WIP Little Navmap (like FsNav for FS2004 and freeware)

[mgr]

Hiya,

Might be some interest here for a neat little program in development at the moment:

https://albar965.github.io/images/littlenavmap_airportoverview.jpg

See this topic for more information:
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/little-navmap-flight-planner-beta-released.438380/
Download and :
https://albar965.github.io/littlenavmap.html
Online manual:
https://albar965.github.io/littlenavmap/help/en/index.html

Still in beta test, yet already functional.

Marcel

[falcon409]

If this can build flight plans that are compatible with FSX/P3D then I'm all for it. This same function in another program was deemed so revolutionary as to be worth charging a yearly fee. I love nothing more than to see this be successful.

[gaab]

Yes ! :jump:

I just discovered it few days ago and I am really impressed by what's allready in.

Not to be missed.

Gérard

[mgr]

Hi,


If this can build flight plans that are compatible with FSX/P3D then I'm all for it. This same function in another program was deemed so revolutionary as to be worth charging a yearly fee. I love nothing more than to see this be successful.

It can build and read (and modify) and save the result as default FSX flightplans. Have not seen any other export modes/format so far.

Marcel

[THibben]

I have downloaded and installed and am pretty impressed so far. Also just downloaded the 52 page manual and am starting to read it. This program appears to be very detailed.

Tom

[lownslo]

This program is a gem! The author's LittleNavConnect works with LittleNavMap in a network environment, and is incredibly easy to set-up. Quickly creates a solid handshake between the host (FS) computer and the client (moving map) computer.


If this can build flight plans that are compatible with FSX/P3D then I'm all for it.

Yep, creating, saving, and exporting a .pln works perfectly. And is all easy to do.

Greg

[PhantomTweak]

Maybe I'm an idjit, but I can't see where to download the manual. Is there a link I'm missing someplace, or something along those lines? Or should I just copy-n-paste it off the page to a pdf file?
Thanks for this program, by the way. I use FSNav in FS9 and love it. I've been hoping for something exactly like this for FSX-SE, and here it is! Thank you very much for all your hard work. I certainly appreciate it, for what it's worth :encouragement: :very_drunk:
Pat☺

[ce_zeta]

If this can build flight plans that are compatible with FSX/P3D then I'm all for it. This same function in another program was deemed so revolutionary as to be worth charging a yearly fee. I love nothing more than to see this be successful.
You can build a flight plan in your laptop, any Windows device...and connect Little Navmap to your flight rig.

And the most important thing, it's open Source! So any developer can add more features!

[THibben]

Maybe I'm an idjit, but I can't see where to download the manual. Is there a link I'm missing someplace, or something along those lines? Or should I just copy-n-paste it off the page to a pdf file?
Thanks for this program, by the way. I use FSNav in FS9 and love it. I've been hoping for something exactly like this for FSX-SE, and here it is! Thank you very much for all your hard work. I certainly appreciate it, for what it's worth :encouragement: :very_drunk:
Pat☺

Click on help and then contents.

Tom

[falcon409]

Not impressed at all thus far. First of all I can only run it for about 10 minutes before I get a CTD. I ran the database collector prior to opening for use in the sim, yet nothing displays on the map other than the base map. Another thing is that it appears that nothing happens until a flight plan is loaded. No flight plan, it just sits there waiting for you to do something (like build or load a flight plan). As far as I can see you can't just open it, have airports and navaids automatically display and go flying. Of course since nothing from the database shows on the map, you can't build a flight plan.

Some of this frustration comes from having used FSNav and now the free version of FSTramp. Everything loads, all airports, waypoints, navaids, etc are visible and ready to fly. I'm used to this and was hoping, with the ability to build flightplans (at least it sounds like that's possible) in this product I could move away from FSTramp and move up several notches. That isn't the case right now.

I am reading the manual, but none of what I'm looking for seems to be jumping out at me. Going to stick with FSTramp for now until this is refined some more. . .actually a lot more considering what I see currently.

[THibben]

Not impressed at all thus far. First of all I can only run it for about 10 minutes before I get a CTD. I ran the database collector prior to opening for use in the sim, yet nothing displays on the map other than the base map. Another thing is that it appears that nothing happens until a flight plan is loaded. No flight plan, it just sits there waiting for you to do something (like build or load a flight plan). As far as I can see you can't just open it, have airports and navaids automatically display and go flying. Of course since nothing from the database shows on the map, you can't build a flight plan.

Some of this frustration comes from having used FSNav and now the free version of FSTramp. Everything loads, all airports, waypoints, navaids, etc are visible and ready to fly. I'm used to this and was hoping, with the ability to build flightplans (at least it sounds like that's possible) in this product I could move away from FSTramp and move up several notches. That isn't the case right now.

I am reading the manual, but none of what I'm looking for seems to be jumping out at me. Going to stick with FSTramp for now until this is refined some more. . .actually a lot more considering what I see currently.

Hi Falcon,

I had it running for a few hours this afternoon with no problem. I clicked on the icons across the top right side of the menu and I had every navaid between Bremerton, KPWT and Boeing field, KBFI. I then set up a flight plan between the two and saved it.

