may have also noticed several new features around the FsHub website over the last few weeks and other improvements of which I will be blogging more specifically in a couple of weeks’ time.
Whilst we do get many requests in via. Discord, at the moment at least, please can I ask that you use the Contact Form on the FsHub website instead (as this will automatically raise a “ticket” which I can then easily convert into a “Feature Request” into our tracking system and saves me having to try to remember individual requests of which, do easily get lost amongst other Discord chats.
Valentine’s day 2023 special event
JimG has published our 2023 valentines “special event” which will see pilots (of whom wish to obtain this time-limited achievement/badge) visit the Italian city of Venice!
The achievement is set to go live on the 7th of February 2023 and will run through until the 21st of February 2023 – so be sure to fly the achievement within this time period as it will not be awarded after this time.
I’ll be honest with you, working on the LRM client really isn’t much fun 😀 The client really serves the purpose to get your flight data into the main FsHub platform (which is where the real magic happens!), I’m working extremely hard to get this released so that I can then turn my attention back to the more impressive features that FsHub can and will provide in the future.
So rest assured, over the coming months, my promises of a full-blown economy system will still very much be coming and implemented alongside the main FsHub platform for those that wish to participate and use it.
In the mean time, I would like to pay special thanks to Clorix, thunfischbaum, Aurora and JimG for stepping up and helping in the Discord server with general support issues whilst I’ve tried to not get too distracted which would otherwise make the release of the new LRM client delayed further.
I look forward to providing you with more updates and some awesome screenshots very soon!
This year has seen many new major features and changes to the FsHub platform and going into next year we have so many new, unique and amazing features planned and coming soon (as mentioned in previous blog posts)!
Over the Christmas period (23rd December to the 2nd of January), we will halt deploying any new features and tweaks to the main FsHub platform to ensure that it remains stable over, what we expect to be a very busy time for our platform.
Myself on the other hand (ballen), will be concentrating, during this time, on the isolated development and testing (another great excuse for me to complete some of the other achievements that I’m still yet to obtain ;)) of the much requested and anticipated SimConnect version of the LRM client and expect to have it fully stable and released by the 2nd of January – so you can all expect this very soon 🙂
The support team (including myself) will also be on-hand to help with any issues as normal so please feel free to reach out whether that’s via. our Discord server or using our other official contact methods!
We just wanted to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy and festive holiday season and hope that you all have a great and relaxing time with your family and friends during this very special time of the year!
If you’re stuck for places to fly or things to do over Christmas (although we highly encourage you to spend it with your loved ones) we have recently released several new achievements that you might like to fly and earn – our Christmas 2022 “special event” is still available to be completed too at this time but will expire on the 31st of December so be sure to fly that one specifically if you don’t want to miss out on this unique achievement/badge – so far we’ve had a total of 112 pilots complete this 🙂
In addition to the above, on Christmas day itself, the three random “Daily Challenges” will be overridden to target specific holiday/Christmas airport locations and so, you can be assured of a festive daily challenge flight should you choose to fly on Christmas day 🙂
The daily challenges on Christmas day will be as follows:-
Short flight: EFIV (Ivalo, Finland) > EFRO(Rovameni, Finland) – GA to Lapland!
Long flight: LFPG (Paris, France) > KORD (Chicago, USA) – “Getting home to Kevin” Inspired by the film “Home Alone”!
Special “Daily Flight Challenges” for Christmas Day!
I look forward to updating you in my next blog post in the new year with what I expect will be the announcement and immediate availability of the new, much anticipated SimConnect client (for MSFS users).
We hope you have a great Christmas/Holiday season!
Best wishes and season’s greetings to you and your families…
This blog post is going out a few days later than originally planned due to me being tucked up in bed at the moment (with what I can only imagine in the flu!)…
I hope you’re all well and recently were able to pick up a few bargains (payware scenery and/or aircraft) in the recent Black Friday deals, and of course, to my American friends and pilots, I hope you had a great “Thanksgiving”…
Just a quick blog post to update you on everything that’s been happening since my last blog post.
This month has been a strange one really, a lot has been happening behind the scenes, and great progress was made with the LRM SimConnect client but then our growth started to impact various parts of the site and we’ve had to increase our investment into some of our cloud services to get around rate limiting issue due to our continuous growth.
Our holiday (Christmas) event is now live…
Last year, the official FsHub Christmas event was held in Europe – Rovameni (Lapland) and in my last blog post, I asked the community for suggestions for ideas and suggestions for this year’s special event and with Vancouver being in North America we felt this was a great change of scenery from last year…
Between the 10th and 31st of December 2022, we welcome all FsHub pilots to participate in our yearly Christmas holiday event (Vancouver Christmas Market), this year, we have decided (based on user feedback from our last platform update blog post) to host it in Vancouver (Canada).
Keep in mind that this is a “special event” and as such, you only have a short window to complete the achievement or forfeit ever being able to obtain the special edition badge.
Stuck for places to fly at the moment (maybe whilst waiting for the new Christmas event to “unlock”)? – We also recently released various new flight achievements a couple of which with an emphasis on winter flights (The European Skication and North American Ski Resorts).
Also remember that every day, FsHub will generate three global “Daily challenges” which you can fly and visit new airports and parts of the globe that you wouldn’t otherwise maybe visit and count towards your pilot stats too 🙂
Static aircraft carriers have been added
With many new military virtual airlines joining FsHub, I thought that now would be a great time to add in a few of the payware static aircraft carrier locations into FsHub – enabling pilots to take off from and land at various aircraft carriers and for airlines that use the “airline achievement” system, these can now be incorporated into achievements.
The aircraft carrier packages (locations) that we support are the MilitarySim Carriers add-on and the USS George W. H. Bush carrier add-on by LatinVFR – the inclusion of these carriers into the FsHub database sees an additional 17 aircraft carriers which pilots can now use.
Landing or departing at any of these aircraft carriers will now correctly show in your logbook using the provided ICAO codes (UBG1, UBG2, CN71, CN72, R09 etc).
More virtual airline achievement settings have been added!
It was always my intention to expand upon the custom airline achievement rule set and as such, in November I added the (optional) additional achievement rules:
Minimum landing rate (FPM)
Minimum flight time
Maximum flight time
Maximum distance
Maximum altitude
Maximum speed
These new achievement rules are immediately available to all virtual airlines that have access to the “Airline Achievement” features.
New custom achievement rules for virtual airline flight achievements.
The addition of these new “rules” means that airlines (commercial, military or otherwise) can get even more creative with their flight achievements – these new “rules” were recently introduced to make high-speed, low-altitude flight achievements possible such as those military VA’s wanting to create an achievement like the famous “Mach Loop“.
Added various other “special” aircraft designations
It was mentioned this week that whilst FsHub has the official “Undesignated” aircraft designation ICAO code (ZZZZ), with the recent release of many other new types of aircraft, specifically within Microsoft Flight Simulator, at the request of one of our users, Clorix has spent some time this week adding in several new official “special” designators of which can now be used to correctly designate aircraft types such as Gliders, etc.
The new ICAO “generic” types that have been added are as follows:
ULAC – Ultralight aircraft
UHEL – Ultralight helicopter
GYRO – Microlight autogyro
PARA – Powered parachute/Paraplane
BALL – Balloon (Hot air balloon)
SHIP – Airship
FFLO – “Foward flight only” – Official description of this type is “An unmanned aircraft (UA) which is not capable of hover or vertical flight and needs to be in horizontal motion to sustain flight.”
VFHC – “Vertical flight and hover capability” – Official description of this type is “An unmanned aircraft (UA) which is capable of vertical flight and hover”.
In addition to the above, in the latter part of November and earlier this month, many new payware aircraft were released for MSFS and other simulators such as the Harrier jet – we have been working tirelessly on user requests to add these new types of aircraft into the FsHub system to make them available for owners and users of these new payware aircraft.
For pilots with “premium” status, a new feature has been added to FsHub whereby a pilot (user) can add custom notes to any airports in FsHub.
These notes are personal notes – only the logged-in pilot will see their notes for the particular airport.
Whilst this feature can be used by pilots for storing any type of notes about the airport; personally, I use this feature to track what custom scenery I have for any given airport.
Example airport notes section.
The great thing about this feature is that if you visit an airport page and you have custom notes, a small icon will easily identify that you have notes for this airport, and in my case, I know that I have custom add-on scenery for this particular airport.
Airport page indicates that the pilot has custom notes for this particular airport.
….a new map will be added to FsHub soon too whereby, the map will show all airports that you have added custom notes too – enabling you to very quickly “jump” to that airport and see your notes.
