SPAACARS Issues and Updates

Pilots,

I apologize for the frustrations that this program has caused some pilots. I had put it aside and not done any changes to this program for some time, in fact the development environment hasn't even been installed on my most recent computer upgrade. My involvement with the Adventure Pack scenery and related website code has also pushed the ACARS stuff to the back burner, and will continue to share my time as I enjoy assembling those adventures.

I will be taking another look at SPAACARS with the hope of adding the XPlane flight plan to SPAACARS and also again trying to address that pesky disconnect or 'freeze' issue with the SPAACARS where it sits there apparently doing nothing without showing any error message or disconnect messages.

That said, it's frustrating for pilots and me when the program fails to operate properly on your various systems and setups. While I'm always willing to try and help get things working, it's difficult to do when I cannot replicate the problem on my end to identify and fix it.

Since many pilots would rather fly planes than diagnose yet another potential flight sim problem, I've tried to add additional options for ACARS uploads. I'm happy to entertain any other acars solutions that are popular with our pilots (payware or freeware), and look into adding the necessary code to make these compatible with our uploading of pireps like I have done with FSFlightKeeper. The one major limiting factor is that many of those other ACARS programs available are integrated with the popular PHPVMS modules that St. Paul Airlines doesn't use. Therefore we're limited to standalone acars programs.

Finally, I believe there are now updated versions of FSUIPC and the .net library I use to interact with it. I hope to install the latest updates, take another look at possible corrections of existing problems, and release another update to the SPAACARS program within the coming months. I encourage pilots to make sure they also keep their FSUIPC versions up to date so that we're all working similar code - when that's possible. Just as with flight options here at SPA, I will try to accommodate addons for pirep transmission so that we can spend more time flying and less time doing data entry.

John

I'm currently reviewing this program and will hopefully have a new release version in few weeks that will identify some of the disconnect errors some pilots are having. I'm also trying to get fsx to run without freezing on my Win10 system, so this slows the progress and I'll be gone for a week, so....

When I get the next version out there, those of you experiencing disconnect of SPAACARS without the Resume button - restart option can have a go at the next version to see if we can solve that.

Thanks,

John

I think Larry is referring to SPAACARS freezing and not his FSX sim. I'm not aware of SPAACARS being the cause of a sim freeze. I believe I've found a probable cause for the mysterious unresponsive SPAACARS issue. It appears I might have played 'fast and loose' with some of the error catching upon quick review of the code. It's possible I've bypassed some errors and told the program to basically 'carry on as if nothing happened'. If one of these ill-handled error catching code segments is catching a disconnect from the sim, then that would certainly appear as if SPAACARS is freezing and doesn't offer a "resume" button option. So...when I get a chance, I'll review all my error catching routines and clean them up if needed. Hopefully this will address known error conditions and try to gracefully handle them and otherwise crash the SPAACARS program with some type of meaningful message that you can make note of and I can properly handle.

All of this will have to wait for a couple weeks as I'm going to be unavailable to work on this until then. Sorry about the delay on this, but it's one of several irons in the fire right now.

John