Little Navmap flight planner - beta released

[albar965]

Hi All,

I'd like to introduce my latest project which I released as a beta version. Maybe some of you already read the article on the Avsim front page.

Screenshots and more about Little Navmap
Online user manual

What is it:
Little Navmap is a free open source flight planner, navigation tool, moving map, airport search and airport information system for Flight Simulator X and Prepar3D. The main focus is general aviation IFR and VFR planning.

All is based purely on flight simulator stock or add-on data, no third party data needed.

It features a detail rich navigation map using standard airport symbols from real VFR maps thus transporting a large amount of information. Multiple online and offline map themes (OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap and more) and two map projections are available as well as world wide hill shading.

Flight plans and flight plan fragments can be loaded, saved and merged using the common Flight Simulator PLN files.

Drag and drop functionality on the map allows to easily create and edit plans manually. Several automatic flight plan calculation modes are available to create plans following airways or simply from radio navaid to radio navaid within a second or two. No online service is needed for flight plan calculation.

A fast airport and navaid search allows to look for objects by an unimaginable amount of options also featuring a spatial search.

Information windows display numerous details about airports, runways, COM frequencies, approaches, navaids and airways.

All settings, search parameters, flight plans, map positions and much more are saved between sessions. So you know where you've been the last time when starting the program.

Little Navmap can be run stand alone or in networked configuration. Connection to the flight simulator needs the free Little Navconnect program which eases network setup across two or more computers.

Supported platforms: Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 (untested). Linux and Mac OS X releases are in preparation.

Supported Flight Simulators: All FSX versions from SP2 up, Flight Simulator - Steam Edition (untested), Prepar3D v2 (untested) and Prepar3D v3 (untested).

I could not test weather integration with AS16 but in general it should work.

Please give me feedback about problems with FSX Steam Edition, Prepar3D, AS16, Windows 10 or any other issues you run into.

When all looks OK and not too buggy I'll create a stable release and upload it to the major flight simulator sites.

Then I'll head over to the next tasks (add approaches, support AIRAC, add aircraft profiles, etc.).

Alex

 

[johnbla]

Hi Alex

Many thanks for providing this for the flight sim community.

However, whenever I try to load a scenery library, I always get an error.

I have attached a screen shot. This one was an error in the scenery folder of My Traffic 6. I deleted this folder and ran the screnery library again. I then got an error in an FTX folder.

Hopefully you might have a workaround.

Many thanks
John

 

[albar965]

Hi John,

a VOR without name caused that problem. Looks like I have to allow nameless VOR and NDB stations. I will fix this in the next release.

Can you reload the database including the FTX scenery and send me the log file with the error?
That would help a lot identifying the problem.
You can find a link to the log file in the "About Little Navmap" dialog.

As a first workaround you can open the "Options" dialog and go to the "Scenery Library Database" tab. Then add the FTX directory containing the offending BGL file to the upper list ("Select paths to exclude from loading:"). No need to delete the sceneries.

Then you can at least load the rest.

Alex

 

[johnbla]

Alex

I tried to attach the log file but it says "The uploaded file does not have an allowed extension."

A couple of questions if you don't mind.

1. Is there any way to print the flight plan or map?
2. When I select distance in the airports search box I get no results. Is there anything else I have to do?

Thanks for your help.

John

 

[albar965]

Alex

I tried to attach the log file but it says "The uploaded file does not have an allowed extension."

A couple of questions if you don't mind.

1. Is there any way to print the flight plan or map?
2. When I select distance in the airports search box I get no results. Is there anything else I have to do?

Thanks for your help.

John

Hi John,

You can send the log by mail:
albar965 at mailbox dot org
Or attach a screenshot if the error message shows something meaningful.

Regarding 1: Sorry, no print functionality yet. I'll add this to one of the next versions.
Regarding 2: This can occur for several reasons:

• If the minimum distance is equal to the maximum which can happen accidentally.Happened to me a few times.
  