SimConnect LRM Client Progress
In response to the recent User Survey, in the latter part of November, I started developing a SimConnect-specific version of the LRM client that would do away with the need for FSUIPC to be installed for MSFS users specifically (X-Plane, P3D and FSX users would still need to use the FSUIPC version at this time).
Whilst initial testing went great and I released 9 different BETA versions of the LRM SimConnect BETA client to a small group of BETA test pilots over on our Discord server, there was, unfortunately, an issue that causes LRM to crash mid-flight after a few hours – whilst this was extremely disappointing I knew that this would require more time to properly iron-out and understand, under the hood, what the SimConnect SDK was doing.
With my work commitments this month, I decided that I would revisit during the Christmas period (as I have two weeks off work) and instead concentrate on delivering the various other user-requested features and tweaks (of which there have been many this month).
So stay tuned for early January when I expect to have a fully stable release of the LRM SimConnect client ready and available to download.
SimBrief integration
After several months of chasing the team over at SimBrief and a couple of direct email requests, we have finally received an official SimBrief API key and as such, given the setbacks this month with new features (as mentioned in this blog post), whilst we’ve not been able to complete this feature, we now have everything we need to integrate SimBrief more tightly into FsHub.
Although we have already added the optional feature for pilots to enable the “Generate SimBrief” links on various parts of the site (this can be enabled from your Settings > Integration page in FsHub) of which takes you directly to the SimBrief website and pre-populates a lot of the data for you…
Work will continue on this over the Christmas period (when I’ll have more time to implement and test this feature and time off from my normal day job), the end result will mean that you won’t have to visit the SimBrief website at all and you’ll be able to view the flight plan/SimBrief flight manifest from within FsHub itself – awesome!
The LRM client website got an overhaul
The LRM website although never designed to look “cool”, I gave in a couple of weeks ago and spent a day re-designing it to better showcase the features of the LRM client.
The new LRM client website.
The redesign of the website also brings a more modern feel to it – I hope you like it!
The FsHub homepage got an overhaul
I also spent some time updating the design and layout of the FsHub homepage, the old one, as mentioned in my last blog post, was starting to look dated and I felt needed a little overhaul.
I would like to personally thank TwoToneMurphy, Phil and Clorix of whom supplied various video clips from within their simulators of which I was then able to stitch together to make a sequence that kinda made sense 😉
The new and improved FsHub homepage.
Again, much like the updated and much improved LRM website as mentioned above, I hope you like and agree that the updates to the LRM website really do look awesome 🙂
Our growth started affecting our third-party service limits.
We rely on a couple of third-party cloud services for hosting our huge collection of over 100,000 high-resolution user screenshots in addition to the maps that we display on FsHub…
Whilst I had a ton of plans for this month, and although I have achieved many of them, the new SimConnect client, despite having a semi-successful beta release meant that I had to redivert my attention to some of the third-party cloud service issues that we’ve noticed happening over the last month – no doubt a side effect of us onboarding so many new users in the past month!
These “issues” as you might have noticed include the maps on FsHub (on busy days – mainly over the weekends) are starting to hit our map render limits, whilst I have done some initial investigation into how I can mitigate these issues, I’ve decided that I have no choice but to increase the monthly spend on this service and have now increased our subscription to the mapping service that hosts and provide these web maps and so – whilst this isn’t ideal (as it’s a “free service” – I could do without the additional on-going costs) this isn’t too bad based on the fact that we have received several donations last month – thanks to all of you that have donated last month and for those that continue to support the project on Patreon.
In addition to the mapping service hitting its limits, you may have also noticed that screenshots, avatars and achievement badges within FsHub are, in some cases appear to “timeout” and not load during busy times – this is due to some changes with our BLOB storage provider which are now rate-limiting image requests – I’m actively looking to migrate the mass of screenshot and pilot avatar data to a new could service so we can get around this issue… please bare with me whilst I migrate the issues with achievement badges and screenshots – in most cases, however and in the meantime (until I have a solution implemented) simply “refreshing” the web page will re-load the missing images.
Other behind-the-scenes stuff
Whilst, unlike recent months, new features might not be so visible on the FsHub site but a ton of time and effort has gone into some much-needed backend “admin” features to enable us to move airport locations, migrating data between airports and various other backend management tools of which has enabled us to fix up and close a few more complex “data issue” reports that have been laying around for a few weeks.
FsHub is proud to announce that, this year, we have joined up with Navigraph and, as part of this year’s “FlightSim Community Survey” organised by Navigraph and recognised as an official survey partner.
Between November 18th and 28th, Navigraph is conducting a FlightSim Community Survey together with several major addon developers and organizations (FsHub included) within the flight simulation community. The survey, the largest of its kind, aims to gauge the prevailing flight simulation trends and users’ requests for future development.
Like previous years, this survey has an emphasis on the major flight simulators such as Microsoft Flight Simulator, Lockeed Martin Prepar3D and Laminar Research X-Plane, but the survey also includes questions about add-ons, tools, and flight simulation consoles.
This is the largest and most comprehensive flight simulation survey in the world! By participating you are influencing the future of the community.
The results from the survey will be presented on https://blog.navigraph.com Mid-December, but also by the partners participating to this survey (to the extent they wish to do so).
Whilst it was only a week ago since my October platform update blog post, I took some annual leave from work this week in order to really polish off and finalise some of the other recent updates to FsHub and ultimately to clear the way for me to start the development of the new LRM client next week (without any distractions or me needing to jump back into the FsHub code)… this however very quickly turned into me working on requests from the User Survey too and tackling some “annoying things” that I’ve been meaning to improve for a while. I’m really pleased to say that everything (FsHub related) is running silky smooth and have ironed out the bugs that crept in earlier this week that affected the new “Duty Schedule” system (more info on this cool new feature can be found below) more importantly though, everything is now set for me fully dedicate my time and to start working on the new LRM client as of Monday!
The past two weeks have probably been the busiest two weeks (in terms of new features and improvements) for the past 12 months!
I have a ton of things to share with you (mainly so I don’t forget myself too – haha – this week has been a blur!) in addition to what my priority (the roadmap is looking like between now and March 2023) and what and when you can expect new shiny stuff and other improvements 🙂
So here are the key points of new features and improvement this week (you can scroll down this blog post if you’re not interested in any particular item):-
Major improvements to the departure and arrival airport detectionsystem (combats against other nearby airports, seaplane bases, helipads, and balloon sites being incorrectly detected) – This is huge and should be a massive improvement to FsHub in general!!
SimBrief integration improvements – this is now an optional integration (users can enable it through the integrations page) and will provide you with “one-click” flight plan generation on the majority of pages and FsHub features.
A new “Duty Schedule” system has been added enabling virtual airlines to, using their VA published company routes, generate a realistic, joined-up, “daily flight schedule”, designed to simulate a real-world short-medium haul pilots’ day which can optionally pay bonus XP/v$ for each consecutive leg completed.
Airline profile and portal page styling options (VA’s can now customise the experience for their pilots and visitors to their public profile and crew portal pages with banner images)
Major improvements to the manual PIREP system (VA-approved PIREPs are now automatically awarded v$/XP, duty schedules payouts, airline achievements and the new “basic pay” rewards too instead of requiring manual VA admins to validate and reward pilots XP/$v or airline achievements – One click of the “approve” button and it’ll do it all for you)
Five new webhooks (fully Discord compatible) for virtual airlines to share VA member achievements being obtained, duty schedules being completed as well as “admin” webhooks so you and your fellow VA managers can be instantly notified in your own Discord server when a new pilot applies to join your VA, has left your VA or if there is a new manual PIREP to approve!
Virtual airlines can now award XP/v$ etc. for any flights (not just company route and duty schedules) – it’s fully optional and probably a great feature for flying clubs and other non-commercial simulated airlines (where they don’t have set routes) – If your airline is flying “charter” style flights too maybe you’d like to enable this feature – although, on the roadmap, I do have some specific goodies for GA and charter pilots – details at the end of this blog post! 😉
New flight log filter options added and the ability to download your filtered logbook as a spreadsheet (for easier data manipulation, VA statistics collating and custom/internal VA leaderboards etc.)
Our video hosting service is now live and ready for you to share your cockpit videos, awesome landings, virtual airline promotion videos, or even FsHub tutorials 😉
Loads of new achievements to be earned! We are keeping you topped up with fresh achievements, badges to obtain, and new places and challenges to complete.
Read on to learn more about these features in more detail!
Just want to know what the next new features/what the roadmap looks like?
Skip to the end of this blog post where I have set out the roadmap leading to March 2023 with expected delivery dates!
Ok, so what’s new this week?
Without further ado, let’s talk, in more detail about the latest features that have gone live this week…
Remember that several new features and improvements went live last week too and so, if you didn’t read last week’s “October Updates” blog post, you can check it out here.
