Online Multi Player
One of the joys of Flight Simming is the ability meet up online and fly together. We’re not just talking to each other whilst doing our own flying thing. No, we’re talking about flying together in the same air space, seeing each other’s aircraft, helping each other out with our flying, doing “Lead and Follows” around some amazing parts of the world that you might never get to visit even if you lived to be 100.
At the time of writing, MSFS 2020 is enjoying an increasing amount of popularity within the gliding community for a number of reasons. a) Thermals are pretty good – especially with “Live Weather” set. Ridge lift and mountain soaring is ok but the lift still seems “a little optimistic” in the heights you can achieve. Multiplayer is built in as standard and is SUPERB. Why not head over to our Facebook Group and come join us. We have online meet-ups most Fridays at 2130 zulu and occasional meet-ups on Wednesdays at 2000 zulu. There’s even a discord server where you can just “announce” you departure airstrip, and what voice channel you are on. someone will almost inevitably come join you. The MSFS gliding facebook group is at:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1803376689823050
Hope to See you soon.
What follows below is the state of play with X-Plane written 18 months ago but still relevant today
On the facebook group, we tend to use either JoinFS or ffs2play for the multiplayer server and discord for the voice comms. There’s even a link to the VATSIM guys, so if you want to brush up on your RT skills, you’ll be able to do that as well.
Over recent weeks there has bee a leaning towards JoinFS for a number of reason. The main two being the ability to record a flight and send the recording to friends who can then use JoinFS to reply and fly alongside you in real time – even though you might be 000’s of miles and days apart. The other reson – which will be of interest to Instructors particulary, is the ability to jump into someone else’s cockpit to observe and if necessary take control and correct errors in flight. This may well become “The New Normal” in the coming months as we get to grips with how we are going to train new pilots in the near future.
Here are the main features of JoinFS – Download the program here
About
JoinFS is an advanced multiplayer client for flight simulators.
- Cross-platform multiplayer across X-Plane, Prepar3D, FSX and FSX:Steam.
- Decentralized hostless peer-to-peer network.
- Smooth jitter-free live movement of aircraft.
- Shared cockpit, unlimited passengers and multi-role co-pilot cockpit.
- Suitable for virtual pilot training and instruction.
- Hub network allows anyone to launch and advertise a publicly listed session.
- Communications system included.
- Record and save multiple aircraft to a file and play back recordings live over the network.
- Simple model matching allows you to substitute any aircraft model instantly while connected.
- Bookmarks make it easy to save your regular connections.
Small And Efficient Client
JoinFS is designed to be a thin utility that works between the simulator and the network.
- A minimal and clean user interface.
- Typically uses less than 1% of CPU time.
- Uses less than 20Mb system memory.
Soon we’ll have an online calendar so you’ll be able to see at a glance when the meetups are happening and be able to sign up for the ones that take your fancy