JoinFS 1.3.0 for all sims is here.....

[Storm]

The latest test version (1.3.3) of JoinFS is more encouraging. Testing on Kenny's flight today for 25 minutes gave me no freezes, only a tiny pause when new pilots joined. I did not have to disable any other X-Plane plugins and that meant that flight tracking with both Plan-G and Little Nav Map was possible and successful.

There are still the issues of no aircraft labels and no elevation correction, but the former I can live with and the latter I'm used to with SimLink. Additionally there seems to be some morphing of liveries, but that needs further investigation. (It wouldn't normally bother me but my own livery changed too!)

Josh was also in XP11, flying a helicopter, and he appeared to have similar successes to me. It seems we were successfully seen by others in FSX with no appreciable lag, and formation flying was easy. I'll post some screenshots later.

I am sufficiently encouraged to consider testing using JoinFS on my group flights in future. Fellow pilots who attend please take note and come prepared! Download from here: http://www.pmem.uk/joinfs/development.html

Some pics from the flight:

[Storm]

I tried flying X-Plane 11 + JoinFS on Kenny's Sunday group flight, following the manual's instructions as closely as I could, with the following results.

It was good in close formation with one other aircraft with no others visible. There was a small amount of very rapid jitter. And, unlike when using XSquawkBox, other aircraft were correctly shown on Plan-G (though I didn't have time to try littlenavmap).

However when flying with three, four or more other aircraft in view, results were catastrophic. Typical behavior was to fly (or taxi) smoothly for up to, say, five seconds, and then to freeze the simulator for another five seconds or more, and so on in non-stop cycles of freeze/unfreeze. Very often the freeze time would be much longer and the "Simulator" button on the JoinFS main panel would turn red. After unfreezing, aircraft positions would, of course, jump wildly.

Further problems were that the "Show nicknames in simulator" does not turn on any aircraft labels (which, unlike FSX, are not part of X-Plane and are normally added by a plugin such as XSquawkBox) and so you have no firm idea whom you are flying with without asking them. Furthermore, "Elevation correction" did not work and at some airports other aircraft would be shown as taxiing many feet in the air. JoinFS works as a plug-in in X-Plane, and there are seemingly no obvious configuration controls visible in-simulator.

I host two group flights a week. At present, I am not changing from SimLink as the multiplayer platform of choice. It's encouraging that some early progress is being made with JoinFS, and I would like JoinFS to at least be a candidate for my go-to multiplayer platform at some time in the future, but as yet it's very early days.

[Travis]

Preliminary results say that this version is not perfect and is not ready for x-plane cross sim group flights, but has fair success for a beta version and shows promise for the future.

[ATC_ROO]

That clears it up.
Thanks.

[Travis]

No, just one of the other Roo. Lol!

[ATC_ROO]

Do I need to get rid of my wife and my girl friend?

[Travis]

Divorce your wives, dump your girl friends! It is finally here!

[N404]

This does include X-plane. Info here.