Major improvements to the departure and arrival airport detection
You may have previously realised that you landed at an airport and yet your flight report detected either the arrival or departure airport incorrectly and instead, detected a very close-by airport, helipad or seaplane base?
Whilst users could always edit their flight report and manually correct the airport, it was, with other recent features becoming a pain as achievements wouldn’t automatically be awarded and generally just a straight up be a pain point for pilots – whilst this might not have affected you personally, there are several airports (major ones even like KORD and KRNT and no doubt, others too) with nearby heliports or seaplane bases of which, depending on which runway you took off and/or landed at would frequently register the airport incorrectly- This is made worse by the fact that FsHub actually has even more airports, helipads, balloon bases, and seaplane bases than the standard MSFS data/XP data so we can really cater for all simulators and even custom airports that might not yet exist within the standard MSFS/XP/P3D/FSX databases.
With this in mind, Cody (Clorix), Uwe (thunfischbuam), and I had a late-night chat on Discord earlier this week, we bashed about a few ideas as to how to be precise in this automatic detection, taking into account that we support ALL major simulator platforms and custom (real-world) scenery to come up with a solution that would detect the correct landing airport each time and within a few hours, I developed an improved system and was available for testing…
The new system then went live for a select few users (and all anonymous user flights) who responded to my call for help over at our Discord Server to fully test this before I made it “live” for everyone.
I would also like to that send a special thanks to Caspey1UK and Clorix of whom relentlessly tested the changes at KORD and other known airports that we knew had issues whilst I was tweaking the logic and internal parameters based on their feedback…
We’re happy to report that the new system went live yesterday morning (3rd November 2022) and seems to be working a treat, now there are some super rare scenarios that might crop up but I’ve also now built into our system the ability to instantly “fix” these edge cases permanently as, if and when they crop up.
With this in mind, if you do find issues, you can always report them using the airport’s page “Report a data issue” link as shown here:
…the team and I can then investigate and fix any airport-specific issues (permanently) if found.
SimBrief integration improvements
Essentially, FsHub users can now go and enable site-wide SimBrief integration which, will drastically speed up your workflow, and automatically populate things like the departure ICAO, arrival ICAO, flight number, pilot name etc.
I’ll be honest, this is one of those features that I’ve personally wanted to add to FsHub for a while now, it’s designed to simulate a real-world commercial airline pilot’s daily routine – eg. an EasyJet/Ryanair pilot (and I’m sure countless other real-world airline pilots) would turn up for work and be given a flight list (I’m not sure of the proper term) but it essentially tells the pilot all of the legs they will be flying that day, each leg will depart from where it previously landed at.
An example “Daily Duty Schedule” for Alaska Virtual VA.
The system I have implemented does just this, we’ve been testing it this week and it’s super fun and really does add to the immersion (especially if you like to simulate a short/medium haul pilot’s daily routine) – I’ve added a ton of options for VA’s and pilots too and so, if this sounds interesting to you, go and read the full details (with screenshots and explanation) in this blog post.
This feature didn’t originally get off to an easy start though, the complexity of generating these schedules and testing it fully has been a little bit of a headache but, I’m pleased to say after a full day of testing this today and help this week from pilot DadInCommand and Wokninja (thanks for your help guys), the final “bugs” have now been ironed out and pleased to say that it’s working really well!
Airline profile and portal page styling options
As you may know, the FsHub website consists of dark grey backgrounds (unless you’ve enabled the “light mode” in your Profile settings – ahhh see, you didn’t know about that did you 😉), virtual airlines, bush flying clubs, special-ops, heli-med and other types of virtual airlines only had a few options to personalise their public profile pages such as some colour scheme settings and their airline logo.
Whilst this is only the first step (I’ll cover shortly what’s next in store and further improvements to this going forwards in a second…) I can confirm that virtual airlines can now, not only upload and personalise their public profile page with a banner image as per this example:
Example of a custom airline “profile’ (public pages) banner.
I’ve taken it a step further and given airlines the ability to customise their private crew portal too (with some additional new VA colour scheme styling on the buttons too):
Example of separate “Crew Portal” styling features
Whilst the ability to customise your airline’s profile pages and crew portal sections are available to all users, In the near future, FsHub Supporters (those who donate and choose to support the platform) will additionally be able to fully customise the background colour of the page too and advanced custom CSS so you can get super creative, personalise and show off your virtual airline.
Premium VAs will also be able to register their own sub-domain like: {airline}.fshub.io or even port their existing domain name (if they have one) for example, myairline.com and will redirect to their public profile page!
Major improvements to the manual PIREP system
Earlier this year, I introduced the ability (mainly to support non-PC users, such as the XBOX and other simulators – DCS word for example) for pilots to file manual PIREPs to their virtual airline, initially and only up to a few hours ago, this feature, whilst doing what I had originally designed it to do – did provide a limited set of features and I communicated to the airlines at the time that an optional XP/v$ (if they decided to use these features) would have to be manually awarded on a per-PIREP basis (it would be at the discretion of the VA) – I guess I have trust issues 😉
…I have however come to realise that this is becoming a headache for the larger virtual airlines and so, as of yesterday evening, any PIREPs that are manually approved will be handled as if they were any normal flight and so, the automatic reward of XP for company routes, duty schedules, airline achievements and the optional new “basic pilot pay” feature will automatically be processed at the point at which a VA manager approves the PIREP.
As a reminder – if you’re not already using the new airline webhooks to notify your VA or new pending PIREPs to approve, you can get notifications sent directly to your Disord server and enable any of your admins (with the “Approve PIREPs” permission to one-click review/approve them straight from Discord!
Five new webhooks (fully Discord compatible) have been released!
These new webhooks enable you to share and celebrate when VA members complete achievements (again, another request from the recent user survey) and when they complete a daily duty schedule in your own discord server (in the same way that we have on our main global achievements and on the official FsHub Discord server) and, in addition to that, provides some VA management specific notifications to share the load and burden of having to manually approve PIREPs and being notified of new pilot applications.
Virtual airlines can now (optionally) award XP/v$ etc. for any flight!
Originally I was dead-set against pilots receiving XP/v$ for ad-hoc/leisure flights and felt that XP/v$ should really only be awarded when the pilot is flying on behalf of the airline and, as such, be awarded for completing routes for the airline.
By popular demand, however, yesterday saw this new feature released and will, depending on the virtual airline settings, reward pilots based on the distance flown and optionally provide a bonus if flying to or from a company hub/base (you can set these up in your airlines “Hubs and Markers” section if you don’t already have some configured).
Virtual airlines can now enable this feature (as long as they also have the “Pilot rewards feature” enabled) and customise the options from the airline’s Crew Portal under the “Airline Settings” page as shown here:
Scrolling nearer the bottom of that page, an airline manager (with the correct permissions) will be able to enable it and customise it using these settings:
Options for rewarding XP/v$ for all flights (not just company routes and duty schedules)
I am already planning some new features for the future, especially for GA pilots and/or charter-style operations whereby pilots (and VA’s) can cherry-pick/bid on a global pool of frequently generated flights and fly them to gain XP, v$ or just another way of them finding new and exciting airports… if you’re new here and this sounds cool, whilst I’m working away on other bits, you could check out our Daily Flight Challenges feature instead (these are randomly generated every day from our massive database of over 2 million already flown flights) and super fun to fly, gives you another opportunity to be on our global stats page and keep flying in order to try and keep building up that daily flight challenge streak 🙂
I’d be interested in knowing if this (charter/contract jobs) for GA pilots feature is something that you would be interested in and something that you would personally use, let me know by contacting us!
If there is little interest (and although it is now on the roadmap) I won’t waste my time and can I can then just push straight on with the Aeroconomy platform 🙂
In case you’re wondering or thinking… “hang on a minute – isn’t this/shouldn’t it be part of the “Aerocomy” platform?” – Well no, the Aeroconomy platform is an Airline economy platform and designed at the airline management level, these features will play a big part in the airline generated finances and will feed directly into Aeroconomy though!
New flight log filter options added and the ability to download your filtered logbook
Another requested feature from the recent user survey was to be able to filter your personal pilot logbook (and the airline logbook) on a few extra pieces of additional information – pilots and virtual airlines and, in addition, can now download filtered datasets from their logbook in addition to filtering flights with (or without) comments/remarks and specifically include duty schedule legs too.
In a blog post earlier this year, I mentioned that we were looking to provide a community platform where pilots’ could upload and share flight sim-related videos (because we can see from our hosting bills that you guys certainly love to upload a screenshot or two few 😉 and thought you might like to do the same with video clips also).
