Virtual crew chief
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@Kavelenko ,
Thanks for that bit of info! I will make the “cleared off” change - makes perfect sense to me. I use VA extensively, so I can’t have the crew chief cancelling my comms!
Regards,
Tomcattwo
(VoiceClone) -
You may look at the VaiCom profiles, it’s supposed to switch to the DCS VaiCom profile+plugin when the crew chief is cleared off. Just now finally downloading, thanks for all the info guys!
Agreed @Kavelenko this makes the other checks more interesting and ramp start in general a little more fun!
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It sounds like it would be difficult to incorporate a really good “virtual crew chief” into BMS, such that they could respond and interact realistically with us.
But as a “oh wow, this would be cool” item, I think it would be really neat. I enjoyed watching the video of the virtual crew chief in DCS, and the whole time I was watching it I was thinking “This would be awesome in BMS, it would be so cool!”
Maybe it can happen, maybe it can’t. For me, the new 4.38 terrain model is a higher priority (that’s just my personal preference), but things like a realistic virtual crew chief are really fun to dream about!
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@Tomcattwo said in Virtual crew chief:
I took the liberty of making a few minor corrections/additions to the Virtual Crew Chief profile to allow for some additional phraseology (I’m Navy so the lingo might be slightly different), and also to send the Remove/Reinstall EPU Safety Pin command (“t 1”) just before the Virtual Crew Chief reports that he has done so. I also changed the timing pause on speedbrake check for closing from 4 seconds to 7 seconds, which is what BMS uses for time to close the speedbrakes, IIRC.
Great edits! Thanks for sharing.
As @SemlerPDX indicated above, I would LOVE to see the VCC and VA react based on either a callback initiation or reading memory for equipment position, rather than just rote timing. Nevertheless this is an outstanding immersion improvement for me.
VoiceAttack supports inline C# functions. (See page 105 of the documentation.) Could we use this to read the shared memory? That might offer at least some of the feedback we need. If you guys with more experience than me think it might work, I’ll have a go at creating a proof of concept.
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I was able to play around with this just little last night. First off, editing his Vaicom profile works really well and quickly in the sense it has the profile switch I was asking about and it switched to @SemlerPDX’s profile when I edited it and did a few more of the recommended edits (longer speed brake check, T 1 press for EPU pin. SemlerPDX, is there an easy way to “unincluded” when I try that method?
But it’s also pointed out apparently an issue I have with Voice Attack’s recognition in general.
One of the many great things with SemlerPDX’s profile is that it has all the wildcards. This has shown me that apparently my recognition is pretty bad on my system because bi can’t get these phrases to detect hardly at all. I’ve done several of the Windows training sessions. Yes I can add wildcards to his commands and probably will so I don’t have to follow the script closely, but even the word “Chief” is having a hard time being recognized and I speak American Midwest dialect English. -
@Snake122
I’ve found with VA and using @SemlerPDX 's profile, three things that help: 1) a very short pause after you depress your push-to-talk switch (on the order of half a second) 2) speaking more slowly and 3) constant use, plus multiple training sessions with MS Voice Recognition.The short pause works wonders for recognition for me.
R/
TC2 -
@Snake122 said in Virtual crew chief:
Yes I can add wildcards to his commands and probably will so I don’t have to follow the script closely, but even the word “Chief” is having a hard time being recognized and I speak American Midwest dialect English
I added “Hay Cheef” and “Cheef”, and VA loves it rofl. My English teacher would roll in her grave.
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@Tomcattwo said in Virtual crew chief:
@Snake122
I’ve found with VA and using @SemlerPDX 's profile, three things that help: 1) a very short pause after you depress your push-to-talk switch (on the order of half a second) 2) speaking more slowly and 3) constant use, plus multiple training sessions with MS Voice Recognition.The short pause works wonders for recognition for me.
R/
TC2-
Unfortunately doesn’t apply with the modified Vaicom profile. It’s hot mic, which I think might be the actual case with the crew chief connection on RL…
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Good call on pauses. Honestly, I don’t often have that many issues with SemlerPDX’s though, but I’ll work it into Bogey Dope’s.
