I often get comments posted here regarding registration issues or general questions about Courseplanner itself. This is not really the proper place for them, so I have to delete them.
To that end I have created a new contact page where users can email me directly. I haven’t added any security checks yet, (because, truth be told, CAPTCHA can be a bit of a pain to use sometimes).
Note that the forum is still by far the preferred place to get help, because that way the reply can be used by everybody.
My long term plan has always been to include X-Plane with Courseplanner, (mainly because Flight simulator is not actively been developed any more*). To that end I finally ordered X-Plane 9 and it should be arriving in the next few weeks.
I’ll then be able to create an X-Plane module for Courseplanner.
* Yes I know about
Microsoft Flight, but this seems a long way away from been complete and no one really seems to know if it will be a game of a simulator.
I finally got around adding a proper crash report to Courseplanner, I do get a couple of reports every months and every time I am faced with the same problem of not having enough information. Thankfully it does not happen very often, but when it does I need to gather as much information as possible.
I am looking at CrashRpt, I used that piece of software a while ago, (when they were on Codeproject) and I was quite happy with it.
Because it is open source and written it C++, it makes it very easy to incorporate in Courseplanner.
I am also looking at other kinds of Crash handling software, especially Google and Firefox, not because I think they are better, but simply because I would be foolish to ignore such big names.
One of the most attractive option they have is the possibility to send the report directly to the website, in the past users were reluctant to send an email, or, in worse cases the emails would be trapped in some spam filter.
I also created a privacy policy page, it basically says that I have no plans to pass any information to any third party. Currently the policy is limited to the crash report, but at some stage I will have to update it to include registration and the forum.
I am planning on releasing it to the beta team later today, (my ftp server is down for some reason).
I was playing around with using Courseplanner on an old unix machine of mine. Of course you cannot just run a windows application on a ubuntu machine, but thankfully Wine allows you to run such applications.
But be warned a lot of issues have been reported, Wine does not work 100% all the time.
So, before I venture down the road of installing Courseplanner on my ubuntu machine I need to venture down the road of installing Wine.
Start the terminal server (Applications > Accessories > Terminal).
At the command prompt, type
sudo apt-get install wine
[sudo] password for username:
Enter your password, and then wait for the relevant packages to be downloaded, (only 19Mb but for me it took a bit of time for some reason).
When this is done… there is nothing else to do, you can type…
wine –version
To get the version number, but to be fair, this won’t help you much 🙂
Next I need to install Coursplanner…
Courseplanner tracking a waypoint
I finally managed to get back to flying a little over the week-end, I am working on some new features for Courseplanner, namely the ability to turn into a waypoint, (or past a waypoint depending on the one you want to visit).
All the coding is done, I am just testing with various aircraft if everything works as expected. With all the small aircraft, (Cessna, Mooney and so on), it works well, but it is another story for the heavies. It is just very hard to remain on course without having some wild turns in order to remain on course.
I also added some small features to see where the automatic flight management of Courseplanner is aiming.
But all in all it is fun to get back to flying again.
Yesterday I released a new version of Courseplanner, so far the response seems to be positive, but it is still early days.
I still need to make a few changes, especially the map, it is obviously a bigger eyesore than I expected, so I will need to look into it as soon as possible.
As I want to keep Courseplanner as ‘stand-alone’ as possible, (because of future support for X-Plane), I need to think of a simple way to display the map as ‘clearly’ as possible without depending on X-Plane or Flight Simulator.
I think that importing sectional maps might be a good idea, so if people want a ‘high definition’ map of a certain area then they will need to download it from various sites. I might make it flexible enough to upload to this site as well, (so others can download it).
I also want to add support for X-Plane, I am sure it won’t hurt to have more input from such a large comunity.
As alway I am looking for any suggestions/bug reports, anything to improve Courseplanner. So feel free to visit the forum and throw in your suggestions.
I have released a new version of Courseplanner with support for FS9/FS2004 this effectively placed me a month behind the original release date of Courseplanner 4 but a lot of users have been asking for it.
So, feel free to download version 4.0.0(152) and report any problems you might come across.
I will now concentrate on some of the other requests that have been sent to me and to make Courseplanner as stable as possible. Feel fee to send me as many requests as you want.
I am also looking at adding support for X-Plane, I can’t promise anything but seen that it took a month to add FS9 I am guessing it should take about the same amount of time.
What also took a bit of time was re-uploading almost all the missing images that I deleted by mistake, (and I also updated the new version of MediaWiki, (1.14.0), for the online document).
3 days behind schdule I have finally released a new version of Courseplanner. This is an important release because all the framework has been layed and now it is only a matter of fixing the remaining bugs.
I know there are still some problems with flight following and the flight plan does not seem to be 100% as I would like it, but those are more ‘cosmetic’ changes than anything.
The module is also working nicely now and I refactored a lot of code in the background to enable suport for multiple version of Flight Simulator. Given that Microsoft has droped their design team, and the fact that most people still seem to prefer FS2004 I think it is in Couseplanners own interest to support FS2004, (at least), as soon as possible.
I also really want to release some open source code so that others can start using the module/dll and design their own add-on.
But I think for now the main worry is to have a stable version that supports FSX.
I have finally released the beta version of Courseplanner, this version is open to all.
Because of time constraints this version does not support Networking.
On the other hand the website has been giving me endless headaches, I am hopful that by the end of the week everything will be running smoothly.
I have also been working on the courseplanner documentation, I realize that a lot of work still needs to be done, but I will slowly add more and more information as time goes by.
The courseplanner forum is up and running. I have removed all the old posts as they related to Courseplanner 3.x.
Of course I will still support the old version where I can, but in the meantime I think it is best to start with a brand new forum.
I am also planning to release a beta version before the end of the year. So if you want to be a tester please send me a private message.
Edit: I have also completed the documentation site, but of course there is nothing to see yet. I will try and add a few basic pages as I go along.
I have restricted the wiki to registered users only, in the past this has proven to work well. I would prefer to give full permission to everybody, but unfortunately the wiki is abused by bots faster than I can control it.
Recent Comments