Development Roadmap

FSLabs A320 does not update the data-ref for "Landing Lights" which is what triggers the Ready for Takeoff phase of flight.

To get around this, I have retained the ability to trigger this with the landing lights switch, but if the Taxi phase has been activated for five minutes or more, the Takeoff phase will automatically be entered.

This should allow ample time for taxiing (which starts after engine start).

This is a temporary fix and will be improved at a later date. Please let me know how you get on as I do not own the FSLabs aircraft unfortunately so am unable to test it myself.

This version of SLC introduces the ability to turn on or off the Medical Issues, Cabin Issues and Technical Issues via the settings dialog.

I have set these functions to be OFF by default while the software is in early access because I have been made aware of some potential hiccups, but more importantly some people did not want the features at all and instead wanted SLC to solely manage the passenger notifications.

So now you have a choice :)

I have turned down the probability that these events will happen (if turned on) to prevent them from happening so often (which is unrealistic).

This will be a configurable property in a future version.

Turning on off the Captain sounds (Positive Rate, etc) now saved settings correctly - sorry about that.

In version 1.0, when triggering an in-flight service, the other two would be disabled until it finished.

The idea behind this was that on a smaller aircraft, there would not be enough room for multiple trolleys to go up and down the aisle - however, people have mentioned that on larger aircraft multiple services can be carried out at the same time so I have removed the restriction and you can choose to start services at any time.

SLC will now automatically notify you of a new version if it's available when starting the application. You can of course turn this feature off in the settings if you don't want to be bothered.

In version 1.0 to toggle between Tech/Notifications/Medical/Cabin areas you had to double click the icons to close the previous one and open the one you wanted - this is now rectified so a single click will switch (like a tab control) instead and it is much nicer.

I have adjusted the settings so that passengers should no longer be as likely to complain about needing the toilet in some cases if they've just boarded - I like to think they'd go to the toilet before getting on the plane.

Anxious passengers will no longer complain about the music being turned off just after landing - there is now a grace period to allow you to start taxiing etc.

In version 1.0 in the Turnaround phase the music would continue playing with no way to shut it off - this has been resolved by automatically turning it off when Turnaround is reached.

If you pause the simulator, SLC will also pause - no longer will you come back to hungry or thirsty passengers after dealing with a phonecall :)

In version 1.0, the software waited for all engines on the aircraft to be started before the Taxi phase began - this has now changed so that if any engine is started, the Taxi phase will be entered to allow for single engine taxiing.

Passengers will now only complain about being hungry or thirsty if the flight is a certain length - so you can now do short-hauls without losing satisfaction rating for not serving drinks.

Passengers aged over 18 will complain after 90 minutes (if they're hungry or thirsty)

Passengers aged under 18 will complain after 60 minutes (if they're hungry or thirsty) because they're children and a little more... whiny :)

Some people mentioned that boarding and deboarding was too quick - now it should be slower.

If you are impatient you can instantly board/deboard the aircraft by double-clicking the Door icon.

I received some fantastic feedback from a blind flightsimmer who uses SLC (and P3D) via a screen reader - I have attempted to make sure every control on the application now has tooltips to assist the screenreader in instructing the user while navigating the interface.

You can now choose to make the window transparent - there will be a future update to control the opacity, right now it is set to 80%

In v1.0 if you started the alcohol service, the button remained red - now it correctly changes to green.

You can quickly check whether or not you're on the current version by visiting the Settings screen and clicking on "About".

Taking off from a high altitude airport like KDEN causes the "climb" phase to start immediately after the wheels leave the ground instead of the "after takeoff" phase. The flight phase needs to be calculated based on the takeoff altitude, rather than a fixed value.

One of the sound files was not playing when the doors had been opened and passengers started to leave the aircraft - this has now been resolved.

When adjusting the volume of sounds via the mousewheel on the icons, the setting is not preserved between restarts.

During a UI redraw, if the internet connection dropped SLC would be continually trying to authenticate the software. This now does not happen. Additionally, the serial number is now hidden in a password box instead of a text box in case it ever got displayed on a Live Stream.

Thanks to Lewis for pointing this out. And for having a terrible internet connection ;)

Sometimes, especially on a long taxi to the runway, the cabin crew would repeat "the cabin is secured" - this now should not happen. It was to do with passengers undoing their seatbelts and then redoing them (thus triggering the situation + sound).

I am testing some new VST filters to make the cabin crew sounds a bit more realistic - please bear in mind that they were made originally by my daughter to help get SLC going and as such, because she's 10 (and not a flight attendant) they are not perfect - but until we have more sound packs, I will do the best I can with what I have!

VST Filter is Spaceman v2 (SynthEdit) .. settings:
Atk: 000,
BW:
80.00/2.00,
Curve: 0,
Drv: 0,10.000,
Freq: 35.00/6.5,
Gate: 100.00/-80.00,
GateRef: 100.00 / Left,
Lev: 0/0,
Mod: 30/-30,
Noiz: 57/-57,
Out: 0/0,
Power: 0/ on,
Rel: 75.00/250.00,
Stages: 0.00/0,
Tone: 22.00/8.9,
Tone: 0.00/10.00,
Type: 0.00/Squelch

Quite a few people have questioned why the captain is in charge of serving drinks, but an equal number like the option. The answer is because SLC was born originally to replace the cabin-crew features that I enjoyed in FSPassengers so that is why it was included.

Based on this feedback however, I will allow you to choose either in v1.2 - if the automation is in progress, the interaction buttons will be greyed out - once triggered by the siulator, they will display "Green" with the progress bar as usual so that you still have a visual reminder of what is happening in the back.

