Had another flight in the X-Plane system with Mr O, who is based in Texas. This time I decided we would fly from Kerry airport in the Republic of Ireland and bomb, or at least virtually attack, Skellig Michael – the island where Rey finds Luke. This time I recorded a section of the flight. After the bombing run it took about ten minutes for us to find each other in the skies so that wouldn’t be too interesting!
Machynlleth Tours
I spent a lovely time last night flying over the Welsh countryside with Mr O. We both have PCs capable of running X-Plane 11 and as we near the winter no-work-period it seemed sensible to try and fly together. While this is possible it is not easy. X-Plane has the ability to link up with another computer but only if you are on the LAN together. This is somewhat irritating. Also, it will only link up if the copies of all the sub-directories are exactly the same. This is not really a possibility as neither of us wanted to change our personal set up. So, the next thing was to find a solution from the world of the internet. There are a few after market add ons that will allow you to fly together but I didn’t want to pay money [I think I might make a donation] and I wanted the simplest set up. I found JoinFS a cross-platform tool to fly together over different sims! Also, as an advantage it is P2P and so doesn’t rely on an external network or server.
After a while trying to set the software up and not reading the instructions, because who does that, we managed to get one aircraft showing in my sim although Mr O couldn’t see me. I think that’s because JoinFS works by “knowing” the type of aircraft you are in and telling the other machine what type of aircraft to show. My T-7 wasn’t categorised and so nothing showed up for Mr O. This wasn’t a problem and we proved the concept worked with a trip around the Mach Loop until Mr O crashed!
On the next attempt we both had Tonkas and heading out to the Loop from RAF Valley. It looks like there are some positioning issues as Mr O’s plane was partly sunk into the ground and his weapons rack was ten metres from where his plane was, but you know what, at least we could see each other on the tarmac.
In the previous picture you can see my Tonka, Mr O’s and also his weapons rack just off his starboard side. So we headed to the loop. I think we did OK. I guess we might need a bit more coordination on airspeeds and maintaining a distance but for a first go it was done well. I think we did about three tours around the loop. In this next picture you can just see Mr O flying with much bigger balls that me!
We both ran out of fuel at some point so we had to coordinate pausing the game and adjusting the settings to add more fuel to the planes. This worked fine for Mr O but when my cockpit lit up like Xmas and I had run out of fuel I only had one engine burning upon game restart. I couldn’t get the second engine started, but that didn’t matter, we still made it back to Valley and landed.
I look forward to the next flight. I just need to pick somewhere cool to fly. Maybe the Swiss Alps?