• Another cause is that you still have another search criteria active, like airport name or similar. This happens to me all the time. To be sure just reset the search (Ctrl-R or context menu in the search result table: "Reset Search") before enabling the distance search.
  
• Make sure that the distance search center is placed in the correct position (i.e. not in the middle of an ocean).

Alex

 

[Jay Bloomfield]

I can duplicate the above error, but adding the My Traffic scenery folder to your app's loading excludes (the top list) doesn't seem to exclude it. The logfile is at:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0o78og13ljo8yew/abarthel-little_navmap.log?dl=0

I disabled the MyT 6 folder with Scenery Config Editor to allow your app to complete the loading process and here is that logfile also:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0b5ypes9cudvcjd/abarthel-little_navmap_success.log?dl=0

As an aside, it is always nicer to have an app that is completely self-contained (like yours), but an option that you might want to consider is to take advantage of Pete Dowson's MakeRunways utility. It would save your app a small amount time on loading all the airports etc. in the initial phase of parsing scenery.cfg, but it might also be handy if the user has already run MakeRunways before and the output is up to date. The other advantage of using Pete's utility is that he keeps it up to date and compatible with FSX, FSX-SE and all flavors of P3d. It's just another item not to worry about.

BTW, the unnamed VOR is YUL1 which is a "fake" VOR that some people have used to give a longer approach route to RWY 10 at CYUL.

 

[albar965]

Hi Jay,

Thanks for the log files.
I'll check the exclude functionality again. Maybe something is wrong there.

Regarding the empty VOR names:
I changed the database to allow empty VOR and NDB names (and some other stuff too) now. I found a few of these after testing with a bunch of add-on sceneries. It looks like I've been too restrictive.
So this problem will be fixed with the next release (1.0.3.beta).

I'd really like to use the MakeRunways utility (actually I'm using it in Little Logbook). It would save a lot of work, but it does not give enough information.
For example aprons, VORs, NDBs, waypoints, airways, all that is missing.

I think, the good thing about my project is that all that code is open source. So anybody can join and fix errors, extend it and use all of it in his own project.

Alex

 

[Jay Bloomfield]

For a 1.02 beta, the app is incredibly polished. It's too bad that MakeRunways only provides ILS and COM frequencies.

 

[albar965]

Thanks, Jay. Glad to hear that. I'll make a new beta release this weekend that fixes these VOR problems. The exclude function had a bug too as you noticed and that is fixed now as well.
I also added support for AS16.

Looking at the feedback and the log files for now it seems that Prepar3D and Windows 10 don't cause any specific problems which was my main concern.

Alex

 

[Jay Bloomfield]

The only issue that I noticed was that map occasionally got jumbled up when zooming, but it was not reproducible. Try zooming in and out around KILM.

 

[albar965]

Jay,

can you send me a screen shot when this appears again?
Also tell me which map projection and map theme was used.

I'll try to reproduce it here but currently I'm not aware of any graphics corruption problems.

The Mercator projection has some known problems:
Sometimes objects disappear, but this should happen only when zoomed far out.
Or, when using the mouse wheel to zoom into a place near the date line (like New Zealand) it jumps to another place.

Another annoying behavior appears when you drag the map with the mouse and hit the map overlay buttons. The map will jump to elsewhere. Just use "Map Position Back" to restore the view.

Alex

 

[Oldguy19]

Hi Alex;

I just install your Beta 1.0.2 for NavMap = OK
Install Navconnect =OK
And, I can see my Aircraft on the map.

My first impression; looks great.

It would be nice if i could control the info showing (for Aircraft) on map . I find it is too much by default.

Probleme i have, is in the search Windows section «Airports» i have no Airport showing , but a i have all the navaids showing OK

I'm with = Window10
FSX with Acceleration

I try to put picture but i don't know how |

 

[johnbla]

Hi Alex

First let me say that once again, many thanks for your fine work. It's the best thing since sliced bread.