So far I have the automation working as follows:

• In-Flight Services can be automated via a checkbox in settings
• A tiny notification label appears under the services panel IF automation is turned on
• You can toggle the automation on/off during the flight and times will be respected
• In-Flight Services can still be triggered manually if not automation is active, times will be respected and adjusted.
• In-Flight Services automation starts when in either Climb / Cruise, and after 20 minutes from takeoff. Services will not start automatically during descent, but you can do it yourself (if you feel ike it - remember, there's a penalty if the crew stop serving without getting through all passengers).
• In-Flight Movie starts 10 5 minutes after takeoff, then every 60 minutes after movie ends - movie is random duration between 40-120 minutes.
• Drinks service starts 20 10 minutes after takeoff. Then every 2 hours after they finish.
  If you trigger it manually during the 2 hours, the 2 hours will count again after drinks finish serving.
• Food service starts 10 5 minutes after drinks end. Then every 4 hours after they finish.
  If you trigger it manually during the 4 hours, the 4 hours will count again after food finishes serving.
• Alcohol is still manually served for now - not everyone will wish to serve alcohol? Maybe if manually triggered, I could allow it to be automated for subsequent servings? Feedback please!

Apparently there is an issue with sometimes the window not displaying above the simulator if the simulator is running in Full Screen mode, instead of Windowed mode.

Works in P3D and X-Plane but FSX reverts back to "Windowed" mode if you click on the SLC window (or any other addon window for that matter).

X-Plane isn't always as good as P3D when it comes to announcing turbulent cloud layers to XPUIPC - I may have to do some manual turbulence detection by picking up airframe shaking.

X-Plane does not supply "turbulence" information in some cases - if this is true, I attempt to use the windshear value to detect turbulence - we'll see how well this works.

Turbulence Impact has now been reworked as follows:

• Misc Details
  • If passengers are affected by turbulence, they will now take corrective action - i.e. sit down, belt up. Beforehand they used to complain, but not actually do anything about it so they'd complain indefinitely.
  • Even if passengers are sitting down and belted, there will now be a negative reaction to severe turbulence - anxious people will be affected more as always. Try to avoid turbulent skies if possible :)
  • If all passengers are seated and belted, if turbulence is detected AND the seatbelts are off, a warning about "Turbulence Detected" will display in the Notification area - however, no satisfaction impact will be experienced.
  • This ensures that the flight "trend" will be positive if mild turbulence is happening - because all passengers are seated, belted and feel safe.
• Light/Moderate Turbulence:
  • Passengers who are seated + belted: no impact on satisfaction rating
  • Passengers who are seated + not belted: minor impact on satisfaction rating
  • Passengers who are not seated + not belted: negative impact on satisfaction rating
  • Anxious Passengers who are seated + belted: minor satisfaction rating + proportion related to their anxiety
  • Anxious Passengers who are seated + not belted: negative impact on satisfaction rating + proportion related to their anxiety
  • Anxious Passengers who are not seated + not belted: higher negative impact on satisfaction rating + proportion related to their anxiety
• More Severe Turbulence
  • Passengers who are seated + belted: minor satisfaction rating
  • Passengers who are seated + not belted: negative impact on satisfaction rating
  • Passengers who are not seated + not belted: higher negative impact on satisfaction rating
  • Anxious Passengers who are seated + belted: minor satisfaction rating + proportion related to their anxiety
  • Anxious Passengers who are seated + not belted: negative impact on satisfaction rating + proportion related to their anxiety
  • Anxious Passengers who are not seated + not belted: higher negative impact on satisfaction rating + proportion related to their anxiety

When the aircraft view is from outside, no sounds should be audible (if possible!)

This option is unavailable for X-Plane users (does not support reading 'Current View' from XPUIPC.

SLC has been confirmed to work with FS2004 and the QualityWings 757. Great work, thanks to LeslieG on the Discord server!

For users of FlyUK SkyTrack SLC will detect if it is running and after a flight display a reminder to submit a PIREP.

I will add an option to allow enabling/disabling the ProjectFly / FlyUK SkyTrack PIREP in case it is not needed.

SLC uses the FSUIPC Client DLL to interface with FSUIPC and XPUIPC. I have included this credit on the v1.2 credit screen because I forgot to show appreciation to Paul Henty for his great work in previous versions. Sorry Paul!

SLC now shows the Flight Report button during Deboarding, rather than having to wait for the plane to deboard first.

Passengers will no longer leave it until the toilets are closed to announce that they need the toilets - if they need the toilet, they will go earlier than "normal" if the flight is in the descent phase because they now know that the toilets will shortly be closed.

However you should also note that drinks and food can continue to serve during descent - so if someone goes to the toilet and then has a drink, they need the toilet again as time goes on and the approach phase is extended - especially if you do multiple go-arounds.

Too many passengers were getting up out of their seats - now it is turned down from a maximum of 20% to a maximum of 5%, and the probabilities of them doing so is toned down as well.

The safety notice now has a delay on it when taxiing starts, so that it does not immediately play after starting engines. This feels a little less "mechanical".

The time between boarding ending and taxiing beginning has been increased to 15 minutes from 10 before any warnings/penalties are given.

The time between taxi starting and taking off has been increased to 20 minutes from 10 before any warnings/penalties are given.

The penalties have been reduced so it only really starts having a majorly negative effect if there is a serious delay.

This should give ample time to depart airports where taxiing takes some time - i.e. large airport, or busy airport.

Removed the reference to FSUIPC being unavailable, and now shows "Simulator Not Connected" - eases confusion for X-Plane users who do not use FSUIPC but have XPUIPC instead.

You can now right-click on the Doors button to instantly board/deboard the aircraft depending on the phase of flight

This replaces the double-click functionality from v1.1 which was a little fiddly.

If Cruise is reached, but the altitude increases,a new cruise altitude will be recorded - this will ensure that the descent phase kicks in properly when you start to descend, and not after you descend below the original cruise altitude that was set.

You should no longer get a "Deboarding, Awaiting Doors" message when taxiing back to the gate and using the brakes, unless your ground speed is 0 in which case you've stopped.

You should no longer get a warning about taxiing too quickly after landing - I have dampened down the detection for this particular warning to give you time to slow down enough to prevent it.

On some PCs SLC's user interface would lag from time to time - the culprit has been found, so it should be much smoother now.

If you managed a "Good" landing rating, your score for the flight report screen was being reduced by 50% when calculating a grade .. I got an E instead of a B.

This was due to the rating being reduced by 0.5 (50%), instead of 0.05 (5%) ... my bad!