We personally felt that providing a video-hosting platform might be of interest and could be used by pilots to either show off their landing skills, epic weather and scenery, virtual airline promotion videos and hey, maybe some of you guys might like to even post some tutorials on how to use FsHub (as that would be awesome!) – we’ve been wanting to do this for a while but we’ve just not had the chance what with all of the features we keep cramming in 😉
Our new video hosting platform(an open-source clone of YouTube essentially) is being maintained by Uwe (thunfischbaum), one of the support team members here at FsHub who is dedicated to maintaining it going forwards and whilst I have not yet integrated FsHub with it directly if the uptake in users is fair then in the new year, videos posted by users can optionally appear on their FsHub profile page (fully integrated from the video platform) soon.
So feel free to go and give that a look, several users already have accounts on there and have started to share some cool landing clips and other content.
Various links back to this site will appear shortly on the main FsHub website over the weekend too.
New flight achievements are available!
For those of you that love to fly and complete our official FsHub flight achievements and collect the badges or enjoy flying these achievement flights to explore new places that you might not have otherwise…
We’ve added a handful more single and multi-leg achievements into the system this week with various themes including:
Ferrying PAX to Europe’s favourite Ski destinations in our “The European Skication” achievement (as stand-in pilot)
Exploring Norway in our “The Norse Way” (14) multi-leg achievement where we’ll explore from top to bottom – coming in the next couple of days, as it’s a big one 😉
Visiting Denmark’s five main airports in our “The Vikings” achievement.
Departing Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden airport, we’ll take a cross-country trip and explore some of the best German views in our “The Black Forrest” achievement, before finally landing in Zurich.
Head down to Italy and check out the historical city of Naples and obtain our “Napoli” achievement.
Ireland you say? Yep – You will be flying to County Kerry to visit Ireland’s highest mountain “Carrantuohill” and the Lakes of Killarney.
With only a few days left of our Halloween 2022 special achievement, if you want to pick up this badge for your profile too.. be sure to complete it very soon.
In the next month, we will also publish our annual Christmas special event achievement too – be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that… we may also be planning something a little more special this year, a group flight using our Live Traffic system – kind of like VATSIM but no need to worry about procedure or radio comms (it works across all simulators and FSX users, for example, can also see XP11, XP12 and even MSFS2020 players) – We’ll pick a date and a time (that hopefully suits most people) and hopefully we can all fly together and earn the achievement in one go – don’t be put off by this though, the achievement will be available to obtain over a two week period and so, if group flying isn’t your thing or prefer to do it at a more convenient time then the decision is yours.
What’s next on the roadmap?
Well, a ton of the recent updates have been, for the most part, Virtual airline-specific as I saw ideas and features that could be implemented relatively quickly and that I too, felt would be beneficial, that said, it’s only fair that the GA pilots and other (non-commercial) airlines get some love too and so, although my immediate attention will be turned towards getting the Alpha release of the new LRM client out the door for initial testing (planning for within the next three weeks time) the following (in order) will be worked on next:
The next-gen LRM client (a complete rewrite) with a modern interface and dropping the requirement for FSUIPC and XPUIPC. – Initial alpha release is in approximately three weeks’ time and will be given to members of our “Test Pilots” group on Discord!
(During the Alpha testing phase of the new LRM client…)Re-designing the FsHub homepage and further improvements to the global radar and virtual airline radar pages.
(During the Alpha testing phase of the new LRM client…)Adding the ability for achievement editors to specify a remote(non-airport)landing/departure point as an achievement objective/rule – great for pilots and non-commercial VA’s to set up bush flying achievements, helicopter/helimed achievements and more – from the achievement editor you’ll be able to “drop a pin” on a map and specify the radius at which the pilot must land or depart from that point (and it will be AWESOME, game-changing for GA/Heli pilots, maybe?)! – (This is expected to be completed before 20th December).
A new dynamic “mission/job/assignment” generator – for GA/Helicoper/Military/Charter airlines (remember, this can be bush flying clubs, military VA’s, helimed operations as well as charter airlines) can enable a feature whereby the FsHub platform will generate (fully configurable) missions around the clock whereby the VA will get notified of “jobs/assignments/missions” that are system generated and then a VA pilot can “pick up” the job and fly it, the generation of these jobs will be generated by the platform with a personalisable message for each type of job (eg. Road traffic collisions, Charter flights, Humanitarian help requests, Outback Animal rescue etc.), they will expire after a certain period of time if “not picked up” and you can optionally choose (given the dynamic nature of these types of assignments/jobs) to configure FsHub to notify your Discord Server when they become available – these jobs can be configured to be generated to destination Airports and/or remote (non-airports) locations within a set area around the VA configured “hubs”, bases or a specific set of GPS coordinates and associated radius area – I’ll be working on how to best identify land vs. sea too (this is expected to be completed by 1st of January).
Advanced (optional) styling for airline profiles and crew portals – As I mentioned above, premium VA’s (where the VA owner is an FsHub supporter) will have the option to further customise all aspects of their profile pages and crew portal with advanced CSS editing features.
More flight report stats and flight performance metrics – The user survey suggested that pilots didn’t want to be “scored” on their flight performance but would be interested in seeing a breakdown of information such as fuel economy, speed limit restrictions in addition to landing light states and – this is being taken into mind with the new LRM client and I will be adding code in order to retrieve this information and be able to process and present it within FsHub (this is expected to be completed ahead of the public release of the LRM client software in early to mid-January)
With these features done and dusted, I will begin work on the new Aeroconomy platform (where airlines can optionally “compete” against each other in a fair and balanced way) and I realistically expect that to be released in March 2023.
Then, after this point, I’ll review the latest user survey and see what people are interested in and how they would like to see the platform grow…
I want to know how and what features of LRM you currently use, and what you would like to see (or not see) in the next version…
Now is your chance to let me know what you’d like, as you’ve probably seen by now (with the user surveys) I do take your feedback on board and do implement suggestions/features normally at a rapid pace too…
Please, if you can help me out, please fill in this quick survey – I will be reviewing it prior to starting the new client on Monday!
As per the roadmap above, I expect to have the client in a fully working state (minus the bells and whistles) in about three weeks’ time so testing can commence (by our test pilots) and any bugs identified and squashed ASAP…
I personally feel that it’s best to get a non-FSUIPC version of the client out and into the hands of users as quickly as possible (as long as it works ofcourse), I’m sure that a lot of users don’t even use some of the more advanced features of LRM (such as the Aircraft Manager, LRM Data Connector and AeroPad features) and so, for the initial release, I plan to have the following items fully working:
Airline selection and custom airline styling for the client window.
Basic cabin sounds (clapping for good landings, screams for bad landings)
Route planner (so you can import/setup or sync your flight plan/company route etc)
Screenshot Geo-tagging
JoinFS integration
Blackbox mode (auto-start LRM when your computer turns on)
Discord Rich Presence
Helicopter support (hopefully, switching away from FSUIPC and XPUIPC this support will be better than the current “experimental support).
…and then, depending on the outcome of the survey that I have linked above, will then work on adding the missing features back in over the months that follow March, these being:
METAR lookup
LRM data connector
AeroPad
Charts Browser
That’s all for now 🙂
Feedback and donations are always well received, I hope you found this blog post informative and excited for the new things that are coming between now and early January 🙂
I’m now going to take a few days’ break from working on FsHub and be ready to start afresh on Monday on the new LRM client!
With recent-ish updates to FsHub (mainly the ability to have more than a single airline manager), Airline Managers (other than the “owner” of whom would solely receive email notifications about new pilot applications) which meant that airline managers had to keep an eye on the Airline’s admin portal for both new pilot applications and when manual PIREPs are submitted and pending approval.
As part of the feedback from the user survey – I was asked to implement emails to EACH of the airline admins (or ones that had a specific VA role), I personally felt that this would not only become very “spammy” but also eat into our outbound mail service’s usage rates and so, I decided that the best thing to do (given that so many airlines are using Discord), was to add additional VA hooks that can deliver this information in real-time!
This morning, after a couple of late nights adding these new webhooks, I’m happy to announce that there are now five new additional webhooks that Airlines can enable and either “receive raw” (directly to their own web servers), as a simplified Discord bot message, as a Slack message in addition to using the “all singing, all dancing” third-party “FsHub2Discord” service (which Aurora will shortly be upgrading to handle the new webhooks).
The new webhooks are immediately available from the Airline Crew Portal’s management panel (use the “Integrations” section) and the additional hook options are available here:
Enabling these new hooks will mean that you can quickly receive notifications to your Airline’s Discord server (probably under a “private” channel – up to you though!). Other airline admin staff can then take action by approving/rejecting Pilot applications and manual PIREP submissions (instead of having to manually check the FsHub Crew Portal each day) – FsHub will notify you in real time!
