Re: [Flightgear-devel] That blaring voice...

[Josh D. <jos...@ou...>]

Hi guys,

By all means, your approach of adding something to QT is a good idea to me.

Maybe I have failed to explain properly.

I can't speak for every IRL pilot. But when I was in flight training (rip... I am now too ill to continue), what we would do is tune ATIS into comm2 and leave comm2 MUTED until we needed it. Then we unmute, listen to him, and then mute it again when done.

So yes, we do "turn off" ATIS.

And, cannot "adjust frequency" because FlightGear tunes it by default unless you override it (like my planes do). So, you're left with starting the sim to blaring ATIS, when you're in the middle of power-up or whatever.

It makes no sense.

Plus, the thing is reading out instructions for AI airplanes, or even telling me I am cleared for takeoff, callsig (lol, the default?) all in that harsh, irritating voice.


  *
If you want to not hear the text-to-speech at *all*, ‘just’ set the ATC volume to zero, surely?

I do not think this "fake ATC" should be enabled by default. It makes no sense. I would wager that 99/100 people who use flightsims want an interactive ATC such as VATSIM, the FlightGear MP/Mumble/FGCom, or RedGriffen ATC. They do not want to hear some random ATC blaring in the background in an annoying voice while they're just trying to start their plane up.

So I think this "fake ATC" like any other ATC option, should be an opt-in, not an opt-out.

When the sim is started, there should be no blaring voices.

--
Josh Davidson
________________________________
From: James Turner <ja...@fl...>
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2024 15:02
To: FG Developers List <fli...@li...>
Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] That blaring voice...



On 30 Sep 2024, at 18:20, Josh Davidson <jos...@ou...> wrote:

If flightgear implements some sort of run once that asks that, no objections.

But this default blaring voice should be off by default

It's essentially a very very poor screen reader and I challenge to find a single other piece if software that puts such a thing on by default.

We can certainly make such a question part of the first-run sequence the launcher does, and yes in principle the current launcher UI is accessibility enabled because it’s built on Qt. Of course our main in-sim UI is completely invisible to a screen-reader of any kind.


However my objection is mostly with the read commands for ATC and ATIS. Because they don't stop. They keep blaring.


This seems odd to me: the system only plays the messages you would hear with the corresponding frequency tuned .. and in the case of AWOS / ATIS, it’s of comparable quality. If you were seated in the aeroplane, you wouldn’t ’turn off’ ATIS or similar, you’d either adjust the volume, or change frequency … so why is what FG currently does, different? We certainly don’t want to default our COM radios to volume=0, and we do want to make COM stations play the best approximation of ‘real’ audio we can, so I don’t see how we could do better?

If you want to not hear the text-to-speech at *all*, ‘just’ set the ATC volume to zero, surely? And then you’re relying on reading the on-screen text, of course. Given that setting is in a dialog labelled ’sound’, I would say it’s not exactly hidden, and not an unreasonable default?

Kind regards,
James