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Yeah, I’ve done it multiple times with all the different trainings. Maybe just need to update again. But the only time I use MS Voice stuff is with VA.
@Kavelenko said in Virtual crew chief:
@Snake122 said in Virtual crew chief:
Yes I can add wildcards to his commands and probably will so I don’t have to follow the script closely, but even the word “Chief” is having a hard time being recognized and I speak American Midwest dialect English
I added “Hay Cheef” and “Cheef”, and VA loves it rofl. My English teacher would roll in her grave.
good call. Yeah, edits like this have been helpful with me too even with SemlerPDX’s, especially the EeePeeU pin or something like that. It took a lot of tweaking to get that with his profile so I need to carry that over to Bogey Dope’s.
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@Snake122
OK, I have managed so far to integrate a revised version of Virtual Crew Chief profile with @SemlerPDX 's latest profile. The way I have done it:-
Used the full “VirtualCrewChief-Profile.vap”, and removed all Say Again commands. This is so that I can still use AVCS commands while VCC is active.
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In VCC.vap, I included all commands from AVCS Core (V1.11) and AVCS4 Falcon BMS Radios (v1.42).vap. This is so that when VCC is the active profile, I can still have commands recognized from these profiles too.
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Made a command in AVCS4 Falcon BMS Radios (v1.42).vap to switch the active profile from AVCS to VCC (the voice command is: “[Virtual;] Crew Chief; [Virtual;] Crew Cheef” )
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When the active profile switches to VCC, I used a Profile Exec Option for "When this profile becomes active execute the command “Hey Chief”. That way, I will know when VCC is indeed the active profile.
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Do all actions needed in VCC. By executing either the “You’re cleared Off” command or the “standby” commands, The profile will be switched to AVCS CORE (V1.11), and AVCS will load once again, initialize, and then make AVCS4 Falcon BMS Radios (v1.42) active profile again. You’ll know when it’s active when you hear “Systems are ready” from VA. Takes 20-30 seconds on my PC.
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Since VCC commands are NOT included in AVCS, I can do all AVCS commands with no interference from VCC.
I do not like messing with @SemlerPDX 's AVCS4 Radios profile, but I could not find a way to make a user command that would switch profiles. So this is a “temporary” fix until I can find a way to do that so as to not interfere with AVCS4 Radios.
I have not tested it in game, but it does work properly in VA.
Regards,
Tomcattwo
(VoiceClone) -
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@Tomcattwo good to know. For me the easy button last night was to just point the VCC profile that switched to the DCS Vaicom profile and edit it to switch to his BMS profile when I clear off the crew chief. For me, keeps the two profiles’ commands separate, like you mention with the “say again,” etc. and I don’t need the AVCS profiles until I’m done with the startup anyway. I’ll see what happens but may be awhile until I get the time to play with it more.
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@Tomcattwo I did it differently. I opened @SemlerPDX’s AVCS4 Falcon BMS Radios profile in VA, clicked on Options -> Profile General -> Include command from other profiles and added Virtual Crew Chief below the AVCS CORE. Seems to work for me so far. Any changes to Virtual Crew Chief are done directly to its own profile, which will then be loaded once I boot up Sem’s profile.
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@Kavelenko This is exactly the best procedure - the load times for AVCS4 BMS are long (with over 4 million derived command variations!). Everything will perform much better and faster if the VCC profile is merely included into AVCS4 BMS.
That being said, apparently there are commands in VCC which can disable VoiceAttack Global Listening, so for any AVCS4 BMS users who do not use my PTT system in Global Mode, I’d recommend editing that profile and using the Search box near the bottom right to entire a filter keyword of “Listening” - edit any commands which appear under this filter and disable/delete any “Stop VoiceAttack Listening” actions in each of those commands.
After that, VCC will function perfectly as a background profile included in AVCS4 BMS (or any VoiceAttack profile, Fish’s for example) without interfering that that profile.