The new webhooks are as follows:
Airline applications – You will be automatically notified when a new pilot applies to join your VA and easily approve it.
Manual PIREP submissions – You will automatically be notified that there is a new manual PIREP waiting to be approved.
Airline achievement obtained – Celebrate that a pilot within your airline has completed one of your custom virtual airline achievements.
Airline resignations – You can choose to be notified if a pilot resigns from your airline (maybe you need to do some background admin or simply want to know if people leave)
As I mentioned, you *can* use the simplified (un-cluttered) version of FsHub’s Discord bot messages (when adding the hook, click on the “Chat Server” option to ensure that the hook is delivered to Discord in the correct format, examples of some of the output messages can be seen here:
If you’d rather see even more data in your Discord messages, the FsHub2Discord service which is managed and run by Aurora (which uses FsHub Data) will be updated shortly if you’d rather have richer/larger Discord messages as opposed to the simplified and streamlined ones that FsHub provides out of the box.
Please be aware that these new hooks are considered “BETA” at the moment and so, if you find any issues please report them to me ASAP and I will investigate and push fixes (if required) – my testing has gone really well though and so all should work without any issues.
Additional information received from the recent User Survey also included a request to be able to search for flights (both personal logbook flights and virtual airline flights) that are either “Duty Schedule legs” (following the latest release of the new virtual airline “daily duty schedule” feature and flights (either personal or VA) that either do or do not contain user comments/remarks.
I can confirm that both of these features have also now been added and are immediately available!
If you didn’t know… FsHub has a super powerful personal logbook filter and, airlines are also able to take advantage of the same feature too…
You can access the flight filter section either using your personal logbook’s Filter Flights button or, if you want to search all airline flights, the airline flights page also includes this “Filter flights” button as shown here:
Filter flights in a pilot’s personal logbook.Filter virtual airline flights (to include flights from all virtual airline members).
Clicking on the either of the “Filter Flights” button, the user will be presented with the advanced filter feature, the addition of three new filter options can now be found in the following locations:
Previously, given that we’re not officially associated with SimBrief or Navigraph (- the company that builds and maintains it) and I didn’t want to make the FsHub user interface too cluttered, I had only implemented the feature (a link to generate a flight plan based on the departure and arrival airport) to the “Daily Flight Challenge” page.
I know that many users, in particular, GA users will not use SimBrief and instead might favour other tools for flight tracking such as LittleNavMap, with this in mind and due to the request to add this “SimBrief” integration to almost every page where there is a departure/arrival airport, I have decided to make this an optional feature.
To enable the many various “Generate SimBrief” links around FsHub you can do so by visiting the Settings > Integration section and enabling, under the “Third-party integration” section, the integration named “SimBrief” as shown here:
Once the SimBrief integration is enabled, FsHub will display many links around the various application sections (pages) that will when clicked on, take you to SimBrief and automatically start a new Flight Plan with the associated departure and/or arrival airport information prepopulated – some of the pages (such as route pages will also intelligently pre-populate (coming later today) your flight number too – assuming your route name is constructed in a standard way (the first word being the flight number, eg EZY123X).
The following pages and sections, with this feature enabled, will display the option to generate a SimBrief flight plan directly are…
Airport information page (ability to choose to depart/arrive)
Flight report page
Route browser page
Route overview page
Achievement details page
Airline duty schedule page
Daily Flight Challenge page
If you think I have missed some sections of the site that could benefit from this feature too.. please let me know!
Here are a few screenshots demonstrating the location of these (trying not too hard to look too subtle) links..
In my last blog post, I mentioned that I would be adding a new “Daily Duty Schedule” feature to FsHub. This feature adds an extra level of realism and depth to virtual airlines that have company routes set up and if they decide to enable this (optional) feature for their pilots.
This new feature brings with it many advantages for your virtual airline, including:
Realism – Many airline pilots will be given a “daily schedule” by their company, this details what routes they will fly that day.
Explore new places – Maybe your airline has a ton of routes but you either don’t know where to fly or like to stick to your “favourite” routes or airports.
Pilots get an improved sense of achievement – completing a full schedule of flights that their virtual airline has given you for the day.
Future economy system (Aeroconomy) – Having your pilots fly these schedules will likely increase your airline “efficiency” metrics as more of your lesser-flown/favoured routes will be flown and will directly impact your airline’s performance metrics.
We now track how many duty schedules and duty schedule legs a pilot completes adding another “score” metric to your airline and the global stats – essentially capturing and acknowledging those pilots for realistically flying virtual airline routes.
As an airline owner, you have several options available to you in order to customise how these features work and how you might use it within your virtual airline.
When I originally planned this feature I modelled it on the fact that many real-world airlines would provide a daily duty schedule to their pilots, for example, EasyJet and Ryanair (both European budget airlines) who’s pilots would turn up to work in the morning and be given a duty schedule by their dispatch team – this schedule would tell them where they would fly that day and be expected to complete it) – Now I’m sure that many pilot’s would love certain routes but, we all have bad days at the office and things we don’t necessarily want to do!
This system will generate a personal schedule for your airline pilot, the schedule will start at a Hub or Airport as selected by the pilot prior to them “Generating” the schedule, FsHub will then generate a joined-up schedule (airport to airport) within the pilot’s specified time – In the real world, this “time” would be their shift duration – maybe 8 hours? – In FsHub, this time is the amount of time that you feel you can spend on the simulator that day.
If this feature is a successful, we will also look at adding an option for “charter” airlines where the system can generate a random charter flight from one of your hubs to a random (adequately size) airport – This will likely to be in the new year however given other things (such as the new LRM client and Economy system) that we plan to work on next!
Once a virtual airline admin has enabled the new “Duty Schedule” system (and has airline routes setup for your virtual airline), your pilots’ will be able to generate and access their active duty schedule using the “Duty Schedule” icon on the Crew Portal as shown here:
The Duty Schedule screen will enable the users to generate a new Duty schedule based on the hours they can “fly the sim” today…
The pilot doesn’t have to complete all legs in the generated schedule but for each leg they complete (in order) the bonus will increase – paying them more each leg!
Once the pilot generates their “Duty Schedule”, the legs will be displayed as shown (this example, as I only set 2 hours and a minimum leg distance would obviously generate less legs as the system tries to find suitable routes along the way whilst keeping it in your time limit but, with more time and randomly chosen shorter legs, your duty schedule could consist of 3, 4, 5 leg etc)…
In this example fewer legs were generated as I specified 2 hours as being able to fly and, as I prefer flying bigger aircraft, ensuring that the minimum leg distance was set to 150nm as the absolute minimum leg distance I wanted to fly.
From the above example, the generated duty schedule has two legs (this fits in based on the airline’s configured “average miles to hour” setting and should fit nicely in with the time that the pilot has specified he/she has in the “Hours” text box.
The first (active/yet to complete) leg is highlighted with an orange border as shown in the above screenshot [1], indicating that you need to complete this leg first, and future legs (shown in the above screens [2]).
When flying duty schedules, you must fly each leg in order – you cannot jump to say leg 3 and expect it to complete!
Once you complete a leg, refreshing the page should move the active leg indicator to the next leg and subdue any previous legs as demonstrated here:
(1) This leg is now completed (is darkened/subdued and the aircraft indicator has been removed. (2) This is now the active/next leg the pilot must complete. (3) Shows the normal route points plus the computed bonus amount, in this example, I have set the airline route leg bonus to 100% – paying your pilot’s a higher bonus will encourage them to use this system and level the XP/v$ distance between those that can fly regularly and those that cannot) – it’s the total of both of these values that will be “paid” to the pilot upon completing this leg!
It’s also good to note that this new system adds a kind of persistence to your current location as, when you land on any leg of your duty schedule, FsHub will automatically update your “last known” location by updating the departure airport as shown here:
And so, when you next come to generate a new Duty schedule, the departure airport will default to the last airport that you landed at when “on duty”… whilst not overly exciting it does mean that if you want to add to the realism, your next duty schedule can generate your schedule from your last know duty (landing) location having potentially a career of virtual airline flights all joined up nicely.
Once you complete the final leg in your duty schedule, refreshing the page will give you confirmation that you have completed it, you will see a message confirming that you have completed the daily duty schedule and, unless the airline admin hasn’t enabled the “Enforce 12 hours duty schedule”, you will be immediately able to Generate a new Duty Schedule as demonstrated below:
Confirmation of successful duty schedule completion!
