The Immortal DHC-2 Beaver

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 25

 

It is Sunday and time for another update and I have to say that it was a busy week.

 

There were a lot of things I was working on this week and I was jumping back and forth between topics really. I am not mentioning the nitty gritty details of everything I did, but I will highlight a few things.

 

Okay, here they come:

 

I continued my work on my Engine model and specifically on the CHT and Oil Temperature model. These are not driven by X-Plane default anymore, as I have my own plugin code for that and can tune it as I like. I am pretty happy now. Maybe a few tweaks here and there, but in general O consider it as finished, for now. That doesn't mean that I won't spend time on it again in a future update, if necessary. 

The engine behaviour, in case you abuse the engine, is working fine too.

 

Then work continued on sound. This time my focus was on engine sound. So far I used the standard X-Plane way, which means that you use one engine sound file for the full RPM range. Actually, it wasn't all that bad, but since I have sound recordings for 5 different power settings, I want to make full use of this of course. I started on this already in the past, went back to default, and now I am back using everything I have and it sounds really nice! 

 

The XP9 Beaver got some attention as well. I am happy to report that she is now also flying in XP9. Well, there is still a good amount of work ahead, in order to make her behave like the XP10 version, but I am very satisfied with the progress I made this week. Yes, I know it is crazy that I am working on the XP9 version, while the XP10 release is around the corner, but that is just me. 

 

No pictures for today, as I was mainly working on things that can't be shown off really. 

 

So now I would like to talk about the feature I mentioned in my last Sunday Updates. The feature that bush pilots, especially those using floats, will like. I will call it "Floatplane Docking". Using this feature allows you to do the following:

 

- when your taxi speed on water is below 5 mph, you will be able to enable "Floatplane Docking" and this will tie down the aircraft to that location, which means that it is not changing position anymore. However, it will of course continue to bob in the waves.

 

- when you are in "Floatplane Docking", you can push the aircraft naturally back and forth, left and right and you can rotate it around its vertical axis. So just like the things you can do in realy life.

 

I scenario would look like the following. You land on water and taxi to the dock. That dock is often not a "hard" object and that means that you will just slide through it, which is killing the immersion factor. Or sometimes it is setup in a way that you can easily end up in a crash condition, which is also not realistic and fun.

 

So here you come. You taxi to the dock and when you are close to it, you cut the engine and glide towards it with the remaining energy. When you are now in the position you want and below 5 mpg, you can engage "Floatplane docking" and it will "tie down" the Beaver and it will stay in that position. Now you could use the controls to easily move it to the dock and fine tune your position. 

 

Now you want to go for another flight. Nothing easier than that. By using the "Floatplane Docking" control, and with contols I mean your Joystick, you push the Beaver away from the dock, put the nose where you want it to point to and release docking mode. Now you are free again, away from the dock and can do your waterpilot thing. 

 

Nothing feels unnatural when you do all this, because the aircraft is still interacting with the water and not in some kind of akward freeze state. I really like it. In fact so much, that I almost exclusively use the float version of the Beaver. 

 

I hope you are able to understand what I mean with all that. Well, I will show it next week in a video. 

 

As I said before, I don't want to bore you with very tiny details. I am just in hussle mode as I am closojg the finish line. Therefore, that's it for today. If I remember that I forgot something really important to mention, I will do during the week.

 

You all have a wonderful Sunday and Happy Mother's Day to all your families!

[Jakob Ludwig]

Thanks for the update. Really liking the docking feature

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 26

 

Hello everybody,

 

To the weekly Sunday Beaver Update. Again a very busy week for me, trying to iron out things that were discovered by the beta team. However, fortunately for me, not that many. Therefore, I was able to work on things that were not completely planned for the initial release.

 

One of these things is how I planned to work with sound. Well, we all know that X-Plane standard sound is not the best thing one could have. So I thought about coding something in SASL, and I actually did until late last week. But I changed my approach and decided that I go the extra mile, even for the initial release, and that means that I am using DreamEngine for sound. 

 

Well, this is not something completely new for me and actually I was planning to use DreamEngine for months now. The reason why I considered SASL sound coding was that I didn't really have the time to get familiar with another piece of software. So I thought.

 

I contacted Fred (the creator of DreamEgine) and told him about my thoughts and he jumped in and gave me a hand. That was awesome and I appreciate that a lot Fred!

