The Immortal DHC-2 Beaver

[ryancz]

That looks amazing!
Is that the new Stewart (CZST) airport?

[Pete_SMS]

Yes, that is the new Stewart and it is awesome!

[chaps]

I'm so envious , you get to fly into CZST with that awesome Beaver and we have to wait until March, sigh ;(. It's like waiting for Christmas all over again.

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 5

 

Hi all,

 

Another Sunday and another update. Just have to say that there will be no screenshots today, but I hope to show you more in the coming week. 

 

Even without any new screenshots to show, the last week has been pretty productive and I am happy with the progress.

 

The livery you saw in my last Sunday update got some final touches, like some paint on the horizontal tail. That was missing last week, but we got the Beaver in the paint shop again and now the livery is finished.

 

I continued on the animations and can say that the cockpit and interior is fully animated now. Some gauges are not driven by numbers yet, but they are showing the correct values if stimulated. The reason they are not driven by numbers yet is, that these will be driven by my own plug-in code. I could hook them up to some standard XP dataref's, but I am not going to do that, as most of the engine stuff is custom coded. 

 

Talking about sounds I can say, that all Beaver engine sounds (internal and external) are now available and they sound great. I will do some final touches and remixing over the coming weeks, but they are great already. Ground roll sound and wind is in place as well. The interior sounds, like the doors, pumping the flaps etc. will come a little later.

 

Finally, I can add that we are now working on the cockpit and cabin night lighting and I hope I can show some cool screenshots in the coming week.

 

So even without screenshots, I hope you enjoyed this update. 

[Pete_SMS]

OK...I have a screenshot and decided that I am going to show you a teaser for the cockpit lighting. 

 

[eaglewing7]

Now if only you could find a way to pipe in some AM radio through that ADF, I'd be in heaven.  

[Jakob Ludwig]

Very nice lighting. Kind off talking to me: Do you like more

Bety nice. Looking forward.

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 6

 

Hi all,

 

A new update today, however this week was a little slow. Lots of things going on besides X-Plane development, but there was progress.

 

Tuning of the cockpit lighting is still ongoing and you will see the current state in the screenshots below. Maybe the post lamps have to shine a little brighter on the panel, but this needs to be checked.

 

Some re-work on the external 3D model had to be done, because one of the animations did not work properly due to the mesh setup. However, this seemingly tiny change affected 4 obj files and was more work in the end than expected, but it is fixed now.

 

I also had a look into supporting external hardware like the Saitek switch panel, radio stack and the GoFlight equipment. I figured that XP is not really supported by this hardware and that one always needs a plugin to make it work, which is a pitty. I also got the impression that this external hardware works most of the time, if the developer of an add-on aircraft is using the standard XP datarefs and commands. Custom commands or datarefs always involves some extra work. 

 

Well, I try to support this as much as possible, but I won't limit myself to standard XP datarefs and commands, just to make external hardware work, because it would limit me in my development, because a lot of things will be custom without using XP standard. What I will do though is that I will provide a list of custom datarefs and commands and also what they are used for in the cockpit, so users will have the ability to customize the hardware plugin scripts from Sparker for example. 

 

I also did some coding, but it was more cleaning up a few things, because I like tidy and maintainable code. 

 

That's all for this week and I hope you like the following screenshots:

 

 

 

Edited January 12, 2014 by Pete_SMS

[Airbus]

Looks very nice Pete! 

[Hueyman]

This really make me wants to fly only by night and VOR to VOR with those nice little classic instrumentation !

 

Well done guys

[jetjerry]

Thanks again Pete for keeping us up to date on your progress.  She looks beautiful.

I do believe this will be my #1 bush plane.

[79carboy]

Wow, looks great. Keep up the good work

[Pete_SMS]

Thank you for the nice comments from last week!

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 7

 

Hi all,

 

Another Sunday again and another update. No screenshots today, because most of the things I did were code and sound related.

 

3D model:

A few minor changes and improvments had to be done on the external model, and I hope it can be called fixed and frozen now. 

 

Sound:

I played around with the engine sounds for some time and have tried to further improve them by tweaking and mixing them, and I am pretty happy with the results, but still not done.