Each flight that was detected as a “Duty Schedule” flight will also “tag” the flight report and the total rewards for the (route reward points + duty leg bonus) and will be indicated on the flight report as shown here:
(1) Shows the flight was “tagged” as a “Duty Schedule”. (2) Shows the amount rewarded/paid to this pilot for completing the duty leg (the route points + % bonus as shown in the previous screenshot)!
Whilst my other screenshots show the ability to specify a “Maximum leg distance) in the “Duty Schedule Generator” panel. If this option is disabled by the admin, the interface will only show three options for generating a duty schedule (for added realism) as demonstrated here:
The Schedule Generator form will not allow the user to specify the maximum leg distance if the admin has disabled it – to improve “realism”.
Additionally, in my screenshots above (during testing), I didn’t enable any of the “12-hour restrictions”, but just to demonstrate what a pilot would see if the airline did enable this feature…. the “Generate duty schedule” button would be “locked out” until the 12 hour period had elapsed with a count down time as shown here:
As an airline manager/owner, we have provided you many options to customise this system for your own use, as a recommendation, however, if you are trying to simulate real-world operations or want to “level the field” within your virtual airline for pilots who are unable to fly as regularly as others, whilst still wanting to give them an (optional) points bonus, I would suggest the following settings:
Recommended “settings” for airlines that want to simulate real-world ops or want to level out the gap between those pilots who can fly regularly and earn lots of XP to the pilots who want to fly and be in with a chance of ranking high in terms of XP.
Let me quickly explain these settings…
This option turns on/off the “Duty Schedule” system for your virtual airline – in order for this to work, however, the airline must have “Company routes” added into the system given that this system uses the airline routes to build a duty schedule.
Once this feature is enabled, the pilots can access the “Duty Schedule” feature and generate their daily schedule from the Airline’s Crew dashboard icon and use the “Generate duty schedule” to automatically build a joined-up schedule (from the departure airport they choose).
When enabled, this option will allow any pilot to generate a duty schedule and unless the pilot completes the duty schedule within the 12 hours at the point at which they generated it, will not be able to generate another duty schedule until the 12-hour period has elapsed – for realism purposes, we, at the minimum recommend that pilots should accept that is the route they have been given and must fly regardless of if they like certain airports or routes – this, I’m sure would be the same in the real-world – You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth 😉
When this option is enabled, regardless of the fact that the pilot completes their generated duty schedule will not allow them to generate a new one until the 12 hours is up – ensuring that they can only benefit from the additional route bonus once a day! – giving other pilots in your virtual airline the ability to “catch up” in terms of points/XP/v$.
I would suggest unticking this box, real airlines would expect pilots’ to fly whatever length route they are given (which fits within their hours per day), by unchecking this feature, adds more of a “potluck” approach – the virtual VA dispatcher could give the pilot a couple of longer routes or say 5 shorter routes…. remember that each completed leg of the Duty Schedule awards (Leg# * bonus %). The issue with enabling this option (in my opinion and this is why it is disabled by default) is the fact that airline pilots could easily manipulate the amount of bonus XP by engineering their duty schedule to pay them more for many shorter flights. – Ultimately though, this feature has been added for airlines to decide themselves!
This is the Route Bonus * Leg# (%) bonus that the airline awards to the pilot, this is designed to encourage the pilot to fly all legs, each consecutive leg awarding more bonus than the previous (basically the maths is Route Points + (% bonus of the route points x the leg #)! – A higher bonus here might REALLY encourage pilots to fly even the not so nicer-generated schedules in addition to adding more points/v$/XP etc to pilots of whom struggle to keep up with other pilots that can fly many routes a day – also, the pilot may find that one of the “middle legs” of their schedule just happens to be one of their favourite routes and whilst this specific route might normally pay poorly, having it as the 2nd or 3rd leg in a duty schedule might really make it pay well given the bonus multiplier!
As you can see from the above options there are many ways in which you can make this work and customise it for your own virtual airline flying style or requirements.
As an airline, if you solely wanted to use the “Duty Schedule Generator” as a way of randomising and giving your airline pilots a random schedule, I would suggest that you might want to consider using the following settings instead…
The above options will ensure that a pilot can generate (and re-generate) random duty schedules but, and more importantly, won’t benefit from any additional schedule leg XP/points/v$ as a way of manipulating their earned XP.
These settings will enable your pilots to generate a route (they are happy with – eg. they won’t have to fly it and can immediately generate a new one if they wanted a different set of routes) and by setting the Route Bonus modifier to 0(%), the pilot’s won’t receive any extra bonus XP for their flights – ensuring that they cannot generate a ton of XP/v$/points… ultimately the decision, as an airline manager is yours, however – the options and features that I’ve added should cater for the vast majority of virtual airline requirements.
The other options as shown in the above screenshot will be fully documented by the end of this week and will be available on our documentation Wiki – I will update the interface to link back so airline admins and pilots can better understand the system over time.
FsHub also tracks now how many “Duty Schedule” legs a pilot has completed too, this will, over the coming weeks be added to the main platform and virtual airline stats too… yet another metric to determine which pilots like to complete real-world style operations for virtual airlines.
…and finally, I would like to mention that the duty schedule system will also play a big part in the new optional Aeroconomy platform that I also mentioned in my last blog post whereby completed “12hr” Duty Schedules will “score” more than normal routes – as Aeroconomy is designed to simulate a real-world airline economy, this will also help your airline’s performance metrics by ensuring that more of your lesser enjoyed routes will be flown and that the airline’s efficiency metric is kept at a high level (more on this later though!).
I hope this all makes sense, if something is not clear though, please visit our Discord server and ask us to clarify/update this blog post.
This month has mainly seen more features specifically designed for virtual airlines given the amount of demand and feature requests coming in over the last six weeks – fear not though, many more “GA” features and updates will be coming in the next couple of weeks (and also detailed in this blog update).
Let’s just jump straight in, as this post will probably be fairly lengthy (again!)…. I’m happy to announce that, once again, several new features and tweaks to existing features have been deployed this week – in summary, these are as follows:
Airline Route Import & Export feature
Airline achievements can now optionally award pilots reward points for completing them.
Airline achievements can now be restricted to certain aircraft types.
Airlines can now earn XP (in addition to their pilots).
Airline routes can now be restricted to certain aircraft types.
Updates and improvements to the virtual airline radar map.
We released the new “Virtual Airline Radar Map Plugin” (for use on your own virtual airline website) is now available to download and use!
Virtual airline managers can set a new option “Company routes only” to ignore VA pilot flights that are not on your airlines’ list of “Routes”.
Other smaller UI and UX updates to the platform.
aeroconomy.com – Our new “opt-in” virtual airline economy system – we’ve decided on the name and secured the domain!
In the rest of this blog post, we will take a deeper look into each of these new features and how airlines can start to use them.
In addition to the above features that will be showcased in this blog, a the end of this blog update I will also cover the other features that I plan to work on next and, if you have an opinion, I would love for you to contact me using our official FsHub contact page.
I have also released a new User Survey (link can be found at the end of this blog post) – this is your chance to have your say as to what you would like to be added, updated or prioritised next!
In addition to the above, I would just like to quickly say that whilst some of you may have been disappointed to not have many new pilot achievements the last month – I took the decision to hold off releasing new ones until November (to enable newer pilots to catch up etc)… we will however be starting to design and release more at the start of November!
Airline Route Import & Export feature
Virtual airlines that have many routes setup inside FsHub previously had to manually edit these routes individually through the FsHub Crew Portal admin section – even though the feature of “Airline Routes” is relatively new, already we have several airlines with well over 500 routes in the system each and so (especially given the other new features that I will mention in this blog post later which may lead to airlines wanting to update all of/many of their routes to use the other new features), editing these routes individually can be a massive pain point.
Yesterday, I released a new feature so that airlines can now export their existing routes, edit them and then re-import (sync) them – this is great if you want to mass update your routes, bulk add new routes, disable/enable a whole load in one go (maybe you want to make seasonal changes or decided to remove an entire hub) then this option is what you may have been waiting for! – I would like to thank 6 knots (Ciaran) for helping me test this feature last night!
The route export/import file is in CSV format and enables you to open and modify it using a spreadsheet application (such as Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs etc).
Access to the Import and Export Routes features can be found at the top of the Airline Routes admin section as shown here:
Given that the ability to edit and re-import a CSV file can come with issues such as not necessarily being able to trust that the input is correct in each column or row and that the FsHub platform must be resilient enough to handle bad input data – I understand that from a support perspective this could become a real nightmare for myself and the support team here at FsHub such as if users constantly need our help to understand why route import files are failing to import – In order to mitigate this issue and empower the users I have implemented a new “Last import log” feature so that the user can very easily and quickly identify and fix data issues with their own imports (will tell you which line and what’s wrong – basically how to fix the issue yourself) using this new log viewer window that will automatically appear when you first run an import:
Easily debug any route imports using the Log Import window.
