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The B737 Classic Project


Morten XPFW

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi everyone,

 

Work continues - as a matter of fact development speed has increased again over the last few days. There is really nothing big to reveal, on one end we are adressing the roughly 30 issues and remaining items we have, on the other hand we are fighting the uphill battle with the FMS routing structure.

 

Before release there is also the documentation to be done - most of the content is there, it just needs streamlining and editing.

 

Just last night we have improved the APU operation. We now have a moving air-inlet door, the FADEC will wait until the door is open before it engages the starter, and the APU can also be shut down with the firehandle or by switching off the battery bus - in that case the APU inlet door will stay open, though.

 

A funny thing happened when testing the new behaviour - with repeated APU starts and insufficient time for battery recharge in-between, two of us have accidentially depleted the airplane battery. We initially thought we found a bug, as you couldn´t even connect the ground power anymore!

But it turns out the behaviour of our simulation is correct, because without sufficient battery voltage you can not even close the relays to connect electrical ground power. This does happen in the real aircraft, too - if a pilot, eager to get to the hotel, forgets to properly shut down the aircraft in the evening (battery switch off), the next crew in the morning might find a dead battery. The only way to get the aircraft going in that case is to connect a DC source to the external DC connector. laugh.png .

 

We also worked on improving the GUI - up to now we had to go through the plugins menu to access preference or setup menus, now we have a state-of-the art sidebar that you can get to by bumping your mouse on the left edge of the screen.

 

Some menus (ground and cabin-crew interaction) can also be triggered by following real procedures (selecting the correct interphone channel, enabling receive volume, toggling interphone or radio push-to-talk switch), but if you don´t feel like that, just use the nifty sidebar-menu.

 

Our menu interface will be fairly spartanic, for example the "preflight" one will allow you to pick three states (cold and dark, turnaround, ready to fly), and specify zero-fuel-weight + CG and fuel distribution.

We decided against some more elaborate "seat plan" where you can click on every single seat to place/remove a passenger. It would take too much time to make, novelty of it would wear off after using it once or twice, and really in the end all the real pilot cares about is the weight and the center of gravity.

 

There will also be no "real time" boarding and deboarding of passengers, this is something that is very hard to get believable without actual 3D people moving onto the aircraft, which to my knowledge hasn´t been done totally believable on any flight-simulation to date.

We do realistic fueling times (if the user chooses so), but weight adjustments (loading/unloading) is instantaneous. If you want to roleplay, use a stopwatch and a figure of roughly 5 passengers( = 500kg or 1100 lbs) per minute tongue.png .

 

With development speeding up again, I expect to start posting some more content and dev-blog type info more regularly.

 

Jan

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Current livery list is below.  More will be made and we also will provide a paint kit

so you easily can make your own favorite.  :) But at the moment first priority on getting

the aircraft ready for release.

 

Air France

Air Italy

America West

British Airways

Condor

Delta (retro)

Iberia

Linjeflyg

Lufthansa

Lufthansa (retro)

Norwegian

SAS Scandinavian

Transaero

United

US Air

Varig

IXEG
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Current livery list is below.  More will be made and we also will provide a paint kit
so you easily can make your own favorite.  :) But at the moment first priority on getting
the aircraft ready for release.
 
Air France
Air Italy
America West
British Airways
Condor
Delta (retro)
Iberia
Linjeflyg
Lufthansa
Lufthansa (retro)
Norwegian
SAS Scandinavian
Transaero
United
US Air
Varig
IXEG

 

Glad you've included Air France. I'm sold.  ;)

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Time for another short update - we have actually been really busy this last week, we squashed a bunch of bugs, and also added some detail. There was a total of 37 new revisions to our internal update system.

 

Just today we fixed the yaw damper. Its behaviour is a bit curious, as it will stop working when it looses B hydraulic pressure, but the switch won´t drop to off, and the OFF light won´t go on! If you turn off the B flight-controls, it will revert to off immediately. And if it looses power, it will also go off, but only after a 2 second delay!

 

This is the kind of detail that is keeping us busy these days. We also worked on stabilizing our GUI interface, you can see it at work in the little video I show you below.

 

I am currently scrutinizing the electrical system, we want to make sure that everything is working just as the real thing - and even with a book in my hand its not always easy. The electrical system is quite complex, Boing has it very well thought out, and somehow electricity always gets to where it´s needed tongue.png . I can´t tell you how often I thought I found a bug, only to find out that some relay opens and reroutes power halfway across the whole diagram. The whole system is a work of art, and we strive to reproduce that as close as possible.

 

 

The video is about the dreaded TR3 disconnect relay. Few pilots REALLY know the electrical system down to the last detail, its complex and there is really no need. Tom did a great job on getting every relay and diode working right, and with modeling this TR3 disconnect relay he is really polishing it to perfection.

 

The TR3 disconnect relay (also known as R9) is a favourite with instructors, as it packs a mean punch just when you thought you are home safe. If transfer bus 1 fails, not a whole lot will happen. The important DC Bus 1 gets power from the "other side" of the system through the TR3 disconnect relay.

But when the autopilot or flight-director captures the glideslope, the relay will open and DC Bus 1 will loose power. And that one has some important users attached to it, like the auto-throttle, anti-skid, anti-ice for engine 1, etc...

 

 

Stay tuned...

 

Jan

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi everyone,

 

we are alive and kicking. The last weeks have been a flurry of activity. We are still in bug-hunting and polishing mode, with the FMC being the last big thing on the "to do list". No ETA, but several months to get that one up to speed, probably.

 

Just a short list of issues adressed and fixed these days:

 

  • Fixed bug where autothrottle would enter N1 mode during FL CHG descent if user propelled airplane aloft with local map
  • refined AFCS logic when changing pitch modes, to always correctly retain speed assignment
  • fixed a crash bug when shutting down or starting up engines if randomly assigned "engine age" reached extreme values
  • fixed computational problem at extreme thrust settings which made thrust fluctuate
  • fixed a problem with user preference not being saved between sessions
  • tuned and improved starting behaviour of engines and APU to more closely mimick real life
  • fixed takeoff config warning to sound for all flap settings, except 1, 5 and 15
  • fixed the overheat test button for the wing-body-overheat to stop making repetitive sound
  • fixed the wing-body-overheat warning triggering the wrong master caution field
  • changed autopilot to also disconnect in case of electric stab trim, moving AP trim switches to cutout or moving EFIS/IRS transfer switches
  • fixed cabin altitude behaviour for going into safety-relief-valve mode during climb and then being stuck in that mode
  • fixed auto mode of pressure controller to honour maximum press differential of 8.0psi if flying above set FLT ALT
  • fixed PASS OXY ON behaviour to trigger manual or automatically (14.000feet CA), a one-shot device (light stays lit)
  • and several other small fixes and refinements

 

I will try to shoot a short video for your viewing pleasure later on - might be Saturday night before I get to it, though.

 

Jan

 

Just two new liveries that Morten made:

 

post-3933-0-59639500-1412361784_thumb.jp

 

post-3933-0-47197300-1412361795_thumb.jp

 

Edited by Litjan
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