Thank you for your question there
No bug here, just perhaps only a small bad choice for defaults, on my behalf, which you will understand.
jaxsin wrote in Mon Feb 22, 2016 7:36 pm:I was wondering why it is when I select a pre-made msg to send with $rwy in it I have that edit box pop-up which essentially tells me I haven't selected a runway.
Have a look at the "quick reference" in the help menu, which will help you understand what ATC-pie with text aliases. Any dollar-prefixed token (like "$rwy") triggers a search for a replacement value, and the pop-up comes only if none was found. The search goes as follows:
1. if the alias is one of the
predefined list that you find in the quick ref, the substitution is the one described; if not, it is a custom alias (feel the power?) and we carry on to 2...
2. look for a line of the form "alias=blah blah value with spaces allowed" in the
general notes (notepad dock); $alias is substituted with what follows the '='
3. look for such line in the
local notepad
4. look for such line in the currently selected strip comments for an
aircraft-specific value
This gives you the force to create any alias you would like on all three world (2), airport/centre (3), and radar contact (4) levels. EDIT: you can test all this without spamming the real network by holding the mouse down on the "Msg" button and selecting "check before send"---or whatever it is called exactly :-p
Now you'll notice that $rwy is NOT one of the predefined ones [!!
EDIT: This has become incorrect, please read forward in this thread. $rwy was introduced after runway boxes. !!], so it was rather
proposed as a custom alias in the default presets, which is where my choice might not have been a perfect one. But you can change all that to suit your needs.
The idea behind my proposition was that people who wanted to assign RWYs and use text for clearances could add a line like "rwy=25L" to the ACFT strip. Or, if there is only one active runway for arrivals, why not write the line on your local notepad and you would have a generic text preset with an alias that would work for all ACFT without having to assign individually. Though in this case $rwyarr can do the job (see below).
PINTO wrote in Mon Feb 22, 2016 8:02 pm:Have you selected active landing and departure runways via the dialogue box? I haven't had a problem with $rwy before.
Allow me to correct: the runway selection dialog has an effect on three aliases, namely $rwyarr, $rwydep and $runways. But not on $rwy, which as I said is not a predefined substitution.
jaxsin wrote in Mon Feb 22, 2016 7:36 pm:The only way I can seemingly get the $rwy variable to work is by issuing direct instructions from the instruction pain
Not sure what you mean, since other than "Expect RWY ...", the instructions should not be filling a runway for you. It will in solo games though, once they know what RWY to expect.
Perhaps not on first run, but ATC-pie normally saves your window state, so if you like the instruction dock and have it visible when you close, it should open again on a subsequent run.