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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

Update 17/05/2015 This week had a chance to work on the manipulators and animations. Most of the instruments are ready, manipulators are there. Of course there is no fun without blender exporter bugs, so lots and lots of hours eaten up by fixing and figuring out WTF is going on So, the progress is there and it's still slow. But it's there

Hi Daikan, nice to see you still around on the forum. In this regards, nothing will change. You can still generate the scenery as before (i.e. building-footprints), it's just that it's becoming virtually impossible to create enough objects (without killing performance and my sanity) to render something like the below: This is a town near to where I live, and I've visited here a few times in real life. Comparing this to the OSM approach, this looks much more believable at both street level, and hovering over at 200ft in a helicopter.. but as already stated, the buildings don't exactly match the ground textures (Here it is unnoticeable because you can't actually see the ground textures). Unfortunately the more plausible the scenery the less accurate it is, and vice versa :-). If anyone can think up a way to get the buildings to match up exactly and not require thousands of models then please let me know :-). Simheaven released a facade only scenery using W2XP, so this is already possible. It improves performance somewhat and the buildings are more accurate, but the problem is they look like lego bricks and not very realistic and it puts lots of people off immediately. Facades work really well for industrial buildings, but fail when trying to render anything which has a slanted roof, etc.. Plus, to get accurate looking facades, you'd still need hundreds of different wall definitions and configurations to make it somewhat believable. Well that's actually what it's already doing to some extent. Industrial zones and tall buildings are still shown as before, but groups of buildings are grouped together and turned into autogen. The biggest problem I found is how does W2XP know that there are simply no buildings in a particular area or if there are buildings in real life but there is a lack of data. Either way, it can still be configured to render autogen similar to smart exclusions (i.e. Only in places where there is no data).

"Boing 777" boing boing boing Okay on a serious level, I would recommend that if that happens again in the future go into setting and disable hypoxia. This (as far as I know) will stop the screen from going black. You can then descend, solve the issue, and reenable hypoxia (very realistic... not). Or you could hope for the best and boing boing boing down onto the ground.