I found the manual pretty comprehensive and 52 pages long. Pretty well written.

Tom

[falcon409]

Hi Falcon,

I had it running for a few hours this afternoon with no problem. I clicked on the icons across the top right side of the menu and I had every navaid between Bremerton, KPWT and Boeing field, KBFI. I then set up a flight plan between the two and saved it.

I found the manual pretty comprehensive and 52 pages long. Pretty well written.
Tom

Yep, apparently it is working for most, but nothing I do will show anything more than a basic map. The manual doesn't really shed any light on what the problem might be as it assumes that everything works. It doesn't. . .back to FSTramp for now.

[IanHenry]

I've always found Plan-G to be great, but recently the site seems to be unavailable, so I think I'll give this one a try.


Ian

[Dimus]

For PlanG I've found that open bike maps are the ones best working at the moment. Still using it to create flight plans and sometimes connect it to P3D to show location and AI planes. Not tried this one yet.

[ce_zeta]

Yep, apparently it is working for most, but nothing I do will show anything more than a basic map. The manual doesn't really shed any light on what the problem might be as it assumes that everything works. It doesn't. . .back to FSTramp for now.

Can you post a screenshot?

[mgr]

Hi Falcon,


Yep, apparently it is working for most, but nothing I do will show anything more than a basic map. The manual doesn't really shed any light on what the problem might be as it assumes that everything works. It doesn't. . .back to FSTramp for now.

Could you post the problem on the developer forum-topic. The maker (Alex) is quick in reply and solving things is my experience.
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/little-navmap-flight-planner-beta-released.438380/page-2

Regards,

Marcel

[falcon409]

Can you post a screenshot?
That won't accomplish anything. . .all you'd see is a map with nothing on it other than airplane symbols where airports should be and streets.

[falcon409]

Hi Falcon,
Could you post the problem on the developer forum-topic. The maker (Alex) is quick in reply and solving things is my experience.
Regards,
Marcel
Done, and waiting!

[albar965]

Hi All,

I'm the author of this little thing.

Some remarks about questions in this thread:

Yes, it can build flight plans (PLN files, XML format) for FSX, FSXSE, P3D. No other formats supported yet. I'm open for proposals.

The manual is available online as one single HTML page. So printing or converting to PDF should be no problem. It also comes with the program but the online version has some more updates and clarifications.

About features compared to Plan-G:
Plan-G has much more functionality than Little Navmap (Vatsim stuff, airspace boundaries, approaches, traffic, multiplayer aircraft display, user waypoints, etc.).
I used it a lot in the past but had too many problems with freezes as well as lacking airport information (e.g. cannot find out if an airport has lighted runways).


About the development:
There was already a bunch of beta releases, that fixed a lot of problems reading scenery, thanks to a very helpful community.
I think it is getting quite stable now and I will create a final release soon which will not differ much in functionality (but more in number of bugs :mixed-smiley-010:) compared to the beta releases.

The next goal is a release version 1.2 that will have a lot of small improvements. Here is list of tickets that I assigned for this version (https://github.com/albar965/littlenavmap/milestone/1).

falcon409: I answered you post at fsdeveloper.

Alex

[Adonis]

What I'd like to see added is a possibility to show the Project Tupolev, SCS and SamDim plane RSBN beacons from the two used types of databases.

[falcon409]

Ok, a rundown of what works now and why:

No airports, navaids, airways, etc showing on the map. . .that would be because I was in FSX and in the Scenery Library dropdown. . .Prepar3D was selected. Upon loading it seems to want to default to P3D.

Aircraft not showing with NavConnect running and connected (supposedly). . .it was not connected but attempting to connect, the reason it wouldn't is because the ISP I copied over was off by one digit

CTD after about 10 minutes of flying. . .No idea why that happened (twice) possibly due to something going on in NavConnect timing out because the ISP was incorrect. Who knows.

Interestingly when I made a flight plan, I made one with four airports. . .starting with South Jersey Regional, each successive airport was placed above the departure airport rather than below which meant that when I placed the destination airport I had a reverse flight plan that wanted to start at Trenton/Mercer (which was actually the destination) and land at SJR (which was the departure). I'll work on that one. . .probably something I didn't do correctly.

Finally, I seem to be getting a fairly significant FPS/Stuttering hit while running the program. I'll have to do more investigating to see if there's any way to reduce that because as it is right now it's a major problem while flying.

[albar965]

What I'd like to see added is a possibility to show the Project Tupolev, SCS and SamDim plane RSBN beacons from the two used types of databases.
No idea what data format they use, but I think this could be solved by adding custom waypoints functionality with CSV import/export in a future release.


Ok, a rundown of what works now and why:

No airports, navaids, airways, etc showing on the map. . .that would be because I was in FSX and in the Scenery Library dropdown. . .Prepar3D was selected. Upon loading it seems to want to default to P3D.

Aircraft not showing with NavConnect running and connected (supposedly). . .it was not connected but attempting to connect, the reason it wouldn't is because the ISP I copied over was off by one digit

CTD after about 10 minutes of flying. . .No idea why that happened (twice) possibly due to something going on in NavConnect timing out because the ISP was incorrect. Who knows.

