Self-Loading Cargo v1.6.6.0 Released

Multiple cabin crew voice support, better aircraft integration and a new selection of default cabin music.

Self-Loading Cargo v1.6.6.0 has released which brings alive the rest of the cabin crew onboard your aircraft, has better data handling for aircraft integration and a bunch of new music that you can use while boarding your passengers.

Multi Cabin Crew Voice Support

Using the power of various AI TTS platforms, you're now able to choose from multiple voices across each platform which will automatically be applied to individual crew members and you can interact with them in exactly the same way as you've always been able to with the purser.

 This major milestone will allow more flexibility in the way operations are performed onboard the aircraft as time goes on - each cabin crew is individually simulated and they will be able to perform tasks and work with both yourself and the senior flight attendant throughout each flight as situations arise with the passengers and ground crew.

While the senior flight attendant will still carry out his or her required duties (such as liasing with ground staff to organise boarding, telling the cabin crew the cabin is ready for landing etc), other duties may be deferred to other members of the crew (such as contacting the captain to ask if they should bring a drink, performing welfare checks, performing the safety announcement etc) and you'll hear different voices depending on which person is speaking on the intercom and cabin speakers. This creates a highly immersive environment which feels much more like a living, breathing cabin - with more to come as Self-Loading Cargo grows in functionality throughout the v1.7 development branch.

There will also be further development of this functionality to support the pre-recorded digital voicepacks (as opposed to TTS) once further voicepacks become available.

Better Aircraft Integration (+ "Cabin Ready" ECAM support)

A significant amount of time has been taken to improve the integration with aircraft within Microsoft Flight Simulator where LVARs are used to detect certain parameters. Due to limitations in the simulator, data is not always consistent and can sometimes revert to "default values" if not received in a timely manner, so a concerted effort has been made to manage this and "dampen" the information so that fluctuations coming from the simulator affects Self-Loading Cargo as little as possible. In a nutshell this means that you should notice much improved door handling, seatbelt sign handling and ACP manipulation when using supported aircraft.

"Cabin Ready" ECAM support

Developers can now integrate "Cabin Ready" functionality into their aircraft ECAM - this functionality is used primarily on Airbus aircraft to allow the cabin crew to notify the cockpit when they're ready for takeoff or landing.

Self-Loading Cargo now exposes its cabin readiness data to developers to allow this direct integration with aircraft - so please feel free to point aircraft developers to the developer guide in order for this excellent immersion improvement to be realised.

This is an MSFS-only feature at the moment but there is active development on the X-Plane side of things too - more on that later!

New Cabin Music

The Cabin Music system on the "Inflight Services" window within Self-Loading Cargo has been given an update to properly support music play lists with "shuffle" and "loop" support for music tracks that play while boarding/deboarding the aircraft. To make this feature more useful, I have put together a music album of ten exclusive music tracks for your listening pleasure.

These music tracks are available in "original" or "attenuated" form so that you can either listen to them in high-fidelity or a lower quality which sounds as if the music is coming through poor quality aircraft speakers. The choice is yours.

You can download both soundpacks from the soundpacks area of the website - instructions for installation are also on that page.

How to update

Download the update from your account area and install over the top of your existing installation. 

Changelog:

You can view the full release notes for more information.