The startup.wav can now be customised via the soundpack - it was in the wrong phase and played before a soundpack had been selected from the UI, so it was always the default one that was being used.

Now it has been moved to the pre-flight phase which makes much more sense - and it plays correctly.

Special thanks to Harold for bringing this to my attention.

To ensure compatibility with FSLabs A320 (which does not support the landing lights triggering the Takeoff phase), I tried automating it so that either you triggered it with the lights or it triggered itself after 5 minutes of taxiing.

While this worked, it may not have been desired (and wasn't for many other users).

I have now updated this by making the automation completely optional (via a "Compatibility" tab in Settings) but also:

• if you turn on the seatbelt signs DURING taxi, it will go to Takeoff mode automatically. Note - if you turn them on during boarding (i.e. before Taxi), this will not trigger Takeoff mode. This gives the effect of "dinging" the seatbelt sign twice during taxi... so Belts are on ... ding once, they're off... ding again, they're back on ... thus Takeoff is triggered.
• OR, adding the ability to manually right-click the seatbelt sign to initiate the takeoff.
• OR, you can still trigger the phase by turning on the landing lights with a switch
• whichever of the above you perform first, will override the other.

When the "Takeoff" phase is triggered, a sound from the captain to the cabin crew is played telling them to take seats for takeoff - so this makes sense from a visual point of view while also allowing the people without FSLabs A320 to continue to use the landing lights as normal.

By adding the functionality for toggling in quick succession, this will also help when HotKeys are deployed and/or scripting via LINDA/MCE.

This functionality works with ALL aircraft.

Special thanks to Ralf for his extensive support in this matter and insightful suggestions on how to make it work well for everyone.

"Taxi too quickly" warnings will now not trigger until 30kts on the ground. Raised from 25kts in v1.2.

I have reduced the impact pitch and roll exceedance has on the flight rating because it was a little bit too aggressive and a perfect flight score could reduce by almost 40% after a single tightish turn - I don't think it should be such a drastic impact on an otherwise good flight ... however if you continue doing tight turns and pitch movements then obviously the score will continue to drop for the duration. A single issue should not kill your score dead though.

Passengers will now sit down automatically if standing when you turn or pitch too quickly. If they're already anxious, they'll also secure their belts.

In previous versions the landing rate was taken as a single value from FSUIPC at the point of landing - now the value is dampened, and taken as an average of the landing speeds just before touchdown because this is a much more accurate way of assuring that the data is not subject to weird spikes based on erroneous data being fed from the sim to FSUIPC and in turn SLC.

A lack of in-flight service will not incur a penalty any more, so short-haul pilots will not get a perfect rating obliterated for not serving anything.

• Lack of drinks only gets a penalty if not served on flights over 90 minutes from takeoff.
• Lack of food only gets a penalty if not served on flights over 120 minutes from takeoff.
• Lack of alcoholic drinks only gets a penalty if not served on flights over 180 minutes from takeoff.

Feedback requested - is this realistic?

Now you can customise the in-flight service automation further by selecting the items you'd like to automate (if any) as well as whether or not they repeat throughout the course of a flight.

For instance, you may wish to serve drinks continously, but only one meal and one movie with no alcohol service.

Now you can.

Captain K-Man, of Twitch fame and glory, seems to think it would be a great idea to make the "passenger manifest" viewable - so I shall (with the caveat that it is VERY much work in progress).

Here it is:

• Watch passengers board/get seated/belt up in realtime
• Watch passengers stats react as you fly the plane
• Watch passengers stats react as in-flight services and events affect them

It amazes me how some people can't get behind the cleaners doing some sterling work on our dirty planes before new passengers come aboard. Oh well - now you have the option to turn the sound off :)

In < v1.2 the turnaround phase (or more specifically, resetting the flight) attempted to close the doors... now, it will not because the gate sound will be playing and it would be nice to be able to start a new flight without interrupting the audio.

You will be able to customise the time it takes for each person to be "handled" by cabin crew during each in-flight service.

Tech/Medical/Crew issues can now be either automated, with a probability slider for each, or triggered manually by right-clicking the associated button. You may also choose whether or not a confirmation dialog will show up in case you accidentally trigger the event.

They can also be turned off entirely.

Because SLC is still early access, these features aren't as great as I want them to be - although they do work. As such they are disabled by default, you need to turn them on in settings in the "Features" tab.

If you wish to create a soundpack with only a few files, you can now turn an option on/off to determine whether any missing files will be played from the Default soundpack.

This will allow you to run SLC quietly with perhaps a cabin boarding sound, and let FS2Crew (or similar) handle the pilot voices very easily.

When you open the doors during boarding/deboarding you can now choose via settings to hear some additional background noise to represent the airport gate (if applicable).

This works really well during the Turnaround phase where you have not yet selected your flight details, but the doors are open - it adds some nice immersion to being parked at the airport waiting to turnaround.

Easy Volume Control: as with other functions such as passenger ambience, boarding music etc, the gate volume can be controlled directly by using the mousewheel on the doors button.

SLC v1.3 will have its requirements downgraded to support Windows Vista which only supports .NET Framework 4.6, as opposed to 4.6.2

Because the g-force is being monitored very frequently, it is prone to giving immediate reactions to the tiniest amount of movements which would be imperceptible to the passengers - now SLC calculates the average G-load over a short amount of time to try to emulate the "real feel" of the flight.

This will help when it comes to the reporting functionality because tiny spikes will no longer affect the negative rating so easily.

Special thanks to Andy for his continued input and for suggesting this feature on the Discord channel.

Suggestion by Fabien - Special features (which are still under development) are currently able to be disabled via settings - what is nice is to be able to trigger them manually so that you can have them switched off, but if you decide you wish to spice things up a little, you can perform the action manually by right-clicking the relevant icon (at an appropriate flight phase).

A nice suggestion from Andy so that SLC will automatically remember the window position you last left it at when restarting.

I have tidied up the UI on the settings dialog so that things are in more intuitive places. This will also assist in adding new functionality when further features are added.

