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Min. Enroute Alt.

P

Putt4eagle

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us-illinois
A friend brought this up the today and I thought it would be a neat idea. A gauge that would give you the minimum enroute altitude along a course you have set in a flight plan or direct GPS. Any thoughts on where to begin on such a project?
 
Putt4eagle said:
A friend brought this up the today and I thought it would be a neat idea. A gauge that would give you the minimum enroute altitude along a course you have set in a flight plan or direct GPS. Any thoughts on where to begin on such a project?
Click to expand...

That might be a bit difficult, but calculating a Minimum Safe Altitude from moment to moment is simple:

(A:GROUND ALTITUDE,feet) 1500 + (>L:MSA,enum)
 
Bill,

Thanks for the reply. Since the altitude of various terrain is already known (in the scenery files?), all you would be looking for is the max terrain altitude of any terrain along the route. Just the one point. In real life you would just look at the sectionals but couldn't this be done with some sort of query? If FSX can draw a route, vor to vor, couldn't it also query those terrain elevations too? I do a lot of mountain flying in GA and it would be kinda cool to map a route that would introduce elevations so that you could avoid pushing the service ceiling of your aircraft.

Thanks again for any thought on the subject.
 
Putt4eagle said:
A friend brought this up the today and I thought it would be a neat idea. A gauge that would give you the minimum enroute altitude along a course you have set in a flight plan or direct GPS. Any thoughts on where to begin on such a project?
Click to expand...


To get this data from FSX is a massive task.

Why not use a real world tool, that already exists, and is probably far more powerful than anything that could be done with FSX. In addition, you can use such a tool WITHOUT running FSX.

ie

http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov/flight_path/

ON this map, you can create a flight PATH, and then get graphical information for data along that path.

msa.gif


Geoff_D
fs-mp.com
 
Geoff_D said:
To get this data from FSX is a massive task.

Why not use a real world tool, that already exists, and is probably far more powerful than anything that could be done with FSX. In addition, you can use such a tool WITHOUT running FSX.
IMG]

Geoff_D
fs-mp.com
Click to expand...


Geoff, thanks for the info. Very cool stuff. I am sure the query would be massive, if not impossible, if you tried to do it without a parameter around the route line. Would narrowing the query to just within a range of a route line be possible? Say, a 1/4 mile radius of the route line?

What I am looking to do is have a gauge that would return only my the highest altitude I would need to clear all terrain. One number. For example, if I were to set course from KDEN to KSLC direct, it would appear my highest point along the route would be 14,6 near the ZIMMR intersection. So this gauge would tell me 15,1. (of course, ultimately it would be nice to have the distance to max alt included. ie, 36mi from DEN, 15,1, if I had to get to that by the time I travel 36mi. I am sure it would be much more complicated to return the result than I think. I am just imagining possibilities.
 
What about FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude?

Is this the function that FS uses when it calculates Cruising Altitude (Min Enroute Altitude?) in its Flight Planner? If it is, then if a flight plan has been created and the Waypoint Index identified, could you not simply get the Min Enroute Alt from this function?
 
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rpmc said:
What about FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude?
Click to expand...

Absolutely! Duh! I completely forgot about that token from the fs9gps.dll :eek:

(C:fs9gps:FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude,feet) (>L:MinEnrouteAltitude,feet)
 
n4gix said:
Absolutely! Duh! I completely forgot about that token from the fs9gps.dll :eek:

(C:fs9gps:FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude,feet) (>L:MinEnrouteAltitude,feet)
Click to expand...

Interesting, but there is little or no documention to tell you for sure that this really is. It is also not exampled in any of the FSX GPS gauges.

Sticking the word WAYPOINT in there looks like it might be a little more complicated that what "FlightPlanMinAltitude" would be, if it existed.

It would imply that it is the Minimum Altitude at the CURRENT ACTIVE WAYPOINT, in which case, one would have to look at ALL the waypoints on a Route, to get the the Minimum Altitude, for the entire route ?

Back to the documentation guessing games !
 
Geoff_D said:
Interesting, but there is little or no documention to tell you for sure that this really is. It is also not exampled in any of the FSX GPS gauges.
Click to expand...

Well, as it happens we didn't have even this much information prior to FSX!