 

Well, now I find my way around and I am able to use all the sound files I have and that I quite a few.  This is really adding to the immersion of flight when everything you operate has a sound. The doors, different switches, water rudder selector, parkbrake, flap pumping etc. I love it so far. May I love it myself? Yes, I guess I may... 

 

So yeah, I guess you will like it too...

 

I lot had to happen behind the scenes though, because I had to code my own combustion engine plugin, so that I always know i which state the engine is. I also simulate my own propeller and engine "spool up" and "spool down". 

 

CHT and Oil Temperature simulation and the possible malfunctions, in case you abuse the engine, got their final treatment as well, and I will leave it like that for now. 

 

Then like last week, lots of minor stuff here and there to make it all work nicely.

 

I wanted to show Floatplane Docking this week, and I even recored a video showing it and in this video you could also see for the first time the Beaver in its element. However, I am fighting with the screenrecorder tool so far, as the rendered video as an mp4 shows degraded quality and I don't like to present it to you. Well, I guess you would know that it is due to the video, but still. I hope I have something good within the next days and if I do, I will load it up to YouTube and post a link here. I am really eager to let you see the Beaver. So I do my best.

 

Next week, I am going to speak about some plans I have with the Beaver. As I told you before, it won't be a release and maybe one or two bug fix updates. More about that next week....

 

I hope you all have a great Sunday!

 

Pete

[Ben Russell]

Nice work Pete. Keep up the solid progress.

[Jakob Ludwig]

Thanks for the update and nice to see you implementing a nice sound environment from the beginning.. Really appreciated. 

 

Regarding recording you may have a look here https://obsproject.com/. I use this software from now and than and you can record with a descent quality as well. 

[Pete_SMS]

Thanks for the comments and the link.

[Pete_SMS]

Hi,

 

Here it is, the video showing the floatplane docking. I am not overly happy with the video and sound quality, but it was a compromise between quality and file size. I hope you enjoy what you see.

 

Have a wonderful evening!

 

[Panman]

Ready to purchase!  Looking forward to a lot of flight time and a lot of docking.  Very cool feature!

[AtomicFrawg]

Hello Pete. If you need help promoting with Live video, I would be happy to help. I cant wait to fly this plane on PilotEdge and on my show.

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 27

 

Hello,

 

I hope you all had a great Sunday so far. Mine was very busy with X-Plane work. As usual during the last weeks.  

 

So I uploaded my first video this week and I am glad that you liked it, even the video quality and sound was not 100% to my liking, but I guess you could work around that.  Now I have a new scree capture software and I am more happy with the video quality and sound quality now. So I guess you will see more videos in the coming months. For sure you will see one next week again. I was not able to do it for today, but I am ure you will be happy to get more info during the week as well, right?

 

I could list again so many things, because I did a lot this week. Mainly fixing and improving things which were discovered by me and the beta team. So I would say that I am very close to the technical freeze now. Technical freeze means that no changes will be done to the technical product anymore and it will be frozen for the initial release. After that only the documentation is missing.

 

Work on the documentation started already and I expect the technical freeze around Tuesday or Wednesday. Most probably you won't get a huge POH for the initial release, but you will get everything you need to safely operate the Beaver and to fly her as she should be flown. More doc stuff will for sure come down the road.

 

So just a few highlights from this week:

 

- Continued my work with DreamEngine and added more sounds. All this adds a lot to the immersion and even if it is already great at this point, there is more to come in the future. 

- Improvement done for the amphibious version. Especially ground handling needed some attention, but all good now.

- Added and tuned all malfucntions which are caused by not operating the engine and aircraft within limits.

- Added two more views. I figured that it might be hard to see/reach the engine primer, when you don't use head tracking. I added a special view which helps to operate the primer and you for sure need to operate it.  The other view zooms in to the trim controls, if you want to see where the trim positions are.

- Did a lot of work on my own engine model again, and payed attention to all phases the engine can operate in (off, startup, running, shutdown). The code got kinda complex in the end, but is working great now. Also the sync with sounds is done.

 

I probably missed again a few things to mention, but just because I did so much this week again. All I can say now is that she is almost technically ready and the release is really around the corner. 