If you wish, you can set the SLC window to dock to the left or right to prevent it from being moved around.

Off by default

SLC will close the manifest window if the settings window is opened so that they don't overlap one another

This has now been updated

• Now supports transparency if enabled on main screen
• Now correctly terminates if main window is closed
• Now can be docked either left/right, and undocked from the main window if desired

• These items have now been resolved, and hopefully clarified in terms of operation for those wishing to trigger them manually.

I have received two reports of automated services causing an issue - if you have any further reports, please let me know - it would be a great help to diagnose the issue :)

It was an issue with the alcohol service - sorry about that, download the hotfix to prevent crashes (or don't use the alcohol service until v1.4 if you don't want to update again).

SLC now allows you to manually configure the transparency level of the window to suit your needs rather than it being fixed at 80% if transparency was enabled

General interface improvements for blind users - now debug elements are no longer needed and will not appear to NVDA (screenreader).

If you supply a departure and arrival ICAO, your flights will automatically be logged (unless you turn it off!)

• This data will be used to build up a history of flights that you've conducted, so that analysis can be done on your data such as "average landing rate", "average passenger satisfaction" etc
• At this time the interface to view these logs is NOT complete - it will be updated in v1.5 on both your online account, and within the application.

For now, as of v1.4 we will concentrate on you gathering flight data by flying so when v1.5 releases, your reports will be full of delicious information :)

The Text To Speech engine has been enabled for all events if a filename.TXT is supplied instead of a *.WAV file in the sound packs

• Independant voices for Captain, Cabin Crew and Ground Crew
• Independant volume for each voice
• Independant speech rate for each voice
• Select any installed TTS voice on your system, and assign a different one to each role.
• Dynamically adapts to current flight-simulator conditions. Include variables such as {destination}, {altitude}, etc to make the transcripts change depending on what is happening during the flight at that point in time. Documentation To Follow

More to come on this as it is built out.

Aircraft Wifi can now be selected as an option when starting the flight - or you can remain old-school and have "in-flight movie" :)

• Connection quality is simulated based on Gogo - between 3Mbps and 12Mbps is simulated depending on signal quality
• Signal quality is dependant on altitude - below 10,000ft the signal will not be brilliant
• Not all passengers will be using Wifi - so they may or may not get frustrated depending on how bad the quality is, and how many passengers are actively using whatever resources are available at any given time.
• The more passengers onboard, the more potential users of the Wifi - so the more likely it is that the service will be slower.

In addition to passengers, cabin crew are now individually simulated for each flight.

• READY - React in their own way, mood etc in the same way as passengers
• READY - Seating / Belting separate to passengers and depending on flight phases, cabin being secured etc
• READY - TTS integration .. "hi there, my name is 'Emily' and I'll be joined by 'Dave', 'Melanie' ... etc
• READY - Number of cabin crew are assigned based on available seats on the aircraft as per FAA regulations, i.e. 19-51 pax = 1 flight attendant, with at least 1 more for every 50 seats.

Passengers will now have "thoughts" about issues without them necessarily causing a negative reaction - for example "here we go!" when starting the takeoff roll, and "i'm feeling a little hungry" when food hasn't been available for a while.

This will be important and built upon in v1.5 and up as we start the process of bringing more integration between captain/crew and passengers.

I needed a way to show users an achievement on a per-flight and overall basis - enter the "improvement factor". This way you can see whether or not you improved the mood of your passengers based on their satisfaction rating right at the start of the flight, and that at the end. In real life you'll barely ever have the passengers feeling 100% great, so that shouldn't be the success factor - but you can do things to make them feel better than how they felt when they first got onboard in which case, happy days.

You can now view in real-time what each individual passenger is up to - such as "reading a book", "sleeping", etc.

This will be built upon in v1.5 so you can see if anyone is waiting for attention - for now it is a pretty cool way for passengers to appear "alive" during your flight and adds a lot to the immersion factor.

I have completely reworked the weather detection engine so that there are now three phases - arrival airport, departure airport and "current position".

• READY - TTS will give a weather update to the passengers on departure, and arrival weather (if available). Nervousness may result...
• READY - Turbulence should be correctly dealt with now, but X-Plane may or may not be brilliant unless your weather engine updates the cloud and wind layers correctly. Let's see.
• READY - Passengers may get nervous before takeoff/landing depending on how bad the weather is, what time of day it is etc (worse at night)

This is a major update to the software to better handle the physics of the aircraft and how it impacts the passengers.

• All Airframe Events Now Moved to Event-based system
  

  When something happens to the aircraft, everyone feels it at the same time be it turbulence, excess pitch/roll/yaw rate etc. Under the current system in < v1.3 it was possible for passengers to react to events differently because during the course of processing all of the passengers, the current flight values would change. So say if we had 300 passengers, by the time we got through 150 of them, the aircraft pitch / gforce might have changed so the remaining 150 passengers would ignore the trigger event and react based on the current conditions - which was not ideal.

  Now when something affects the aircraft, that event is stored and processed individually - so all passengers react to the values which were present at that particular snapshot of time.

  This means that no matter how slow your computer, the simulation will be exactly the same for every event for every passenger.

• Passengers still retain their "individuality" and can also still react to non-airframe events at the time they are processed.

• On turnaround the aircraft doors usually remain open - if you started a new flight, then the passengers would board immediately which you may not have been ready for. Now you have to manually start the boarding process (i.e. tell the pax they can come onboard) after doors have been opened so that if you leave them open, the passengers won't just assume they can come onboard.
• By default this is now turned ON - but you can turn it OFF to revert to previous behaviour via settings if you so wish.
• Doors icon will now flash when your input is required - i.e. they need to be opened or closed.

• GForce penalties for pitch events are now dampened so spikes from the simulator are smoothed out.

• Updated penalty and warning detection levels
• Updated messages to reflect passenger statements rather than technical terms, i.e. "steep climb!" as opposed to "excess pitch!"
• More realistic (and fair) effect on passenger rating - progressively more harsh as you go further and further into exceedance.