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@Kavelenko
Thanks. At @SemlerPDX 's recommendation, I reverted back to including Virtual Crew Chief profile in AVCS4 Falcon BMS Radios (v1.42) profile, as you have done, and made appropriate edits in VCC profile.
Regards,
Tomcattwo
(VoiceClone) -
@Snake122 I hate to say it, but if your recognition is that borked even though you have trained your Windows Speech Profile, it may be indicative of an issue in that speech profile. If that is the case, the solution would be to start over with a new Speech Profile and run through the Speech Training again (completely through at least 3 times). American Midwest Accent (short of Mary Mack levels of accent) is not typically a troublesome accent for Windows, nowhere near the issues that some of our friends Down Under have, or pretty much anyone from Scotland.
It is a bit of a slog to get through the training, and knowing that it must be performed 3 times at least is daunting, so I never recommend to start over like this unless it seems truly warranted - but in this case, I think it may be. You have performed training several times and do not have a relatively strong accent as Windows sees it, and according to your statements, more than just bad recognition of a single word or few. When it’s just a word (or few), we can add these to the Dictionary and record a custom pronunciation for it - I had to do that for “eight” or “8”, and I have a Standard American Accent.
Cool thing is that once you get your Speech Profile properly trained fresh and new, you can backup your Speech Profile so that you can roll back to this ‘clean’ state anytime down the road (even following a Windows reinstallation) so that you never have to go through that training again unless your voice changes or you buy a new microphone so different in quality it affects recognition.
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All,
I have contacted BogeyDope about the possibility of a VCC profile for hotpit refueling, and sent him a modified Hotpit Refueling checklist for BMS. He and another ex-Crew Chief buddy are looking into it. If he makes one, I will post a link to it in this thread.
R/,
TC2 -
I just did my first run-through of the BMS Ground Ops training mission with the Virtual Crew Chief, and it was a lot of fun!
Yesterday evening I watched Bogey Dope’s YT video (in which he uses VCC in DCS), and took detailed notes of the sequence of actions and the dialogue from the pilot and the crew chief. Then I modified the BMS ramp start procedure a little bit (from the GroundOps training mission) so as to match and incorporate the VCC dialogue and timings.
I used the procedure described above by @Kavelenko (and approved by @SemlerPDX ) to use the VCC VA profile as a “secondary” (my term) profile alongside / at slightly lower priority than AVCS. I made a few edits to the VA profile, such as the ones @Tomcattwo described above.
It took all yesterday evening to modify my stack of index cards (which is my checklist for ramp starts), so that “my” dialogue is written in red ink, the crew chief’s is written in black ink, and the switchology is still written in pencil. But for me, it was worth it! The procedure went pretty smoothly I will get a little better at “playing along” with some of the timings, but overall everything went pretty much according to plan.
When I got to the end and the crew chief told me to “bring 'er back Code 1”, I was well pleased! This will be fun to practice some more and use on a regular basis. I’m glad that Bogey Dope guy posted his video and his file, and I’m glad it “plays nicely” (with only a little modification) with BMS and AVCS 4. Thanks to everyone who gave advice on this thread, too! I think other BMS users will have fun with this, if they enjoy ramp starts.
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C’mon, Foxster-meister…
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wish this was possible for foxvox :")
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@Mylonite470 ,
Congratulations! It does add to the “as real as it gets” aspect, doesn’t it? Yesterday I finished updating my Main Checklist, using a kludge of the 4.37, 4.35 F-16 Main checklists, and insertion of VCC dialog into my startup routine. Took me a couple of days, but now my Main Checklist is all set to go from cockpit entry (‘cold and dark’) through startup (with VCC), taxi, takeoff, climb-out, AAR, fence in, IP, attack, egress, fence out, descent, landing, taxi back, shutdown and hotpit refuel. It works great with VCC. 12 pages (6 sheets) in clear plastic document sleeves.
Regards,
Tomcattwo
(VoiceClone) -
@Ricky
I really enjoyed watching and learning so much from your demo
Thx