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It's here! http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php/files/file/347-piaggio-p180-avanti-ii-upgrade/ Go and get it!

I also agree with this, I was pretty stupid to think a thing like this, I just bought the crj last night, and I now know why it costs that much, it's awesome!!!!!

Most people don't jack...they just think we're all jerks by nature here For those curious as to the x-pilot split from the org, read on for my version of the story. Those not interested probably are the better for it. This is just written history so my fingers and mind can stay busy while I break from dev work. I think there are multiple factors that led to the split but I'd say it all started with the MU2 and it's related development of manipulators. Manipulators were new at the time, no tools existed for aircraft authors to implement manipulators and they had to be done so by hand, not really practical at all. The MU2 had about 70+ of them and I could easily spend 2 hours hand editing the exported object...and I was exporting every 10 minutes or so during final tweaking. It was ridiculous and obscenely annoying. This meant that x-plane add-on aircraft had no 3D interactivity and limited animations. So imagine me with this vision of a nice aircraft, interactive in 3D like FSX stuff and no way to realize that vision due to lack of tools. Marginal, the author of the blender scripts did not support manipulators and had seem to have disappeared from the community so we were all kind of in limbo. I forged ahead and begun talks/negotiations with Nicolas about selling on the org while still working out the manipulator delimma with Ben Russell and we eventually came up with a rough manipulator framework in blender. Now let me tangent for a second... I have always believed that were all add-ons equal in FSX and X-Plane, that a user would prefer x-plane to its rendering quality and smoothness. The problem is that things were not equal....FSX has 10x the addons and the market share. So the only way to get my beloved x-plane to that same level of support was simply to get more people to look at x-plane. If x-plane had low quality...and no features that FSX had, why in the world would anybody want x-plane? This posed a problem. It was my singular goal with the MU2 to send a message to the FSX community saying, "look what x-plane CAN do" and get more people to look at x-plane. Recall at this time that FSX had not been cancelled so we were going up against a juggernaut and needed every advantage that we could get. So I made what I believed to be a nice product, comparable to some decent stuff in FSX, wrapped it nice, wrote a nice manual. Ok, back from the tangent. while negotiating with Nicolas, I observed a couple of things and interpreted them thusly. 1.) He wasn't very professional in his communications. His replies were untimely, never answered my questions directly and were generally evasive. I took a more direct approach by asking more direct questions like: "How often do you pay? What forms of payment do you provide? Do you provide sales reports? How do you handle marketing?" and I would get back responses like, "We pay monthly, a lot of vendors are happy with it". I viewed this kind of as a "I'm the only game in town, you do things the way I want you to do them"....and well, I didn't like that. I would be bringing HIM money and expected a bit of service. His market share alone wasn't enough, it wasn't all about the immediate quick cash flow to me. For many developers I know that it is and that is still affecting the situation to this day IMO. Going with the org means quick up front money, but I still believe it comes at a higher cost in credibility....at least to FSX users and they are still the larger market and I don't think the org is helping the x-plane growth. Nicolas will say it is, growing quickly under his tenure, but his tenure happens to coincide with XP10 dev and FSX canellation. He may have had vision to see the potential growth, but he's definitely not responsible for it in any way. So, I also noticed that Nicolas was marketing stuff with a bit more hype than I found agreeable, almost deceitful IMO, claiming some of his products to be the "best of x-plane" as he still does to some extent, but not as much anymore. Well I could go on other forums and see folks say things like, ".......that's the best they got?" or they'd buy one of his products and immediately feel like they'd been duped by marketing. When they'd voice their displeasure on the org, both the user and their post would "disappear". All that was left was glowing reports and not "counter point". I definitely have a problem with that at a community I helped contribute to. So we began taking screenshots of these posts before they were wiped out and Nicolas has alluded to our "screenshots" as silly and childish....but it was our way to say, "hey man, we're not making this stuff up, Nicolas is burying people for speaking out" and the community is oblivious. It gave x-plane a bad image IMO. Sure there are people who feel they get equal value for their money but