• Passengers now react to yaw acceleration in the air
• Passengers now react to yaw acceleration on the ground (no more rally-cross taxiing :) )
• Passengers now react to pitch acceleration as well as pitch angle
• Passengers now react to roll acceleration as well as roll angle

The PIREP reminder functionality will now detect "A Pilot's Life" ACARS system if it is running, and remind you to submit a PIREP once your flight is complete.

Thanks for Patrick for help on this.

A small update but for those who requested it, you can now minimise the SLC window to the taskbar.

You can now choose whether or not you want SLC to be the "top most" window or not - a few people have mentioned that they don't like that it appears over other applications, so now you can choose to turn it off - it is on by default though.

Don't open the door during flight...

The UI is now dockable to the left/right of the screen if required, and you can also choose to attach the passenger manifest screen either to the left or right of the window

The notification section of the main window has been updated

• The update speed has been increased so it feels much more "in tune" with that is going on - previously it only updated every 5 seconds.
• It only shows notifications for the last 10 seconds whereas it was 30 seconds beforehand - but 30 seconds is a long time, and notifications were largely irrelevant by the time 30 seconds was up.
• You can choose whether or not you want to see the "passenger thought" bubbles (default is 'on').
• NO MORE POPPING! When there's no notifications to show, the window won't resize (which is very jarring at times) - instead it will stay as it was - much better!

Service icons are now permanently visible to stop the UI from "popping" into place when various flight phases are reached

• Icons are greyed out when unavailable
• Tooltips improved for accessibility during each state change

More audible notifications have been added, specifically to remind you to open/close doors when SLC is waiting.

Rather than refreshing the data each time, each line updates individually - this was a known limitation during early-access while this system is being built-out, but it is nice to have taken care of it.

A PIREP warning will now also show after boarding to remind you to start your Virtual Airline ACARS system as well as during deboarding.

The toilets will still be simulated, but in an automated fashion - i.e., unavailable during takeoff and approach/landing, so the notifications from passengers will still happen.

• This has now been replaced with functioinality to allow the captain to address the cabin directly - More to come

Restructured the codebase to make debugging easier going forward - nothing to see here for users, but adefinite improvement of issue detection and being able to rectify issues at my end...

Just a quick fix to stop the TTS from saying "dot" when encountering an extra full stop on the weather briefings (if turned on).

An addition for Andy - now you can click on the relevant button to toggle the passenger / flight log window without having to click the X button to close. Easier to see, less mouse movement required.

Happiness is now a direct result of anxiety levels instead of being modelled separately - you can no longer have 100% happiness and 100% anxiety which makes no sense :)

Additionally, the recovery levels from negative events are improved - so if you fly like a .. trainee ... it won't penalise you for the whole flight.

Increased the resolution of the timing used to check the landing speed so now it should be much more accurate. It is now on par with Landing Rate Monitor in most cases - although please understand that FSUIPC/XPUIPC sometimes are really unreliable for getting the data out (e.g. replays of the same landing will show different data each time).

Boredom rating was being calculated too quickly - this is now fixed. It has the happy side effect that the "happiness" rating is also fixed, because it is the same area in the code which was erroneously running.

Drunk rating was showing in health column and vice versa - purely decorational at the moment, but not correct - now it is fixed.

If your flight fails to log for whatever reason, a message will now show up and let you know what went wrong and allow you to retry.

You should no longer get such harsh penalties when turbulence is encountered.

My bad, missed a decimal point ;) I should really land harder during testing like you guys instead of being such a good pilot ;) ;) ;)

Apparently some people enjoyed it and were very sad that I took it away :)

When large amounts of passengers were simulated, the CPU usage was higher than usual and the UI started lagging - this should now be fixed.

Additionally, the passenger manifest screen should take up less CPU usage when it is open.

I have added a fix so that the FSLabs A320 windmilling engines do not prematurely trigger the Taxi phase any more.

In some cases FSUIPC/XPUIPC does not supply the value for fahrenheit so I have put a fix in place to convert Celcius to Fahrenheit automatically instead.

I have added a fix so that the default soundpack does not announce itself as an airline in TTS scripts any more.

Deploying the landing gear accidentally by pressing "G" when entering a waypoint into the FMC could trigger the descent/landing stages of the flight which was undesirable.

There are now a number of checks in place so that if this happens again, it will no longer trigger events early and you can rectify the mistake without incident.

It was possible for in-flight services to start during a departure if the SID was extended at low altitude for a period of time. A good example of this is the BIBOS1D departure out of Frankfurt (EDDF) which, unless cleared by ATC, could have you travelling for almost 25 minutes level at 5,000ft before your climb.

Now (if automation is enabled) SLC will not start in-flight services until after the departure has completed.

Appending the ICAO code of either your destination or arrival airport to a sound file will cause that one to be favoured when playing an event sound effect. This works for every phase of flight. So you might have boarding-specific sounds when departing "-depEGNT" (Newcastle) and specific sounds you want to play when arriving into Paris (-arrLFPG). Simply append the flight phase and ICAO code to your filename, i.e. "captain-welcome-depEGNT.wav" and it will be played. If you have multiple of these, then a random one will be selected.

You can also optionally specify the time of day, i.e. "morning", "afternoon", "evening" to your sound pack filenames to cause those sounds to only ever be played during a set time of the day in the simulator.

• "captain-welcome.wav" will play at any time of day, from any location you depart from.
• "captain-welcome-morning.wav" will only ever be played when departing in the morning.
• "captain-welcome-depEGNT.wav" will only ever be played when departing out of Newcastle, but at any time of day.
• "captain-welcome-depEGNT-morning.wav" will only ever be played when departing out of Newcastle, and only in the morning.
• "captain-welcome-arrLEIB.wav" will only ever be played when flying to Ibiza, but at any time of day.
• "captain-welcome-arrLEBL-morning.wav" will only ever be played when arriving at Barcelona, and only when it is morning.
• "captain-welcome-depEGNT-arrLEIB.wav" will only ever be played when departing out of Newcastle for Ibiza, but at any time of day.
• "captain-welcome-depEGNT-arrLEBL-morning.wav" will only ever be played when departing out of Newcastle and arriving at Barcelona in the morning.

