feat(fms/efb): Pause at distance before top of descent

[2hwk]

Fixes #5211

Summary of Changes

• New setting in EFB Realism - Pause at TOD (configurable by distance between 0-50 nm before TOD)
• When enabled, flight will pause at the specified distance before TOD
• If the TOD point shifts before your present position, or AP mode reverts in CRZ, will pause the simulation.

Items:

• Pause at or before TOD
• Pause if TOD has moved and is behind PPOS
• Pause on AP mode reversion after transition altitude if AP is active
• Disable when on VATSIM/IVAO

Screenshots (if necessary)

FlightSimulator_9Lr1EIKYeg.mp4

References

Additional context

Discord username (if different from GitHub):2Cas#1022

Testing instructions

• Open EFB settings > Realism > T/D Pause On.

• Load up a flight plan and enter W/B, Fuel, FPLN-A, INIT-A and INIT-B as required to get a calculated vertical descent profile, as indicated by the apperance of Pseudo Waypoints on the ND and MCDU (T/C, T/D, etc).

After takeoff:

• Climb out as per normal, arm and disarm AP (while below your origin airfield's transition altitude), nothing should happen.

• Flying without AP engaged should not trigger any pause or popups.

After crossing transitional altitude, the sim will pause and a popup will be displayed when:

(Note: new popups will not occur for 10s after dismissing to prevent pop-up spam)

• Disarming AP (moving joystick to max deflection, etc).

• A change in Lateral (not vertical) guidance mode from NAV (as indicated on the PFD) i.e. HDG (can be triggered by reaching the end of a leg into a discont.)

• If the approaching T/D point is within the distance specified in the T/D pause distance input (default 10nm).

After dismissing the T/D Reached popup dialogue:

• AP reversion will no longer trigger a pause (either lateral mode changes/AP disconnect)

• T/D dialog should never appear during descent or landing

• When crossing T/D point, "T/D REACHED" should appear on PFD as before.

After landing:

• Do a turnaround, enter a new flight plan to either the previous or a new destination, filling out all the MCDU pages as before.

• Go into the EFB and set a custom T/D distance setting, anywhere between 0-50 nm.

• Observe that the above behavior should remain consistent on the turnaround flight, T/D pause distance should follow the setting.

• On this return flight, leave the pause at T/D dialog open for 10-30 minutes to measure the effect of leaving the plane in this suspended state over a moderate period of time.

• Another flight may be done with the T/D Pause setting disabled, to ensure that NO pause dialogs occur in any of the above cases. A flight without active vertical guidance should similarly not trigger any pause pop-ups.

KNOWN ISSUES/SIM LIMITATIONS:

Sim Limitation:

Note that while aircraft simulation is suspended (i.e. fuel consumption, airspeed, altitude, physics), environmental simulation will continue (Notably Live Weather, Live Traffic/AI Traffic). Consequences of this include that TCAS TA/RAs will still be issued and if there is a significant change in the weather over time (say a few hours), your vertical descent profile and performance figures may no longer be accurate, which means that the actual T/D point may now have shifted from the originally calculated value.

The timestamp issued in the pause pop-up shows your real local system's time (localized to your locale) to help mitigate against this problem.

This is considered a sim limitation as the pause event we utilize does not affect the MSFS world environment. Along this line of thinking, we speculate that without historical live weather and traffic, it would not possible to inject or restore the state that the world was in when the pause was initiated (the time slider in the weather toolbar only affects lighting and will still reflect live wind and weather data).

Flying using a weather preset and without AI/live traffic avoids this limitation entirely, but would also be a compromise in other ways.

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[svengcz]

We should enable this only when VATSIM and IVAO are not set for weather data.
It should be impossible to activate this when pilots are flying online

[TayDex]

We should enable this only when VATSIM and IVAO are not set for weather data. It should be impossible to activate this when pilots are flying online

Though I often use Vatsim as weather source even when flying offline, and I'm sure I'm not the only one

[svengcz]

We should enable this only when VATSIM and IVAO are not set for weather data. It should be impossible to activate this when pilots are flying online

Though I often use Vatsim as weather source even when flying offline, and I'm sure I'm not the only one

You're right, but this feature should be disabled per default and especially if something looks like an online flight.
Otherwise will it be a really bad feature for all other online-pilots and controllers.

[tracernz]

We should enable this only when VATSIM and IVAO are not set for weather data. It should be impossible to activate this when pilots are flying online

I think many people use VATSIM METARs even when not flying online... it's the only way to get accurate weather for NZ for example because VATSIM have a contract with the weather provider.

[johnpmaguire]

I don’t think FBW should be worrying about when a pilot is using this. It’s the user who has responsibility for their conduct online.

If it becomes an issue I’m sure VATSIM and Vpilot will find a solution similar to the auto disconnect for XPlane.

[2hwk]

If there's a way to disable this purely when vPilot is detected I'm for it but in lieu of that I'll just remove that part of the logic for now since VATSIM METAR setting isn't a reliable indicator

[2hwk]

Note: Lint is failing because of vnav branch, I didn't do anything 🙈