Interestingly when I made a flight plan, I made one with four airports. . .starting with South Jersey Regional, each successive airport was placed above the departure airport rather than below which meant that when I placed the destination airport I had a reverse flight plan that wanted to start at Trenton/Mercer (which was actually the destination) and land at SJR (which was the departure). I'll work on that one. . .probably something I didn't do correctly.

Finally, I seem to be getting a fairly significant FPS/Stuttering hit while running the program. I'll have to do more investigating to see if there's any way to reduce that because as it is right now it's a major problem while flying.

The simulator in the Scenery loading dialog is not synchronized with the simulator selection in the menu. I think this can be confusing because sometimes you don't reload what you see.
The program keeps separate scenery databases for each simulator and you can switch between them on the fly.
If one of them is not loaded you won't see anything when switching to the wrong one. I will synchronize the dialog and the map in the future.

About the CTD: I (rarely) had some in the past that were caused by the background updates in the "Flight Plan Elevation Profile" dock window. Close that window, that will end all background updates for elevation data which also might save some FPS. Maybe that helps.
A wrong IP address should not cause any crash, only an error message. Although the error message can show up to a minute later in some cases.
When running all on the same computer simply use "localhost" to connect.

About flight plan building: The logic depends on the menu item you used to add an airport:
If you use "Set as Departure/Destination" the new airport always *replaces* the current departure or destination
If you use "Add to flight plan", the airport (or waypoint) is added to the nearest route leg or waypoint. So this might be added before the departure or it can be appended to the route after the destination.
The drag and drop editing mode on the map is explained in the manual here. (https://albar965.github.io/littlenavmap/help/en/index.html#fpedit)

About stutters: I'm running all on my old and trusty Core i7 975 at 4 GHz, FPS externally locked to 60 (with low settings in FSX) and only get the usual FSX stutters from time to time.
I'm quite sure the stutters are an affinity mask/priority problem. I'll post my settings when I'm at my flying computer.
You can also try to decrease the update interval in Navonnect.

Alex

[IanHenry]

Hi All,

I'm the author of this little thing.

Some remarks about questions in this thread:

Yes, it can build flight plans (PLN files, XML format) for FSX, FSXSE, P3D. No other formats supported yet. I'm open for proposals.

The manual is available online as one single HTML page. So printing or converting to PDF should be no problem. It also comes with the program but the online version has some more updates and clarifications.

About features compared to Plan-G:
Plan-G has much more functionality than Little Navmap (Vatsim stuff, airspace boundaries, approaches, traffic, multiplayer aircraft display, user waypoints, etc.).
I used it a lot in the past but had too many problems with freezes as well as lacking airport information (e.g. cannot find out if an airport has lighted runways).


About the development:
There was already a bunch of beta releases, that fixed a lot of problems reading scenery, thanks to a very helpful community.
I think it is getting quite stable now and I will create a final release soon which will not differ much in functionality (but more in number of bugs :mixed-smiley-010:) compared to the beta releases.

The next goal is a release version 1.2 that will have a lot of small improvements. Here is list of tickets that I assigned for this version (https://github.com/albar965/littlenavmap/milestone/1).

falcon409: I answered you post at fsdeveloper.

Alex


Many thanks for all your hard work Alex, and welcome to the forum.


Regards,
Ian

[albar965]

Hi Ian,

thank you for the welcome.

I'm still digging through the code fixing bugs, testing stuff and hope to have that stable release finished soon.
Then I'm looking forward to add new functionality.:smile-new:

Alex

[albar965]

Hi All,

Little Navmap stable version 1.0.5 released (https://github.com/albar965/littlenavmap/releases/tag/v1.0.5)

A big thank-you to all the people supporting me throughout the beta phase, sending me their log files, screen shots, friendly messages and more.

There is no new functionality compared to the last beta version. New features will be added in the next development cycle.

Fixed since the last beta 1.0.4:


Scenery reading errors for airports without city name.
Errors reading scenery.cfg file.
Exclude options did not work for some scenery paths.
Wrong order of flight plan when adding waypoints.
Overview overlay loosing background image.
Valid start position in flight plan not recognized.
Display of narrow and closed taxiways.

Improved:


Disabling aircraft tracking on double click and other actions.
Simulator selection in loading dialog now synchronized with map.
Smoothed user aircraft movement a bit.
Added help button to various dialogs.
Many additions and clarifications in the manual.

Download LittleNavmap-win-1.0.5.zip (https://github.com/albar965/littlenavmap/releases/download/v1.0.5/LittleNavmap-win-1.0.5.zip) for Windows
Download LittleNavmap-macOS-1.0.5.dmg (https://github.com/albar965/littlenavmap/releases/download/v1.0.5/LittleNavmap-macOS-1.0.5.dmg) for Apple macOS

Little Navconnect stable version 1.0.1 was released too (https://github.com/albar965/littlenavconnect/releases/tag/v1.0.1)

Download LittleNavconnect-1.0.1.zip (https://github.com/albar965/littlenavconnect/releases/download/v1.0.1/LittleNavconnect-win-1.0.1.zip)



Alex