This also applies to TTS files, although you can also use the dynamic variable capability within your scripts to perform almost the same functioniality - but the option is there at least :)

This allows you to perhaps have a busy gate sound playing during the day, but a quieter one at night - or perhaps different sounds playing at different airports, i.e. a smaller airport will have a different gate noise to a larger one.

All digital default sounds are now in MP3 format instead of WAV which reduces the size on disk from 350Mb to only 66Mb without any obvious loss of sound quality. This also means the download of the application will be much reduced once it's released.

The sound engine has been completely rewritten to support unlimited sound effects per event which are chosen randomly to provide a completely random auditory experience each time - TTS is fully supported with unlimited scripts per sound event, and either MP3 or WAV files can be used on all events.

Individual windows can remain open and will remember their positions - this is an improvement over v1.4.x where only one sub-window (such as passenger manifest) would be open at any one time - now you can see everything if you have the real-estate on your screen(s).

Because v1.5 is a major update with a host of new features both under-the-hood and in the UI (and because more features will be coming in v1.6), it will include the first revision of a detailed user manual to help understand how everything works.

You can now select to optionally muffle the cabin crew so that their voices are not so clear when addressing the passengers via the cabin tannoy (as if the door is closed) - when addressing the captain, the voice will still be clear.

Because SLC uses the FSUIPC/XPUIPC door data refs, it not only responds to the simulator opening the doors (i.e. via an FMC, for example the PMDG doors page), but it also can set the door state - this is what happens when you click on the main button in the UI -> It opens Door 0, which on most aircraft is the front-left.

However it does not open the remaining doors which means if your simulated aircraft "Doors" page does not update all of the correct data-refs, only one door will open - and boarding could take ages if, say, you have 300 people waiting to board.

While SLC does support the additional doors being opened from the sim if the addon supports it, it now also allows you to open the additional doors from the cabin view screen - so if you only want the back doors open, you can do it from within SLC. This works on all aircraft, because SLC updates the sim with, for example, "Door 3 is open". For instance in this screenshot of an MD-11, you can see we have two front-left doors, and the rear right door - passengers are using all three entrances.

Additionally, if 3 doors are open, the boarding time (if set to random) is now divided by the number of doors open - so it will be 3 times faster than only having one door available. This will be helpful on things like the B747/777/A380 which have a large passenger capacity.

However if you have set the boarding time to take a specific time per passenger (i.e. to match GSX) then the time taken for each passenger to board the aircraft will remain unchanged - but they will in both scenarios use the door closest to their seat.

The following configuration files are included in this release (list being updated) for the live cabin visual view:

• A Default Configuration File (for Unknown Aircraft, Medium Airliner, 3x2, 3x3 seating configuration)
• Airbus A220, A300-600, A310-300, A318, A319, A320, A321, A330-300, A340-500, A350-900, A380-800
• BAC Concorde
• BAe 146
• Boeing 717-200, 727-200, 737-200, 737-300, 737-700, 737-800, 737-900, 737-MAX, 747-400, 757-200, 757-300, 767-200, 767-300, 777-200, 777-300ER, 787-8, 787-9, 787-10
• Bombardier CRJ-700
• Bombardier Dash 8 Q400
• Embraer ERJ 145, 170, 175, 190, 195
• Gulfstream G-IV SP Bizjet
• McDonnell-Douglas DC-9, DC-10, MD-80, MD-88
• SAAB 340
• Sukhoi Superjet 100-95B
• Tuplev TU-154

This list shows configs that are ready right now - will be updated as the release progresses and the config files are created :)

Now that SLC is aware of a scheduled departure and arrival time, the captain will now make announcements for various events based on the current time of day, and whether you're early, delayed or late for departing or arriving.

This functionality extends into the Text To Speech support throughout the application, so you will always hear contextual sounds whenever an event happens on the aircraft.

Examples include saying "good afternoon" at the correct time of day as well as mentioning the name of the departure/arrival city during addresses concerning delays when using TTS.

Aside from the numeric rating you receive during your flight, you can also rely on the passengers to keep you informed of their comfort level as you weave your way around the skies.

They will now audibly react to your control inputs, taking into account bank angle, pitch angle and g-force, as well as during landing. From normal chatting, to shouting loudly during bad landings or screaming in terror if you decide to perform combat maneouvers in a 747, this adds a whole new (optional!) level of immersion. Be nice!

DON'T DO THIS (Click to watch video)

X-Plane has a horrible bug which results in the local date being incremented by 1 day if the current Zulu time crosses midnight.

This can cause major issues with calculating the difference between two times (i.e. a departure time, and an arrival time - sometimes being over 24 hours wrong.

SLC now allows you to alleviate this bug if you fly X-Plane and fly across a Zulu midnight, by using the system time instead - not ideal, but prevents time miscalculations.

SLC already offered in-flight service automation, but now it is expanded upon by only serving at relevant times - for instance, alcohol will not be served during breakfast time, and meals will only be served at the proper times during the flight - if your flight does not cross a meal time then no meal will be served.

Times are based on the current "local time" of the aircraft.

Of course, you can always manually start services at any time - but if left to automation, then the crew will serve based on the correct schedule.

In addition when starting a flight, the passengers are now generated with levels of hunger / thirst etc which correspond to the time of day - if it's approaching lunchtime, their hunger and thirst levels will generally be increased.

The flight report screen is currently being revamped and now tries to give you handy hints on how to improve your flying, as well as pointing out which errors you made during the flight.

More to follow

A popular request was to allow the specifying of a cruise altitude rather than have SLC automatically detect it - for instance, if you're performing a step climb you may not wish to announce the cruise level has been reached but SLC would detect you levelling off and do it anyway.

Now you can optionally specify an altitude for your cruise level - it can be brought in via SimBrief as well if you use it.

As always though this is completely optional and you can manually announce the cruise level at any point in time.

SLC now allows you to automatically import your latest SimBrief Flight Plan - in doing so, you will enable flight logging and "late penalties".

SimBrief will also provide your flight number, cruising altitude (see above) and the correct number of passengers for your flight.