While there's obviously still a long ways to go yet, at least we do have one heck of a lot more to go on than previously... ;)
 
Yup. Big guessing game for people like me that know little about fs9gps. Since the FS Flight Planner generates a cruising altitude for you once departure and destination airports are set, I assumed there ought to be a fs9gps function to do that. But no luck yet getting it to work. Don't know if I am incorrectly identifying the necessary input parms, if this an asynchronous issue or what, but no success.

I note with some interest that inside FS Flight Planner, cruising altitude is set along a straight line flight path between departure and destination airports only. Even if you add waypoints that would obviously require different cruising altitudes, the initial airport to airport cruising altitude is not affected. So, even if I figure out how to get a value out of FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude, I am not sure what it will be. A waypoint altitude? A departure to destination altitude?

Here's what I have tried without success:

Code: 
<Macro Name="c">C:fs9gps</Macro>
<Update>
(A:GPS FLIGHT PLAN WP Count,number) 1 - (>@c:FlightPlanWaypointIndex)
(@c:FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude,feet) (>L:MinEnrouteAltitude,number)
(@c:FlightPlanWaypointAltitude,feet) (>L:WPAltitude,number)
(@c:FlightPlanWaypointRemainingTotalDistance,nmiles) (>L:DistanceToDestination,nmiles)
</Update>

I added FlightPlanWaypointAltitude and FlightPlanWaypointRemainingTotalDistance just for grins. Those work as expected, generating in this case, the altitude of the destination airport and the cumulative total distance of all remaining flight legs.

But only a 0.00 value for L:MinEnrouteAltitude. I know that FlightPlanWaypointIndex has been defined properly because the other two functions work correctly. Apparently it is not as simple as defining the Waypoint Index.
Maybe I have not given FS what it needs to know before generating FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude, but I dont know what Im missing.

fs9gps experts, where do you go from here on this one?

(I am using FS9)
 
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I am taking the liberty to post this question on another forum (AVSIM) in an attempt to cast a wider net for response.
 
n4gix said:
Well, as it happens we didn't have even this much information prior to FSX!

While there's obviously still a long ways to go yet, at least we do have one heck of a lot more to go on than previously... ;)
Click to expand...

Maybe the way to get the information is through ESP.

I get the impression that if one springs for the full License, it comes with "support" :eek:

It is dissappointing however, that after 2 years of product release, the documention is still so lacking in certain areas.

I guess thats the way it is, but sometimes I feel that FSX is less of a Flight Sim, and more of a Adventure Quest type of "game", where the object is to explore the game enviroment, and "discover" by trial and error ( and alot of $$$s, if you are a developer), the "secrets" of the MISSING SDK. :wizard:

Geoff_D
 
rpmc said:
But only a 0.00 value for L:MinEnrouteAltitude. I know that FlightPlanWaypointIndex has been defined properly because the other two functions work correctly. Apparently it is not as simple as defining the Waypoint Index.
Maybe I have not given FS what it needs to know before generating FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude, but I dont know what Im missing.

fs9gps experts, where do you go from here on this one?

(I am using FS9)
Click to expand...

It may well be that particular token is not available in FS9. There's no indication in the FSX SDK which of the defined tokens are "new for FSX," but I've already encountered more than a few that are completely new for FSX.

As I said, we had absolutely no list of fs9gps.dll tokens in the FS9 SDK. All that we could possibly learn about was through deconstructing the G500 & G295 scripts... :banghead:
 
Thx Fr. Bill ... I'm betting that I still have incorrectly set up FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude.

Susan Ashlock published a GPS Variable list in November, 2005 that I thought was referring to FS9. FlightPlanWaypointMinAltitude is on that list. And, anway, FS9 generates a cruising altitude in Flight Planner; the program is doing it. So it makes a little sense that FS9gps has a function to generate Min Enroute Alt... or so goes my thinking.

If you've read many of my posts, however, you already know that I am still struggling to learn fs9gps, so a safe bet is that I don't have it coded correctly yet. Without forums like this, no one outside of Redmond would know anything about fs9gps.
 
I am sorry I have not been back to this thread in a couple of days. My CPU is on the fritz. Interesting conversation. Thanks for putting so much thought into it. I was thinking along the same lines that if the flight planner selects a min alt., there must be someway to pull that too.
 
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