 

Coding:

Last week I was talking about support for external hardware like the Saitek Swith Panel, GoFlight etc. I said that I try to support this hardware, but that I also don't want to limit myself to stadard X-Plane commands and datarefs. I had a further and deeper look into this and might have found a way to support it, even if I use a lot of custom stuff. I started to code it and a few tests were positive. However, it will take me another day or two to finsish this and then the Beaver will go to the test team to check this. Hopefully, I can make them happy. 

It's not pure aircrat development at the moment, but this kind of support is important for me as well.

 

So probably not super exciting news for today, but at least you know what I am doing. 

 

You all have a great Sunday!

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 8

 

Hi everybody,

 

Update Time and again no new pictures today. However, I hope I post a few before the next Sunday update. OK, what was going on this week....

 

A few things for the 3D model are and were still outstanding, but this will be no longer the case, hopefully by the end of the week. First thing was the prop texture and the the other was the pilot model. The prop texture is in place and the pilot is work in progress. So this is what I hope I can show during the next week.

 

Other than that, I am going through cockpit and cabin animations again, because I had to restrucutre quite a bit, due to the support of external hardware.

 

If the 3D is finished, two more liveries will be worked on and then all will be frozen. Then I will focus on the remaining technical part and I am looking forward to fully dive into it again. 

 

Stay tuned...even if you get bored by this update 

 

...better than nothing, isn't it?

[eaglewing7]

Good to hear that modelling is progressing.

 

You may have seen this manual before, but it could be of use to you for this model.

 

Here is a link, you can download the PDF:

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16541550/PWRadial.pdf

[Pete_SMS]

Thanks for the link eaglewing. I had this document already.

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 9

 

Hi everybody, not a really exciting update today. Our daughter was sick this week and we had VERY little sleep and this meant VERY little development time.

 

I hope I can make a mid week progress report with a few more updates. Otherwise you will get more next week. Hope you are not too disappointed after checking in to read some news.

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 10

 

Hi guys, thank you very much for your understanding. That is much appreciated. Still not a lot more news this week, as the situation continued into this week. 

 

However, I would like to show you who is sitting in the cockpit at the moment. I still need to tell him, that he shouldn't tan so much and he is wearing no headphones at the moment. I think finally he will accept my advice. 

 

I have to ask you to be patient with me again...

 

Here he is:

 

 

[Hueyman]

Why cannot he be black ?

[Jakob Ludwig]

He needs sunglasses... Really huge sunglasses...

[Pete_SMS]

Sunday Beaver Update 11

 

Things were a little slow again and actually I hate to make updates like these, but I also just don't wanna stop doing them, because I said that I will do them and at least I have a few things to talk about. 

 

3D Cockpit and Cabin:

The cockpit, animations and manipulators are almost bakc to a fully finished and working state, after I did a heavy re-work in order to support additional external hardware. I know this is kind of feature creep and it actually took me some tim, to come up with a suitable approach and then to re-work a lot of stuff. Maybe I should have decided against it, but on the other hand is was important. Final testing is still outstanding though, but I hope all will just work fine.

 

Sounds:

I worked a few hours on sound files this week as well, in order to have proper engine sounds. I had already a great base for the sounds, but I am in the process of improving them and I have to see what can be done and what can't. I am not using the XP standard sound engine, which gives kind of poor quality, and it also doesn't allow to use multiple sound files for the complete engine rpm range. Using a custom sound engine means that I have to prepare the files in a way that they make a smooth transition from one file to another and also that the fading and everything is OK. That means a lot of trying, tuning, tweaking. Kind of trial and error until it fits.

 

Plug-In code:

Another session of code clean up and optimization. I could also leave it in the current state, but I just can't stand "ugly" and repeating code. That's just me I guess. 

 

You all have a nice Sunday!

[hobofat]

I hate to make updates like these, but I also just don't wanna stop doing them

 

The updates are awesome! It's great being able to follow along. I also think it may help keep the obsessives from freaking out?

[Pete_SMS]

Thanks for the nice comment hobofat. This makes me smile! 

[Ntr09]

Thanks so much for putting extra effort into sounds! Bad sounds can spoil the whole thing for me sometimes. (*cough* DC-3 *cough*)

 

 

-NR