Scoring System with FO off

[Taro]

Hi all,

When the FO is turned off, it is impossible to get some score bonus, as Professional flight and Smooth Flight. Because of this, the maximum score I can get with the FO off is 97 (A+), that I get only if no penalty and smooth landing. Otherwise, if I don't get the smooth landing, I can only have a 92 at maximum.

Could you please review the scoring system for the users like me having the FO turned off, so we can have a more "fair" scoring ?

Thanks.

[peter]

Hi Taro,

probably Dutch and Travis know more about this, but it is my impression that the FO has nothing to do with the scoring. It simply provides input and takes over a few tasks like seat belt signs etc. If you do not want the FO to do this, then you can check "Suppress First Officer" under "Options for all Airlines" in the Administrator and you should be fine.

Having said that, I still do not know what exactly one has to do to get a "professional flight" bonus. I get it occasionally, I just don't know what I do to deserve this honour

Cheers,
Peter

[Taro]

Hi,

I did about 50 flights with the FO turned off and I never, never got any smooth flight bonus, even with good min/max G (by example 0.6/1.24). As soon as I turned on the FO, I got the smooth flight bonus during my next flight, with a min/max G of about 0.7/1.35. I don't think it's some luck, but that it is somehow related to the FO.

I think to get a Professional Flight bonus you have to welcome your passengers, tell them everything like delays, holdings, turbulences and such, and announce the landing by the FO + by the FA. Which is not possible with the FO turned off.

[Dutch Owen]

I've checked and I can't see any connection between the presence of an FO and the award of "smooth flight".

If you fly so that your minimum G is above .5 and the maximum G is below 1.5 and you didn't have to do a go-around, and there's no 'complainer' on board, you should get the award.

The 'complainer' flag is a random flag that biases your passengers towards negativity, it will randomly be turned on about 15 out of every 100 flights; when you have the bad luck to get that on a particular flight positive comments are less likely and negative comments are more likely. One way to make the 'complainer' flag less likely on any flight is to communicate with the passengers from the cockpit using appropriate announcements.

I'll ask Trav to look too and see if he can see anything. But the code that implements this is pretty simple.


// 0x400 = Smooth Flight
if (ACMEMinG >= SmoothMinG &&
ACMEMaxG <= SmoothMaxG &&
!GoneAround &&
!Complainer) {
Comment |= 0x400;
}



...this is not conditional on anything. And 'Complainer' is calculated:


if (PAX > 0 && Random(15) <= 100)
Complainer = 1;
if (AnnoGen > 1 || AnnoDel > 0) {
Complainer = 0;
}


[Taro]

Oct 19, 2014 10:54:22 GMT -5 Dutch Owen said:

I've checked and I can't see any connection between the presence of an FO and the award of "smooth flight".

If you fly so that your minimum G is above .5 and the maximum G is below 1.5 and you didn't have to do a go-around, and there's no 'complainer' on board, you should get the award.

The 'complainer' flag is a random flag that biases your passengers towards negativity, it will randomly be turned on about 15 out of every 100 flights; when you have the bad luck to get that on a particular flight positive comments are less likely and negative comments are more likely. One way to make the 'complainer' flag less likely on any flight is to communicate with the passengers from the cockpit using appropriate announcements.

Thanks for the explanations. However, I didn't have any negative PAX comment in my flights, and still didn't get any smooth flight bonus. I do all the cockpit announcements I can do, because with the FO off it deletes some options from the ACARS. My last flight scoring was that:

Min G 0.67
Max G 1.24
Landing Speed 217 FPM

Base score = 85 B
Ontime with no ETE revs (+5)
Final Computed Score = 92 A-


That's it...That's what I get the most as score, only exceptions are when I do a smooth landing and get a 97.

[peter]

Oct 19, 2014 8:28:25 GMT -5 Taro said:

Taro said: "I think to get a Professional Flight bonus you have to welcome your passengers, tell them everything like delays, holdings, turbulences and such, and announce the landing by the FO + by the FA."


I do that all the time, but I rarely get that professional flight bonus. Could be that it only kicks in to boost your score (mine is usually above 90). Or I have bad luck with my pax (see Dutch's comments )

[Taro]

From what Dutch said I think I figured it out. With the FO off, I can't do some announcements as I said. Maybe that because of this, the PAX refuse to give some positive comments like the smooth flight one. This would be more related to the announcements that the FO directly, but both are tied as if the FO is off, quite a lot of announcements are disabled.

[Dutch Owen]

This is true Taro, with no FO you don't have the ability to calm the PAX with announcements.

However 'Complainer' should only be on 15% of flights. We'll check into that - but with that on all the time, you'd hardly ever see any positive comments.

A possible improvement would be to put some subtle indication on the details that the 'complainer' flag was on for a flight. Then we'd know for sure.

EDIT: I believe there's a definite bug here. When you don't make announcements you almost always get the 'complainer' flag. Stay tuned as we investigate further.

[Travis]

I concur with Dutch's bug assessment!

AAMOF, I've made Dutch's suggested change and marked that section of the code with the comment // TARO'S CATCH.

[Travis]

Taro,

If you could ZIP and email Dutch and me your airline's log file (it's in your \FSCaptain\Data\ folder, with the name of your airline) it would help us in our "fix."

You can see how to email me & Dutch from the link in my .signature below.

Regards,

[Taro]

Hi Dutch, Hi Travis,

I just sent you a mail with the logs of my airlines.

Thank you for your work on this issue.

[Dutch Owen]

We are discussing the best approach to fix this. Correcting the code is easy, but we both believe that the log contains enough data on each flight that we can have the system automatically go back and correct the scores that were recorded as too low.

This means that for any of you Captains that fly small aircraft without an FO (or that haven't always been good about using the announcements to communicate with your PAX, like, er, me) - you will see some of your already-logged scores increase once you start using 1.5.2.

The exact details aren't precisely known right now, we'll announce them once the fix is set in stone.

Dutch

[Taro]

Just FYI, I have now registered on the forums, what I should have done long time ago

[Travis]

Thank you kindly Taro, both for your custom and for your bug-catching skills.

[Dutch Owen]

We're going to roll this fix into the 1.5.1 release.

Dutch