Author Topic: Passenger Bus and Baggage tractor and acft. door situation sensing  (Read 6651 times)

suavi.akar

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Hello,

Most of the time when I request a deboarding / boarding all necessary equipment but the passenger bus and tractor of the baggage train does not appear anywhere around the airport, so the process suspends. The only way to get them work is resetting the position. But generally a single reset does not work and it needs to reset three or four times. It is not scenery dependent, happens in default, freeware and payware sceneries. Interestingly, both of them appear or disappear simultaneously.

Another minor thing is related with aircraft door position awareness. GSX does not sense the door situation (open or close) and assumes that all doors were closed at the start of the process and gives warnings to make me open a door which is already open and holds the process until I cycle the door. Of course I can start the session with all doors closed, but considering the sensing algorithm is already exist, i assume that this could be handled better in the software.

Both of them are minor issues which are not show stopper but I will be very glad if developers have a look at them. Regarding the success on the new gate customization functionality solving the AES interoperability issue very efficiently, I am sure that these will be just a piece of cake for them.

Best regards,
Suavi Akar

virtuali

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Re: Passenger Bus and Baggage tractor and acft. door situation sensing
« Reply #1 on: February 11, 2012, 06:07:08 pm »
Most of the time when I request a deboarding / boarding all necessary equipment but the passenger bus and tractor of the baggage train does not appear anywhere around the airport, so the process suspends.

That doesn't happen here, and nobody else reported it before. Which airplane, airport and gate you used ?

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But generally a single reset does not work and it needs to reset three or four times.

That, instead, it's really impossible because, a "Reset position" will restart the *whole* Couatl.exe program and, from the point of view of GSX (which runs entirely inside it) it's exactly the same as restarting FSX so, it's not really possible that you would see a difference between resetting once or more than once.

Unless, your system is very slow, and restarting the program takes a while so, you *think* you have reset 3-4 times, but in fact it was just one reset all along.

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GSX does not sense the door situation (open or close) and assumes that all doors were closed at the start of the process and gives warnings to make me open a door which is already open and holds the process until I cycle the door

It surely does, and it doesn't do what you are describing. The status is correctly read in any case, and it surely works. IF your airplane uses custom doors commands, and is not in the list of the supported one, there's no status at all to be read, GSX won't read it at all.

Again, which airplane you used ? Which other addons you have ? Perhaps they are interfering with the doors in some ways ?

suavi.akar

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Re: Passenger Bus and Baggage tractor and acft. door situation sensing
« Reply #2 on: February 11, 2012, 07:32:30 pm »
Dear Umberto,

1. Aircraft is PMDG NGX 800, airport is default LOWW, gate G38. Others were some freewares most probably you won't have such as LTFJ, LTCG. I am quite sure that it is not scenery or gate specific.

2. My system is not the fastest around but it could deliver around steady 14+ fps on aerosoft sceneries at the gate with pmdg ngx all sliders at the recommended high positions in pmdg manuals except water details at low when UT2 traffic at 90%. It is a Q9550 with Windows 7 64 bit. Well tuned optimized and clean. Anyway I assume that everything is resetted when the ground equipment is spawn around again.  If this is not an indication of a successful process termination then you may be right.

3. My other addons are AS2012, UT2, Aerosoft sceneries and AES. By the way, as i wrote before gate customization works really perfect in AES environments.

A final note i remember a topic about not appearing service vehicles which you advised the position reset as the solution. That's why i didn't started this topic so far, and managed the situation by resetting. Only after i have noticed the corelation in the case and repeatebility i decided to report.

Thanks for your attention, Best regards,
Suavi

virtuali

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Re: Passenger Bus and Baggage tractor and acft. door situation sensing
« Reply #3 on: February 11, 2012, 09:57:29 pm »
I really don't know what could cause this. Especially the doors status not correctly read (really, nobody ever reported this). About the slow restart, even on a fast system, if you have *many* scenery areas in the Scenery Library, a "Reset Position", which means a total Couatl restart, might take a bit more, because all scenery layers must be checked in case a new scenery was added since the last restart.

suavi.akar

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Re: Passenger Bus and Baggage tractor and acft. door situation sensing
« Reply #4 on: February 11, 2012, 10:57:40 pm »
Thanks for the information. I will wait for a while before making any GSX request in the next run. There are more than 15 sceneries in my system. I don't know very well the internals of fsx, but regarding that i have only one disk drive and memory at least 75% utilized in fsx session, what you have pointed out could really be the reason.

Best regards,
Suavi

suavi.akar

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Re: Passenger Bus and Baggage tractor and acft. door situation sensing
« Reply #5 on: February 12, 2012, 12:11:45 pm »
I really don't know what could cause this. Especially the doors status not correctly read (really, nobody ever reported this). About the slow restart, even on a fast system, if you have *many* scenery areas in the Scenery Library, a "Reset Position", which means a total Couatl restart, might take a bit more, because all scenery layers must be checked in case a new scenery was added since the last restart.

Hi Umberto,

Just a final update for your informations. Considering the info above, i did some trials today while watching the system in Windows Resource Monitor. I delayed pressing Ctrl+F12 until I see resource utilization stabilized (CPU utilization dropped to 30%, memory allocation stabilized)and afterwards made a deboarding request, everything worked as it supposed to be, including door situation sensing. Then I restarted the position although it is not necessary, just to see what happens and the issue I described in my initial post happened again. I tried this several times while watching the system and noticed that a new couatl.exe process starts before the old one completely removed from the memory. I could see two process (although one in termination phase but still holding some resources) more than 10 sec. perhaps 30 sec together.

I think your diagnosis is correct. It is something related with insufficient system resources. I found how to manage it on my system correctly by your help, but perhaps you may consider to display a sort of initial "loading" message until couatl.exe sets everything up correctly and only after then send the service options on the GSX menu. The first message may take a blink of an eye in a fast system and take some seconds in a moderate one like mine, but avoids any misperception about the functionality of the software.

Just a humble idea.

Best regards and thanks again,
Suavi

virtuali

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Re: Passenger Bus and Baggage tractor and acft. door situation sensing
« Reply #6 on: February 12, 2012, 12:26:47 pm »
I tried this several times while watching the system and noticed that a new couatl.exe process starts before the old one completely removed from the memory. I could see two process (although one in termination phase but still holding some resources) more than 10 sec. perhaps 30 sec together.

It's normal that you would see both executables for a very short time, but it's absolutely not normal you could see them together for 10 sec, and 30 secs is really out of this world. It shouldn't be more than 1 second.