 

Last Sunday I said, that I would like to talk a bit about the future of the Beaver and my plans with it. While I will not talk about everything, I will say, that development does not stop with the release. There is more to come and not just bug fixes. That doesn't mean that something is missing now. What I want to say is that there will be more to come in the future. 

 

You know, I don't want the Beaver to be just another aircraft in you virtual hangar, besides 20 others. My goal is to give you an aircraft that you want to fly over and over again, because you like it so much and because it puts a smile on your face. I want to give this amazing aircraft a soul and I really hope that you will feels this when you fly her for the first time and when there is more for her in the future.

 

If you are into bush flying like me and enjoy the magic and true adventure of flying, then you will enjoy what there is to come. 

 

Stay tuned and have a look out for the video next week.

 

Have a wonderful day! 

[Xflyboy]

Thanks for the update Pete... the wait is a killer

[Pete_SMS]

...and here a new video 

 

[azpilot]

Excellent worn VC textures and sounds.  

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 28

 

Hi there,

 

So, I guess everybody was thinking or at least hoping that today is the day and honestly, today was the planned day, since I talked about a release in May. 

 

Well, the last week has been very hard work, because I had to iron out a few important things things and lso had to re-code my CHT and Oil temperature simulation, as I was not happy with it after discovering a strange behaviour. This whole thing ate up more time that planned and I also had to do some last minute implementations. I guess it is like that. Therefore, I have to apologize, that I spet more time on this stuff, but it was necessary.

 

However, the Beaver is now technically frozen. That means that I won't do any further changes, and won't introduce any new things for the initial release anymore. Unless, the beta team picks up a show stopper, but so far all looks good with the release version 

 

The part missing is documentation and I decided to put together a minimal set of documentation. However, this set of documentation will allow you to safely operate the Beaver and you will get an explanation for everything in the cockpit and what it does. Of course I will give you performance numbers too.

 

Once the Beaver is in your hands, my work continues, implementing even more cool stuff, making the current things better and also give you a nice POH for the simulated Beaver. 

 

I said it before and you know it by now. The release of the Beaver will just be the beginning of a journey and I am looking forward to go on that journey with you all.

 

So having said all that, I guess you know that the Beaver is on short final and close to touchdown. Just give me a few more days, and I am not talking about a week 

 

You can also expect a video shortly after this post. It is uploading at the moment. In this video I will show the different views and options you can select via the menu's and you will also hear that beautiful R-985 engine again 

 

Have a wonderful Sunday!

[Pete_SMS]

[Xflyboy]

The plane has been released over at the ORG. for those interested.

[Hueyman]

Just waiting it's been released on X-Aviation, will never ever give the organization a single penny again.

[Goran_M]

Just waiting it's been released on X-Aviation, will never ever give the organization a single penny again.

 

Try to make your purchases with the developer and the product in mind.  Supporting developers supports the hobby and the community.  

Peter has worked extremely hard on this project, for almost 4 years.  Going by the screenshots in this entire thread, I'd say it's worth it.  Regardless which store it's in.

Edited June 6, 2015 by Goran_M

[Hueyman]

So you mean it won't be sold here ?

 

Cheers,

Hueyman

[Goran_M]

Doubtful. It's made with SASL. SASL is exclusive to x-plane.org.

[Cameron]

Doubtful. It's made with SASL. SASL is exclusive to x-plane.org.

I believe Pete made mention through development he's using his own framework in C.

[Goran_M]

Combination of C and SASL(?)

"SASL plug-in enhanced flight model and systems,"

[Cameron]

Interesting. Would love to hear Pete's reasoning on this. Surely this could have all been done in C given his knowledge. Or did you scrap the C approach all together, Pete?

[Pete_SMS]

Hi Goran,

 

Thank you for your reply!

 

I also want to comment on SASL. Well, SASL is not exclusive for the org. I can sell wherever I like and a few other developers using SASL, like Carenado, do so. 

 

When I started with the development I built myself a C++ framework, but switched to SASL along the way. I even made a post about that on this forum about 1.5 years ago. 

 

You can read it here. 

[ointment]

She's amazing, Pete!!  Thanks for this sweet addition to our X-Plane world!  Just flew her on PilotEdge with no issues whatsoever….well….other than nosing over on landing at Big Bear Lake!  Doh!!!