remember, I'm looking at growing x-plane and the FSX crowd looked at XP as a play toy. The only people who seem to think these were good values were x-plane fanboys who didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings or get banned. This wasn't the way to grow x-plane IMO......and is probably the philosophical base for our differences to this day. So here I am working on the MU2, an org member, no x-pilot yet.....I have these scripts with manipulator support thanks to Ben Russell, things are going south with Nicolas and he's started to become more and more gustapo on the org when people bash his stuff. They just "disappear" and nobody is the wiser. So I need a place to sell my MU2. So I call up Cameron who founded x-plane freeware at age 13 and has e-commerce programming experience. This guy is passionate and talented and good at what he does. He shared my ideas of promoting x-plane quality in a higher light than we felt the org was doing. As talented as Cameron is though, the task was ambitious to set up a new web store and Ben Russell completed our technological tri-fecta. The one thing we decided though was to not share our Blender scripts for a couple of reasons. 1.) We needed a competitive advantage in these early days of "market positioning" knowing the 1000lb Gorilla, x-plane.org was about to outcast and try and crush us and 2.) the scripts were (and still are) cryptic to implement manipulators. If we put them out, we'd have a plethora of users complaining on how to use them and overwhelming us with support, stealing our development time. The license was open source but only upon distribution. So by not distributing, we weren't violating anything. One person that really needed manipulator support though was Dan Klaue. He was working on his stuff but didn't have manipulator support and it really stalled his work. I later found out from him directly that he thought our hoarding of our own fork of scripts was way uncool and it .."upset him greatly". Dan was shaping up to be a staunch supporter of Nicolas and the org and this added to the emotional divide. Now I'm a good ol Texas boy as we'd say in the US, meaning I'm a simple "straight shooting" (says things very directly) kind of guy..... work hard, enjoy the fruits of my labor and don't ask anything of anybody...and I do love to share, my history on the org shows; however, I can't share if I'm not stable enough to survive. I looked at it as I "don't need to share YET, but the time will come that I want to very much".....and a topic for another day, the community here is about to find out that I have every intention of sharing, scripts and everything I've learned over the years using them......BUT I still have to survive and I do long to help and see a new level of shareware begin to take shape and watch people engaging in the hobby of development. Dan's attitude to me was one of, "give me your hard work (Ben Russells actually)". I might have, but philosophically, he was supporting someone who was engaging in really bad behavior in the banning of it's membership. Granted it was passively, I don't think he had any discussions with Nicolas about the matter and chose to keep to his blinders, thereby maintaining plausible deniability. Money was at stake though.....standing against Nicolas means loosing lots of money up front and it's not easy to walk away from without a hit to your pocketbook. To me, it's a tether around your neck though and you don't break from oppression with that technique though so to me it was just a matter of Dan choosing his side and living with the consequences of his choice, nothing more. I certainly have taken consequences from mine and that's just the way it is. Ok...so here we are, you have me with my MU2 and manips, not wanting to sell with Nicolas on one side......and you have Dan, already determined to support Nicolas on the other side.....and there was some animosity here....not by us so much. I had nothing to be angry about. I have my MU2, I have my manips, I have a store to sell on, I'm good to go. The one thing I did do though that really fueled the fire was I implicated Dan's work as inferior....NOT a good way to make friends, regardless of the truth. Now I didn't do it directly, never called Dan a bad developer, never explicitly said a piece of his work was bad, BUT I did point out technical areas that were deficient compared to the standard FSX users were used to. Dan's inevitable response was "why would you do such a thing"....and a very fair question to him. This was one of those difficult moments for me. I could 1.) Play nice and make sure everybody felt good.......while watching x-plane continue to grow slow because Nicolas called works like Dan's, "the very best of x-plane"....or I could stand up and say, "no, this is not the very best of x-plane". People's feelings hung in the balance and I chose to go my route. Selfish? possibly.....do I regret it? certainly not. I think there are a great many people out there who fully understand that exposure is paramount in marketing. It had to be done so I did it, knowing full well a lot of folks probably wouldn't be too comfortable. As