Posted by Lee Baker on Saturday August 22, 2020
As you may have noticed, Microsoft Flight Simulator was released to the public. It seems to have a great graphics system and it’s hard not to see the appeal of the global scenery that’s included in the simulator. It’s already become quite popular, so it’s only natural that PlaneCommand will add support for Microsoft Flight Simulator. I’m very excited to announce that I’m working to bring PlaneCommand to Microsoft Flight Simulator.
As I just got access to MSFS and the SDK this week, I haven’t had much time to figure out exactly what PlaneCommand will look like in MSFS. I expect it will *sound* and *feel* mostly the same- PlaneCommand on MSFS should support all the same commands, speech recognition, and feedback voices that PlaneCommand on X-Plane uses. The UI will need to be different, however.
Microsoft / Asobo’s documentation for the SDK shows that it is incomplete and still under development. For example, there is currently no way using the SDK to provide a UI in the simulator for a plugin. I do hope that they will have made more progress on the SDK later this year. In the meantime, I’m going to make as much progress as I can using the features that are already available.
Given the uncertainty in the SDK, and how development on the PlaneCommand side is still at a very early stage, I don’t have any idea when a plugin will be ready. I am hoping to have a beta perhaps sometime in the fall, and a release in the winter, probably after New Years, but that’s just a wild guess. Development could take much longer; it all depends on what complications I run into on the way.
PlaneCommand has supported X-Plane 10 since the beginning, and X-Plane 11 since it’s release a few years back. I like X-Plane a lot. PlaneCommand will keep supporting X-Plane as it always has. I expect to keep supporting and adding features to PlaneCommand for X-Plane for the foreseeable future.
PlaneCommand is an add-on plugin for PC flight simulators uses speech recognition technology to emulate a co-pilot. The voice interface frees virtual pilots from needing to memorize arbitrary keyboard commands, and provides a natural speech interface to many common cockpit instruments. Realism is enhanced by assisting the pilot with common cockpit tasks like tuning radios or configuring instruments.
PlaneCommand supports the X-Plane 10 and 11 flight simulators on Windows and Mac OS, and fully supports VR. Support for Microsoft Flight Simulator coming soon. A free demo version is available for download, and the full PlaneCommand Pro license is available to purchase at PlaneCommand.com.
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