You can of course set this all up manually by filling in the boxes yourself, but if you do use SimBrief then the ability to simply click a button and be done is really handy.

Click the image to view a larger version.

SLC now allows you to manually take control of the aircraft announcements (if you wish) so that you control when the captain talks to the passengers rather than it being completely automated.

SLC now allows you to use both TTS and pre-recorded voices for each voice in the application - for instance you may now have a digitally voiced captain, and a pre-recorded cabin crew and ground crew or any combination you like.

SLC will now detect the surface that the aircraft is on during taxi/takeoff, and relevant penalties will accrue if the passengers think you're not on a taxiway or runway.

Unfortunately, XPUIPC does not seem to expose the surface type property to SLC, so X-Plane won't trigger any penalties.

SLC will now automatically manage the seatbelt signs for you (if you wish) during various phases of flight.

Each passenger now has a "base" level of anxiety which is used to dampen their recovery from traumatic events, i.e. your flying ;)

What this means is that if you fly in a frightening manner, the passengers will remember what happened and will not recover from other events that make them anxious as quickly. In essence this means that you will not be able to fly terribly at the start of your flight and expect a 100% satisfaction rate, because the anxiety component of a passengers' simulation will not be able to reduce far enough, quickly enough, until the base level of anxiety reduces too.

There's a new option to automate the boarding music during the various stages of flight if you want to... If selected, the music turns on during boarding, turns off at takeoff, turns back on after landing.

SLC now simulates over 60 "thoughts" which are contextual based on the current phase of flight - such as "I love this bit!" when taking off, "I can't wait to land" for more anxious passengers and "I hope the flight is smooth" while waiting to get going.

This helps create a feeling of immersion because the passengers thinking reacts to your flying style - you'll get more positive thinking passengers if you fly well.

SLC now uses the zulu time set within the simulator for all timings - this is an improvement over using the local system time, and allows you to fly using time acceleration if you wish.

• You can now specify an optional departure and arrival time for your flight, in order to simulate irate passengers if you're running late...
• Correctly follows simulator time, so time accelaration is supported and allows you to fly at night during the day etc as you'd expect.
• Different levels of stress for passengers depending on their "type", i.e. those in business seats will not appreciate tardiness (they have a meeting to get to, don't you know).

More to follow on this

• When starting a flight, preferences for departure/arrival ICAO, sound pack and in-flight entertainment are saved.
• Upon next startup, previous settings are restored for quick-start
• Last arrival ICAO is pre-filled as the current departure airport to aid in sequential flights

You can now customise the boarding interval per passenger using a slider - this will assist in synchronisation with GSX and other passenger addons. Default is 4 seconds per passenger which means approx 13.5 minutes for a 200 passenger load (seems reasonable?)

You can adjust this during boarding to speed up / slow down simply by using the slider.

By default, "randomised" boarding is in place - passengers will take between 3 - 10 seconds each to board unless you specify you want a fixed value with the slider.

You can also "instant board" by right-clicking the boarding icon in the UI.

Passengers will now each get bored while waiting to get on the aircraft, and also while waiting for departure - more so if they're sat down and waiting. Similarly they'll get fed up if you take too long to disembark the aircraft.

All settings also apply to the deboarding phase.

The use of the toilets has been improved from v1.4 to properly simulate someone going to the toilet rather than just saying "toilet used" in the notification area.

• Toilets are only available during the climb, cruise and descent phases - otherwise they are locked.
• If a toilet is available, any passenger will travel from their seat to it - even if it is not the closest one to them, as long as it is unoccupied by another passenger.
• Once the toilet is "in use", the length of time it takes a passenger to use it depends on how desperate they were. If you left the seatbelts on and were serving drinks, they may be absolutely bursting - so the time it takes for them to "do their business" when they reach the bathroom will be higher than if they weren't completely desperate.
• Once finished, they'll exit the toilet they will return to their seat automatically.
• Occupied toilets are visualised by being coloured orange - otherwise they are green when available, or red when unavailable.
• Passengers will get frusrated if they need the toilet and the seatbelts are on, or if there are no free toilets available.
• The level of frustration will depend on how desperate they are to use the toilet...

In-flight services have been adjusted so that they are accurately displayed using the visualisation model (if open) and reflect the actual workings of the simulation in the back of the aircraft.

• Services are defined by start and end points on the aisles of the aircraft
• Cabin crew who are currently available will be assigned service duty.
• Assigned crew will report to the kitchen area to prepare for service provision.
• Once ready, service will begin.
• Assigned cabin crew will work their way along the aircraft and serve each seat on a row individually - only if a passenger is hungry/thirsty, or if they are not asleep.
• When services are finished, cabin crew will return to the kitchen area before rejoining the rest of the crew to monitor the passengers.
• Service times continue to be controlled on a "time taken per seat" value which is in settings.
• Services can ONLY be started if there are enough cabin crew available to be assigned to the duties - otherwise it will wait until such a time that enough crew are free to perform the service.
• Concurrent services can only be started if there are enough crew available - if they're busy serving drinks, they won't start serving food for instance.
• "Busy" cabin crew are shown highlighted on the visualisation
• As services are completed, the progress bar on the main UI continues to update but you can also see the service completion on the aircraft visualisation because each seat gets "filled in" with a colour accordingly, allowing you to watch the service simulation occur.

Video demonstration to follow.

Numerous additions to the cabin simulation have been included in this update, as below:

Pre-Boarding Phases

New in v1.5, as soon as you start a flight the simulation starts affecting passengers. They will now start to get hungry / thirsty and more bored as they wait to come onboard rather than before when they only started having those effects once they'd boarded the aircraft.