long as I could get this message out, get x-plane add-on quality up a level through good old fashioned free-enterprise competition, then everybody would benefit. This was my only driving factor. Dan's work today is fantastic I think. He would probably agree that his work today is better than it was then and that he's learned more and has better resources. I am very happy for the work he is putting out. It does x-plane proud. so that was the environment right before the MU2 came out. Tensions were high because of my insinuations of inferior quality and Nicolas banning ways and we knew it was only a matter of time before we were out of there. So we kept our head low, built x-aviation and then built x-pilot as our inevitable forum outlet. So sure enough, the MU2 comes out, Nicolas finds out, shortly later, I'm banned, Cameron's banned, the MU2 is the first all 3D plane with manips and it gets some good reviews and lo and behold several people say the Mu2 is the reason they came to x-plane. I feel justified and vindicated...yet pretty much hated by many org members. Now don't forget that x-plane.org is STILL the 1000lb gorilla in the room and when a 1000lb gorilla gets upset, you go into defense mode real quick. Every time we got attacked (always passively with deleted posts by members or a banning of a x-aviation supporter), we counter-attacked. Everything we did on our end we felt was defensive only, BUT we were the more aggressive publicly as that's all we had....if we played on the org playing field, we'd be wiped out. Product quality and freedom of speech is all we had at the time, one thing Nicolas doesn't quite subscribe to. Nicolas used guerrilla tactics, we used bombs. Folks see what we do, they don't see what he does, he operates the org like a mob boss, in the shadows. Bad stuff gets done, but as long as no-one sees it, nobody knows. That continues to this day. For us here at x-pilot and x-aviation, the mission is the same. Show the FLIGHT SIM MARKET.....not just the x-plane market what x-plane is capable of and we'll all benefit. So as time passes, you see Dan get Sam256 involved and eventually Dan gets his scripts and manipulator support and things keep on rolling. By this time, we're going our separate ways back to back but there's still tension to this day, like North Korea and South. All we ever did was want to elevate x-plane's add-on image and quality outside the x-plane arena as this was the real flight sim market in our opinion and when we left the org, we got attacked and we came back very hard and aggressive verbally. This is why you see no apologies from us save one, from me to Dan for sweeping him up in our issues with Nicolas. Later on, the announcement of the changes in FSX changed the landscape in x-plane. I got picked up by Laminar and got caught up in that instead of doing more add-ons. In the time it took me to do the scenery and four aircraft, I might could have done two other add-ons, BUT I was forefront in XP10 tech and this was a bonus, I was help shaping methods that benefit all developers, for the org developers too. In the end, my path in all this will have a good community effect that has yet to be implemented. I plan to take all my knowledge, experience, evolution of the scripts, documentation and do video tutorials and written tutorials and teach folks how to develop high quality stuff in a hobby fashion for the community. Will this be detrimental to payware developers? Absolutely not in that payware level has gotten to demand a LOT of detail and time. What I'm looking to do is get folks making shareware like the King Air or Baron and possibly in an open source capacity where we can increase community involvement in a more "guild" style environment. Very nice stuff can be done with default tools and I for one think it would be cool to have a big download library of aircraft of the King Air and Baron level. We might implement this in a low cost subscription based environment which provides tremendous value for the dollar. As a parent of 3 kids in college, I have to take care of my family in order to have time to do anything for the community. In the end, all I want is higher quality in x-plane . I do not subscribe to the "everything for free" model though. I have always provided "some free...some not" to balance it out. I've taken for free and therefore feel the need to contribute some for free. At the end of the day, I am interested in a 1.) Vibrant community with great social interaction, mentorship, and culture of quality shareware development and 2.) Providing great value for the money whenever money is exchanged for anything I have a hand in. So that's where x-pilot came from in my version. It started with the Mu2 and my refusal to sell at the org because of what I perceived to be a strategy detrimental to x-plane growth. Cameron and Ben felt the same and we all headed out. In the separation, bad feelings ensued and this little settlement here is the result. Like the org though,in the end, we will go where the community lets us go. Best, Tom K Sorry for the ramble...but it was a good opportunity to spill since you asked Jack