Depending on what you’re updating (or if you are creating a ton of new routes), the import process will be throttled (they’ll trickle create or re-process every few seconds) to prevent performance issues on the rest of the platform – other simple changes to things (even bulk changes) such as the route name (eg. the flight number), reward points and restricted aircraft types (ICAOs) will be almost instantaneous (eg. a few seconds for the entire import as most – even with a few thousand lines in your import file) as our platform doesn’t need to go away, behind the scenes, and calculate distances and verify waypoints exist etc) – So just keep this in mind… what I’m really saying is, you may notice that sometimes the import process is super fast and other times may take a couple of minutes to complete so just sit back and watch for the “Last import log” window to update with the results 🙂 – If there are any issues reported in the “Last import log”, simple “fix” the data in that line and re-import the file.
The file import process has been designed to be as intuitive as possible – to delete rows from your company routes (that exist on FsHub) simply delete the line (or multiple lines) and then run the import, don’t want to delete the route but instead hide it? – simply update the “enabled” column from “1” to “0” save the changes and re-import the file – there is a safety mechanism in place that will not delete any deleted row unless the user checks the “Delete routes that have been deleted from the import file?” option as shown here:
The Route Import screen.
In addition to that, to create new routes, simply add new rows to the CSV file but do not enter a value into the first (id) column – then again, to ensure that duplicates aren’t automatically created by accidentally re-running the same file, the option to “Create routes that don’t have an ID column value?” must be checked at the point of re-import.
If you are an airline admin and want to grant permission to other members of your VA to export and/or import routes (as by default, only the airline admin can do this) an airline admin will need to grant the required permissions to the desired role, these can be granted from the Permissions Editor, the new role permissions that have been added are shown here:
If the concept of these advanced permissions seems complicated, please see this blog post (about halfway down) as this explains how you (as an airline admin) can utilise this powerful permission system.
More information about how to use this advanced feature, including how to create new routes, delete routes, update routes and how you can easily filter by Hub or any other custom filters when editing the CSV file in your spreadsheet application of choice can be found in this wiki article – I suggest, if you plan to use this feature that you have a good read to understand it fully, it’s definitely considered more of an “advanced feature” and probably not for the faint-hearted 😉
Airline achievements can now optionally award pilot reward points for completing them
This has been a highly requested feature and one that, given other requests and changes recently has been put on “the back burner” – I’m pleased to say however that this is now fully implemented and working great!
In order to set up “points” (v$/XP or whatever else you may have configured your airline’s point system as) simply edit (or create a new achievement) and fill out the “{insert your point name} rewards” field like so:
How to add points for airline achievements
Unlike the pilot routes reward (if using the new “Enable airline reward points?” virtual airline setting), airline achievements will not award the virtual airline any additional XP – this value simply rewards the pilot for completing the achievement.
If you do not wish to award XP for a certain achievement (or all of your achievements) simply leave this box blank!
Please keep in mind that only pilots that complete the achievement AFTER you have updated the achievement will be awarded – if you want to back-date pilot rewards (award them for having completed them in the past) – An airline admin should use the manual XP award feature that is found on the airline pilot’s HR. record as shown in this screenshot:
Access to the above screen can be achieved using the icon “Human Resources” in the airline’s “Administration” section of the Crew Portal page!
Airline achievements can now be restricted to certain aircraft types
Another much-requested feature (and in my opinion, a pretty cool feature) is the ability to now create airline achievements which will only be awarded if the pilot has used one of the listed aircraft type designators (ICAOs).
You can now add one or more (comma-separated aircraft type designators – ICAO codes) to the new field shown here:
Demonstration of restricting types of aircraft for a virtual airline achievement.
So, in the above example, we’re going to “allow” any of the following aircraft types (Boeing 737-700, Boeing 737-800, Boeing 737-900, Airbus A320, Airbus A320 Neo, Airbus A321 and the Airbus A321 Neo).
Each aircraft ICAO should be separated with a comma (if you’re only adding a single/specific type of aircraft then you do not need to add a comma at the end)– I have however done my best to sanitise any other form of input – for example, if you use spaces instead, add too many spaces etc. then the system will automatically clean these up and format it correctly once you save/create the achievement!
Again, much like the optional point reward value as discussed above, if you do not wish to enforce a specific (or various) allowed aircraft type that can complete the achievement you can simply leave this field blank and any aircraft will be able to be flown in order to complete it.
What happens to your current virtual airline achievements ?- Unless you update them with a list (or single) ICAO then your existing achievements will continue to function in the same way they did before – they’ll simply allow any aircraft to be used!
The achievement page has also been updated to indicate to users if a virtual airline achievement has a specific (or list of) aircraft that must be used as shown here:
Demonstration of an airline achievement with optional aircraft type (ICAO) restrictions.
If you fly the achievement but don’t use a valid aircraft OR the aircraft you flew had not previously been designated then the flight will still register as a virtual airline flight (unless the VA management team have enabled the new feature “Company route flights only” – that is of course unless this achievement is a valid company route flight) but will not award the achievement.
So as a small piece of advice – be sure to check the achievement requirements carefully before flying and that you use an aircraft (and livery) that is designated correctly – you can check if an aircraft has been designated correctly but checking on a previous fight report using that same aircraft/livery as shown here:
How to check if an aircraft/livery has been designated correctly!
In future, I will add a new feature to the LRM client that will enable you to quickly check the current detected designation for any loaded aircraft – this may even be released next week 🙂
Airlines can now earn XP (just like pilots can).
Some of the more prominent virtual airlines wanted a way to identify and have a measurement for how well the airline is doing and/or to measure the throughput of the routes that are being flown within a virtual airline.
When an airline admin enables the new “Enable airline reward points” setting, the airline will start to generate reward points when pilots fly company routes, this setting can be enabled through the “Airline Details” admin panel section as shown here:
Pay special attention to the fact that you must enable the “Pilot Awards feature to” for this to work!
Once that’s enabled, heading back to your airline’s Crew Portal page, as the “owner” of the virtual airline you will immediately see this section:
As your pilots fly your company routes, this value will start to increase.
If you want other virtual airline members to be able to see this section/amount too, be sure you edit the airline member role’s permission set by granting this new permission:
With the above permission enabled for that security role, any airline members with that role will then also see the virtual airline point balance on their Crew portal dashboard.
Now back to discussing this feature…
The way this works is that, as you may already know, a virtual airline can “reward” up to a maximum of 1000 points per company route or achievement to the pilot who completes the route or achievement – when a route was successfully flown (meaning that the pilot took off from and landed at the specified route’s airports) and will award the airline the remainder of the 1000 max “pilot reward” points to the virtual airline.
So, as an example, if a company route is configured to pay the pilot 300 points (v$/XP etc), the airline will receive 700 points upon successful completion of the flight.
The reason behind doing it like this (awarding the remainder of the 1000 max points) is to add an extra level of “planning” for virtual airlines – if they pay low rates for a flight, fewer pilots are likely to fly it, right? …and whilst that would therefore award the airline more points, it’ll be less likely they will be flown – this should give you airline managers a challenge between balancing the airline “profits” versus awarding (or paying) your pilots well!
So what can you do with these “airline points” within FsHub? – Well not a lot actually, this is more of an unopinionated way for you (as an airline manager) to use this value for whatever reason you may like… for example, one of our bigger VA’s is going to use that value to determine when they can (or should) open new Hub destinations.
What? You thought you might be able to spend those points on new VA aircraft, gate rent, fuel etc? – Nope, this is a simpler, unopinionated ‘be creative with it” feature and, if you don’t want to use it or don’t have a need, simply don’t enable it.
…if you do want to spend generated airline virtual cash and operate within an airline management economy etc. you should continue to read on… this “economy” feature will be coming in our new Aero(e)economy platform!
Airline routes can now be restricted to certain aircraft types
Just like we have added for the “Airline Achievements”, company routes can now be restricted to one or more aircraft type designators (ICAO codes).
If a pilot completes a company route but fails to use an aircraft listed in the list of “allowed” aircraft for the route, then the flight will not be tagged as a Company Route flight in addition to not awarding any points to both the pilot and virtual airline!
The list of aircraft that must be used can be found on the route listing page as shown here:
Updates and improvements to the virtual airline radar map
The virtual airline radar map has long been in need of some major updates – several weeks ago, I deployed major changes that saw the “instant loading” of all online virtual airline aircraft in addition to improved styling.