Boarding Phases

• Cabin crew with nearest seat allocation to an open door on the aircraft will travel to the door in question when it is opened to greet passengers
• When doors are open, any cabin crew not allocated to an open door will take up a greetng position at the beginning of aisles in First, Business and Economy classes ready to greet passengers as they come onboard.
• Any remaining cabin crew who are not allocated to a door or a greeting position will simply walk around the cabin preparing it for departure.
• Once passengers are boarded, cabin crew will mill around the cabin assisting passengers unless they were assigned to a door in which case they will remain in position until their door closes.
• When doors are closed, cabin crew will mill around the cabin assisting passengers and preparing for takeoff
• If an exit closes having previously been opened, the cabin crew member will rejoin the cabin preparations. Opening again will cause them to travel back.
• All FSUIPC-supported doors can be opened/closed (depending on aircraft config file)
• Passengers will enter any open door at random intervals and proceed directly to their allocated seats via the aisles.
• Passengers are able to be selected to view their current travel route around the aircraft
• Passengers are coloured according to their satisfaction levels, and "filled in" if secured (seatbelts) for easy status visualisation.

Takeoff Phase

• Once they're all seated, crew will "ding" the cockpit to notify you that they are ready for takeoff

Climb / Cruise / Descent Phases

• When not assigned to a passenger or service provision, cabin crew will walk around the cabin.

Approach Phase

• Cabin crew will revert to "Preparing for landing" mode, and simulate clearing the cabin
• Cabin crew will visit each row to make sure everyone is seated and belted

Landing and Landed Phases

• Cabin crew will travel to and remain in their seats ready for landing

Taxi to Gate

• Cabin crew will head towards all exits during taxi to the gate ready for doors opening

Deboarding

• Cabin crew will disembark passengers from the aircraft using any FSUIPC-supported door that you have open.
• When deboarding starts (after engine shutdown), any cabin crew not allocated to an open door will take up a position at the beginning of aisles in First, Business and Economy classes ready to say goodbye passengers as they come onboard.
• When deboarding starts, passengers will, after a random delay, make their way to the aisle nearest their seat but ONLY if the aisle is on their seat row, and only if the ajacent position is not occupied by anyone else at that moment in time.
• Upon reaching the aisle, the passengers will randomly delay their exit from the aircraft while they empty their overhead bin of belongings.
• Passengers will then head to the nearest open exit after collecting their luggage from the overheads.

Turnaround

• Once all passengers are deboarded, the crew will come away from their assigned doors and start preparing the cabin for boarding again.

A major new component of Self-Loading Cargo v1.5 is the ability to watch the simulation of the "living cabin" in real-time to see exactly what your passengers are doing.

Check out the following video showing exactly how it works and how the simulation of passengers actually works :)

The items in the notification window no longer switch positions depending on what is happening, they will display more consistently so it is less distracting when the SLC window is in view.

• After boarding and doors are closed, there's now a short delay before the crew notify the captain that the cabin doors are closed.
• After boarding and crew have notified the captain there's now a short delay before the captain addresses the passengers.
• Pushback Phase has been added between Ready for Pushback and Taxi phases - purely a cosmetic update, although the pushback time is recorded internally for reporting later.
• During taxi, after 15 minutes the passengers will start to get restless. After 20 minutes, a negative penalty will start acruing.
• Now the announcement for electronic devices will not immmediately play once the After Takeoff phase has completed - instead, it will play once you're at or above 8,000ft above the takeoff alttude and still climbing.
• After takeoff and switching to climb, an audible "dong" will play to release the cabin crew and allow them to unseat.
• There is now a slight delay between the announcement for seatbelts on/off being played instead of it playing instantly after pressing the button - however, there is now an immediate "dong" as if the seatbelts light had been turned on / off and then a short delay for the crew to announce the seatbelt sign has been toggled.
• Descent phase will now trigger approximately 1500 ft below the detected cruise altitude instead of 500 ft because it felt a little too "instantaneous" beforehand
• Missed Approach is now dampened by five seconds to prevent inadvertant triggering during turbulent conditions.

JAR Design aircraft do not update the XPUIPC dataref for "master battery" which caused SLC to get stuck on the "startup" phase unless you performed a workaround by assigning a key in X-Plane settings to turn the battery on.

SLC now allows you to bypass this check by selecting an option in the settings window to allow full compatibility with JAR aircraft.

• When the boarding music turns on/off, it now fades in and out rather than just abruptly starting and stopping - it feels much nicer.

• Nicer "start" screen to allow selecting cabin layout, soundpack etc.
• "Settings", "Flight Logs", "Manifest" and "Aircraft Layout" buttons are now icons, much more in-fitting with the UI than the large text-based buttons.
• PIREP Start / Submission notification now moved to the top of the screen near the "current status" area to make the UI less cluttered.
• UI condensed slightly to save more screen real-estate.

If you position SLC on a second monitor and then detach the monitor, SLC will automatically detect that the screen is unavailable and reattach itself to the primary monitor.

Users of the FlightFactor A320 (as well as everyone else) will now successfully enter the taxi phase once pushback begins because SLC will now detect the groundspeed as being non-zero automatically, instead of relying on engine startup only.

This should also solve the flight at the other end too - instead of going to deboarding straight after landing, the taxi phases should now work.

The in-flight movie progress bar now shows the length of time the film has played for, and how long it will last.

The WIFI was a little too negatively biased in terms of its reliability so I have adjusted it so that it is more reliable at a higher altitude - thanks to TheMarmaliser on Discord.

An aborted takeoff trigger will only activate once ground speed has exceeded 15kts, and then comes back under 15kts on the takeoff roll (provided engines have throttled back). This will ensure that those aircraft (such as the MD80) which sometimes require a high n1 to get moving (especially on high altitude airports) on taxiways will not accidentally trigger an aborted takeoff while taxiing into position.

Completely stripped out the landing rate logic and now it runs in its own thread and is updated much more frequently than before, improving accuracy and not burning the CPU either which is nice...

In some cases, FSUIPC/XPUIPC supplied eroneous data such as "105" for GForce ratings - SLC will now ignore these and so they will never be counted as maximum and minimum readings as they're obviously false.

The sound engine will now play the default TTS sound file for the Safety Announcement if your soundpack does not include it.

When clicking on "start flight" the UI refreshed causing a new random number of passengers to appear in the "number of passengers" box (although the previous value was used) .. this is fixed now to avoid any potential confusion.

If no internet connection, SLC will no longer crash when attempting to show the flight log window