File Name: Piaggio P.180 Avanti II (upgrade) File Submitter: airfighter File Submitted: 10 Jan 2013 File Category: General Aviation X-Plane Version(s): X-Plane 9 & 10 ATTENTION! VERSION 1.2.1 X-Plane 9 version have been added. VERSION 1.2 In this version are included the 3 fixes I have posted after v1.1 release (Mostly for X-Plane 10): -Landing light flickering. -A circle that appeared on FO PFD with HDR ON. -Added prefill object to improve frame rates (you should see improvement even up to 20%). Moreover, now when the aircraft is loaded, the displays are bright (HDR-ON). Also, in this version have been added realistic shadows to the panel when you turn on the cockpit light (the one below the AP panel). --------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------- Version 1.1 This version is more optimized for better performance of the low end machines. Features: Flight model within 10% of the real aircraft (as per manual) Autopilot operations as the real aircraft Many functions and screen indications are SASL driven X-Plane 10 64 bit full compatible Main landing gear object has added (was missing for XP10 in the previous version) Electronic checklist in MFD Real clock functions Engine indication turn red when limits exceeded UFMC and X-FMC config files are included. Those files have been adapted specially for this aircraft New 2-page checklist to be printed in a single sheet Updated Operating manual You can use now the condition levers and flap lever by mouse PAY ATTENTION: Use caution when using the throttles! As in the real aircraft, be advancing the throttles too full, torque limits can be exceeded by a lot! PLEASE: Any questions or problems post them to the forum for this aircraft. I'm visiting it daily so I can respond as quick as possible. At last, I want to THANK Tony Day, who, with his experience and work, helped me to make this aircraft as real as possible. ATTENTION TO ALL X-PLANE 10 USERS: When switching on the landing lights (LDG position), the lights might not come on, instead the will flicker. To fix that download the file below. https://www.dropbox.com/s/qac6wqsus2pwfl0/switches.lua.zip INSTALLATION: 1. Unzip the file. 2. Put the file to P180 Avanti II/Customs Avionics folder, and replace the previous file. 3. Go and test it. ---------------------------------------------------- After 7 months of work, finally is here! The Piaggio P.180 Avanti II. This is an upgrade of the original P.180 Avanti. Features:New full 3D glass cockpit with emulation of Proline 21 Avionics Suite. Most of the switches are operational Realistic cockpit lighting 170+ customs instruments Various operations driven by SASL scripts Compatibility with UFMC and X-FMC (config files are provided) Operating Manual Checklist It is designed for X-Plane 9, but it have been tested and performs very well in X-Plane 10 32-bit, with some minor issues. It is not recommended for X-Plane 10 64-bit. A detailed Operating Manual is provided. PLESE READ IT! Also, a standalone A5 size checklist is provided for printing. SPECIAL THANKS TO: Robert Pearson, for his permission to upgrade the P.180 Avanti (and the rest of the team, Massimo Durando and Sergio Santagada, for this beautiful aircraft) Vonhinx, for his help with SASL. Dan Klaue, his tutorials inspired me into creating aircraft for X-Plane, and now I creating aircrafts and I don't fly! (well, except testing!) My tools was Blender and Gimp. SUPPORT: At the forum: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php/topic/3467-piaggio-p180-avanti-ii-upgrade/ PLEASE: Before asking for support, READ THE MANUAL! KNOWN ISSUES:A "XFEED" annunciator, may indicate a problem with the plugin. By reloading the aircraft this is solved. In X-Plane 10, the rear legs of the landing gear are...transparent. This will be solved in the next release. In X-Plane 10, the cockpit during the night, with HDR OFF, is very bright. With HDR ON is ok. Since there is no available 64-bit SASL plugin, this aircraft will not work with 64-bit. FUTURE: At least one more version (1.1) will be released for X-Plane 9 and 10, solving any problems that will come up. A v 2.0 will be released later, when SASL 64-bit will be available and will have all the new features of the X-Plane 10. Click here to download this file