This week I have improved upon that further by adding the following additional features such as a collapsable list of all online pilots (with the ability to click their name and will therefore automatically select the aircraft and display flight and pilot details), if a flight plan is filed, it will display the flight plan details (eg. to/from airport, country, distance etc.) in addition to rendering the flight route path…
The new improvements to the virtual airline radar page.
The new “Virtual Airline Radar Plugin” (for your own websites)
Another long-requested feature has been the ability for airlines to be able to “embed” their virtual airline radar map on their own website.
Whilst it is somewhat common for sites to provide these kinds of map features as an IFRAME, I took this one step further and have developed and offered a customisable HTML, JavaScript and CSS solution so that you can host your own radar map that connects back (in real-time) to the FsHub platform to automatically update the aircraft positions on your own hosted map super efficiently (there’s not polling going on here!).
This now gives airlines the ability to use our standard “virtual airline radar” map view (the same that we host on our website) but with the ability to fully customise both the layout and style of the page, the map and the various panel components!
I had intended on providing you guys with a link to our own customised version on the Alaska Virtual (official test VA) website but with all these updates, I’ve been too busy to get that sorted… I will however get it done in the coming weeks to give you all some more inspiration 😉
The downloadable plugin provides several files – more details about how to use it, host it and more importantly, customise it… can be found in the README.md file (included in the download ZIP file)
Virtual airline managers can set a new option “Company routes only” to ignore VA pilot flights that are not on your airlines’ list of published routes.
One of the great things about having the new “test” virtual airline (Alaska Virtual) is that I was able to very quickly see that some pilots fly in other locations of the world whether this is what the pilot wanted to do it or simply he or she forgot to change their virtual airline selection in the LRM client software… I very quickly realised that if an airline is trying to simulate a real-world airline or wants to ensure that its airline logbook remains “clean” can now enable this feature from the airline’s Airline Details section as shown here:
With this new setting activated, all virtual airline flights flown that DO NOT match a company route (that being a flight from a specific airport to another specific airport) will be ignored by the VA – the flight will not appear in the virtual airline list of flights and achievements (that are not based on a company route) will also be ignored.
This setting will essentially turn your virtual airline profile into a super clean – “approved flights” only log book and will ensure that you don’t have to manually go and delete a little GA flight that might have been completed by mistake by one of your pilots – from a pilot’s perspective, however, if the flight is “ignored” by the virtual airline, the pilot will still have the flight in their logbook (as a personal flight) ensuring that they don’t forfeit on flight hours or personal log book entries!
Personally, and whilst I know that many virtual airlines may not like to enable this feature (maybe they love hoarding all those lovely flight hours and nautical miles-flown stats) but for other virtual airlines, this is pretty powerful, especially if you’re trying to replicate real-world operations and have published a ton of company routes!
aeroconomy.com – Our new “opt-in” virtual airline economy system.
Whilst this may not surprise you – as I’ve discussed it in other recent blog posts, I wanted to give you all an update with regards to the economy system that I have mentioned in the past…
This week, I have not only decided on a name but also secured a new domain for our airline management “global economy” system…
aero(e)conomy will be the name of our new “opt-in” platform that will provide our global airline economy.
The way that it will work is that airlines will have to “opt-in” (simply click a button in FsHub) to participate in the global economy and everything that it has to offer – from a pilot’s perspective, they don’t need to do anything differently simply fly as they have been, behind the scenes FsHub will “hand off” data to the new aeroconomy platform where airline managers that choose to participate can then work to build a profitable business, have bills to pay, worry about the price of oil (fuel costs) in certain countries, pay maintenance and landing fees, the airline’s safety record (bad landings) will affect airline ticket prices and reduce PAX numbers. Airlines will be able to rent, purchase and upgrade hubs, deal with economic and weather-related issues, set up code-share and sub-contractor agreements with other opt-ed-in airlines – and I’ve only just scratched the surface!
Just because there is now another domain name, it doesn’t mean that you will need to register any new accounts or even visit that site directly – this new platform will be fully integrated (seamlessly) with FsHub – it’ll just keep FsHub cleaner for those users that don’t want to use the features and keep FsHub running nice and fast.
The website (aeroconomy.com), whilst nothing is currently available on it, will start to take shape – even if just an informational landing page over the next couple of weeks.
Work will then start on this platform based on the results of the user survey which I would encourage users to complete – a link to the survey can be found at the bottom of this blog post!
What features will be landing in the new few weeks?
There are a few other things that I would like to improve upon for both general aviation and VA’s, these are:
Improvements to departure and arrival airport detection – In order for FsHub to seamlessly work across all simulators, FsHub uses geolocation to detect the “correct” departure airport whilst this, for the most part, works well for most major airports there are several airports in our database of approx 50k airports that are very close to each other or have seaplane bases in the near vicinity… I have a few plans as to how to improve this functionality which should improve detection.
More flight performance stats on the flight report – I tested the waters with Cody, Uwe and Aurora (my support team) regarding adding “flight award points” for all flights based on performance – these stats would essentially report fuel economy, check that your speed is below 10,000ft was =< 250kt, general landing rate etc. but for the most part the consensus was they didn’t think it was a good idea for points specifically, with that said, I still feel that some further improvements could be made for general (fly and forget) users and so, if I get much feedback on adding these additional stats, I will look to implement them in the next couple of weeks too.
Personal message system – this will enable pilots to “Add a friend” and once the friend request has been approved, both pilots will be able to send each other direct/private messages.
Airline achievement Discord notifications – this will enable virtual airlines to have their own pilot achievements posted directly to their Discord server.
Online friends list – when you add and the other pilot accepts the “friend request”, you will be able to see a list of your friends of whom are online/flying – clicking on their name will automatically open up the global radar and select their aircraft (so you can see where they are/join them if you’d like) – you’ll also be able to send them a message directly and quickly link to their public profile page!
Integrated forums – Discord is great and all but messages can very quickly get lost, I’m planning on building a forum system whereby we can have a global “chat room” could maybe even be used for advertising your virtual airline or sharing links and other bits… in addition to this, the integrated forum system will allow virtual airlines to have their own private (VA members only) forums to discuss whatever they like!
More improvements to the VA radar page – This will add a two-colour scheme whereby Aircraft that are airborne will show in one colour and aircraft on the ground will be a dark shade of grey (just like the main radar page) at the moment the aircraft are all the same colour but I will improve this over the next couple of weeks. In addition to the aircraft style based upon if it’s on the ground or in the air, I also plan to add the automatic updates of distance and time remaining on any route plan (just like it does on the main radar page – at the moment, the new virtual airline radar only provides static route information when clicking on an aircraft (or user from the new “Users online list”!
The ability for company routes to have additional “rules” such as the ability for an airline to set a scheduled departure and arrival time – with the ability to customise the “grace period” – could be super handy for setting up different flight numbers for different times of the day as well as further customising the rewards/pay for different times of the day. Then, depending upon the “grace period” that you set up could be used as a way to only reward flights that departed and landed within the space of saying an hour from the scheduled times – whilst this may not be for everyone, some airlines might want to use this! – Do let me know if this is a feature that you may like me to add (otherwise I’ll deprioritise it!)
There are also several other niggly things that I will be improving on such as highlighting to a pilot if a daily achievement wasn’t quite completed correctly – we’ve had a couple of instances where a pilot’s daily achievement streak has reset as the landing recorded at a different (closer airport)
Progress on the new native (LRM) client software
To be honest, progress has been slow, I’ve been battling other requests (such as the ones mentioned in this blog post) but XPlane 12 has now been released – I mentioned in my last blog post that I was waiting to get my hands on a copy so I can start developing the native Windows, MacOSX and Linux client in addition to the native client for MSFS too.
The good news at least is that FsHub works flawlessly with XP12 and XPUIPC and so this isn’t too higher a priority now… given this, however, please do vote in the attached user survey to ensure that I better understand what the community would like me to concentrate on next!
As a reminder for those that didn’t read my last blog post, the new “native” client will see the requirement for FSUIPC and XPUIPC be removed – I will interface directly with the XPlane API and SimConnect as this has also been a much-requested “want” especially given MSFS and Windows 11’s dislike to FSUIPC 😉
Ideas and suggestions for the Xmas “special event”
Thank you guys, I cannot express how much your continued support means to me!!
User survey autumn 2022
This is a much smaller user survey this time but, as in the past too, is really handy to get your feedback on the features and future direction as to how you would like to see FsHub grow (new features and improvements). I would urge as many of you as possible to complete it over the next couple of weeks – I will close the survey and review/share the results in my next blog post!
If you love and appreciate all the work and time that goes into supporting and developing FsHub, please consider donating – this really does help support the platform hosting costs, and my ability to improve and add more features (that requires additional cloud infrastructure).