If I may, could I please make a suggestion. When you hover your mouse over an airport and the information comes up about that airport, I notice that the ASN weather comes up as a metar. How difficult would it be to have a symbol there to quickly show the weather, eg if it was sunny you could have a symbol of a sun. If it was cloudy or raining, you could have clouds or rain over the sun. I don't know how much work it would involve.

It's not a game changer, just a thought to make Little NavMap even better.

Thanks for hearing me out.

John

 

[albar965]

Thanks for the great feedback, all.

Oldguy19,
maybe you have some search enabled that hides everything. I's not always apparent (I have to change that). In the search result table use the context menu "Reset Search" menu item to remove all search criteria.
If you can see airports on the map there should be also airports in the search result.

I plan to have the information on the aircraft configurable. Like a list in the options dialog where you can select the information that should be shown with the aircraft.
Currently you can only decrease the text size as a workaround but this applies to all map text.


John,
good idea. I already planned to show the weather stations on the map. Decoding metars is not so easy because of the variety. Instead I could just scan for clouds and rain and show the symbol as you suggested.
Will put that on my list.

Alex

 

[albar965]

Hi All,

I just released 1.0.3.beta.

See here: https://albar965.github.io/littlenavmap.html.

* Includes fixes for unnamed VORs and NDBs (as they appear in My Traffic BGL files) in scenery loading.
* Fixed flight plan generation and start position selection for add-on airports having no runways and/or no start positions.
* Added search option for runway-less airports (many add-on heliports have neither runways nor helipads).
* Fixed error in scenery exclusion options.
* Added support for Active Sky AS16.
* Additions/clarifications in manual.

The program will ask you to erase the scenery database upon startup since it has changed.
When you agree you can reload the scenery again afterwards.

Kind regards

Alex

 

[Oldguy19]

Thank you for a quick response; Alex

Your suggestion for «reset search» fix my problem for Airport not showing in search area,

I'm trying to put image, not sur if it will show.

In nav connect the 2 last line show Something, not sur if it is a probleme or if it is OK. But the connection seems OK, did not see any change in Navmap.

2 small suggestion;

1' in the flight plan window, would indicate (hilight) next waypoint the Aircraft is heading when connected !

2' in the flight plan window, for user's waypoint that i create, can be edited (adding name, info, ect...)

Great work your doing, many thanks

 

[albar965]

Hi Oldguy19,

there are several reasons for dropped packages:
You opened a dialog in Little Navmap and the program can't reply. Then you can safely ignore this message.
Your network connection (if running on different computers) is slow. Then go to Little Navconnect -> Tools -> Options and increase the update interval. 500 ms should normally be OK for all home networks.

You can ignore the message if it happens not too often. As long as you can see the aircraft moving.

Re 1. Will add that to my list for the next major release.
Re 2. I already planned to support user defined waypoints in the future.

Alex

 

[ce_zeta]

Hi.
Tried v1.0.3 with FSX:SE I cannot connect with FSX:SE.
FSX:SE was running. IP: Localhost (FSX:SE and Little Navmap are in the same machine)
Refused connection.

 

[albar965]

Hi.
Tried v1.0.3 with FSX:SE I cannot connect with FSX:SE.
FSX:SE was running. IP: Localhost (FSX:SE and Little Navmap are in the same machine)
Refused connection.

Hi Carlos,

did you run the Little Navconnect agent? You cannot connect from Little Navmap directly to the flight simulator.

Connection is like:
Little Navmap --> Little Navconnect ->(SimConnect)-> FSX(SE)/P3D
Little Navmap can run on any machine, but the Little Navconnect and the simulator have to run on the same machine.

Alex

 

[ce_zeta]

Oops. That's it. Navconnect installed. First run on FSX:SE was OK. Also a connection between a Client and flying computer was OK too.

W10 Pro and FSX:SE.