If you are interested in following the development of my PHNL, which will probably be released in a couple of months, follow this thread or just come back often to see screenshots. Sorry that this is yet another thread on PHNL, I just one that is actually consistent and has a proper title. Here is the first picture for this thread. That's a LOT of orthophotos... for ONE AIRPORT. If Cameron reads this, please feel free to delete my other threads, I won't take offense to it and I just want a nice clean start for development. And that is what it will look like from space. You're computer will probably crash and/or melt. Each of those tiles is 4096x4069. There are 74 tiles. Let's do the math... 4096 x 4096 x 74 = 1,241,513,984pixels The orthophotos will have to be downloaded separately as a zip file off of my own file server due to their 1.2GB size. These puppies are big enough to run without any custom runway or taxilines (of course I will add those, I'm just saying you can). Before this project gets any further I want to thank a bunch of random people: Cameron for this community. Chris K for inspiration and also the most necessary resources making all of my projects: orthophotos! Jayden B for asking for this airport (that doesn't mean other people can ask, this was a gift) The rest of the community for help, consultation (like modern art and such)... Anyways, it's bloody late here and I have three tests tomorrow. I'll add some screenshots tomorrow in the evening.

"Well, i had named the scenery zzzzz_HD_mesh so that it would be absolutely last in my custom scenery folder, but for some reason in the scenery_packs.ini it was inserted first, above all addon airports." When the scenery.ini file is created, it will order things alphabetically... but any subsequent scenery additions will be made to the top of the list. This is how it's designed to work right now. You did the right thing by cutting/pasting the info further down the list. Alternatively, you could have deleted the scenery.ini file to have it regenerate itself, in alphabetical order. -Greg

No it's used for spraying off the salt water of navy aircraft.

The second pix makes me think of a dead body outline for a Shorts aircraft.

Wow Kris! Thank a lot! Definitely it's a hard job and it needs a lot of patient. Needs a couple of things to be able to export correctly from Blender. First you have to put the io_xplane2blender folder into scripts/addons and enable it through user settings. Then go to scene and at X-Plane tab, Add X-Plane layers. At 1st layer put the name of cockpit object (KingAirC90B_cockpit.obj). Below select the textures for that object. Then every object you make must have a material. With that, you will be able to export correctly. But you need to know a few things, like obj file definitions. Here:http://scenery.x-plane.com/library.php?doc=obj8spec.php. I've made a lot of research on many things. I've watched thousands of hours of blender videos (CGCookie, BlenderGuru, BlenderNerds) and of course many times Dan Klaue's tutorials. All start and end at patient!

Practice

Thanks Tom, that was very interesting and I am supporting you all the way... Go get 'em!

Start tracing.....

or modern art.

Top one : arrestor cables for fighter jets. They practice "hitting the wire" using a non-floating-and-bobbing runway first. =)

awesome

OK, I thought this is cool and worth posting. We just got around to tying in the reversers to the hydraulics. There are 3 hydraulic sources: Engine power, Electric pump and a standby pump...each pump weaker than the next. Well how fast the reversers deploy is tied to how much hydraulic power is going into them. So the reversers will deploy nice and fast with the engine pumps. Not so fast with the electric pumps...and just downright slow with the standby pump. So lets say you have one systems down...the 'A' system on the left side. In this case, the left reverser won't deploy...not good on landing (sort of...the standby pump cuts on automatically under certain conditions but I'm making a point . You CAN; however, turn on the standby pump and use that to deploy the A reverser, BUT it will take a bit longer than the B (right) side so on touchdown, you'll have a bit of asymmetric thrust as you deploy the reversers until the slow reverser opens up fully....but only if you advance the throttles though. You could "pull into reverse"...wait a few extra seconds to let the slower side deploy, THEN crank back on the reverse throttle. If the standby system has to power both sides, then the extension time is doubly long.....almost such that you won't get significant reverse thrust till you're a good ways down the runway. You can play with the hydraulic switches, turn pumps on and off and see the reversers deploy at different rates. When I was testing it, I deployed the reversers, turned off system A....commanded the reversers closed and sat there for about 30 seconds staring at the reverser lock annunciator waiting for the other one to close before I realized I hadn't turned on the standby pump. very cool! Tom K Laminar / IXEG

to Nicolas : http://youtu.be/Y3utCntXrPo I'm in Paris and today, we're building a new one for you :

Nope. Not even close. Cameron is much more clever. He's probably cuter, too.

I got banned today (from all the forums in that .org place) for posting a question about 'it may be time to reconsider the screenshot size limitations (max of 120kb) in view of the hi-mesh scenery avaliable today, X10.20 capability, monitor resolutions, and inexpensive storage space available. I got blasted be the Administrator who say I should pay him $20,000 per month to do that because it cost him $30,000 per month for his current storage space. He sent that as a private message, so when I posted his response in the forum under open discussion, I got banned. No problem, I have spent many hundred of dollars their in their store and have a very high rating for my posts (over 350 likes in the past 2 yrs) so I don't mind leaving anyplace that has no concern for maintaining they good customers over something like that and not opening my suggestion for discussion. My post was locked and i was banned without further comment. Sad.. especialy for them considering all Austin's legal problems an need to retain customers. EDIT: To be fair I was off a decimal point. It should read $2,000 and $3,000 not $20,000 and $30,000 my typing mistake. I don't want this issue anymore but don't want to be critical of .org since I have been there so long. Their actual comment I add below for fairness.

It was originally intended for both V9 and V10, and quite a bit of work was done on it for V9, however, during the course of programming, it was discovered there were too may issues to overcome to make it for both versions and have it released in a reasonable timeframe. We also found more features in V10 that we could exploit that were not possible in V9. 64 bit being one of them. So we decided, unanimously, to make it for V10 only.