Leaderboard

Taken from an email I received from 1 of the pilots with regards to this very thing. I asked him what the frequent, high pitched whine was in 1 of the videos I got from him. "That's the Saab mating call. It's the hydraulic pump kicking on because he's using nose wheel steering and brakes. Pressure dropped below 2100psi on Main Accumulator with Hydraulic Pump Switch in Auto Mode. Shuts off at 2900psi. I remembered a bunch of Saabs parked out on the ramp with external power plugged in and they would "talk" to each other." Followed by: "The hydraulic pump comes on any time with external power or 28v generators operating, or in Override. Frequency of it coming on depended on how "leaky" system was. On ground with engines off and external power plugged in, the pump would come on about every 10-20 minutes. Comes on during every aircraft power up if it sat for a while. I imagine that would be interesting to simulate. Pressure cycling below 2100psi every 20 min on ground and higher frequency with more hydraulic usage." Can you confirm the time is actually 20 seconds, or is it actually longer? I ran the Saab on my installation, and it is nowhere near 20 second intervals between hydraulic pressurizations. If it IS 20 seconds between pressurization, then that would be a serious issue that we would need to look into.

Major Update: March 20th, 2016 Happy spring! I have some good news. And I have some news that I know a lot of the X-Plane community, with their mentality, will consider bad news. Let's begin. I had a lengthy conversation with my partner in crime (who does all the original imagery editing and the FSX/P3D scenery), discussing the future of Hawaii Photoreal, as Molokai is nearing completion and Maui will be around three times the work of completing Molokai. As some of you know, for Flight Simulator and Prepare3D, there is a plus version that includes seasonal textures and autogen. Starting with Molokai and continuing for all islands except Kauai when we get there (and Lanai since it only needs updating), there will be a plus version. Our (X-Plane) plus version is very, very different than their (FSX) plus version. Below is a list of things each version includes (this might change in the future). What the heck is plus and how is it not payware? Well, plus is sort of like payware. Only we offer nearly the same product for free. If you donate around $15 you will get all the islands in their "plus" versions. If you're going to complain that we might as well make it payware, no, we mightn't. If you are complaining that the price per island that it ends up working out to is too high, then you clearly haven't donated. I can say for a fact that the number of people who have donated to Hawaii Photoreal this year can be counted on one hand, and I would still have enough fingers to eat my potato chips. Donations motivate like you wouldn't believe. Molokai wasn't going anywhere until we got a few donations. Currently most donations come from the FSX/P3D end of things - which is fine since we only have three islands available for X-Plane. Something discuss between myself and my partner is the different mentality between the communities. His scenery pulls in about 1 donation per hundred thousand downloads. The X-Plane scenery pulls in one donation per... well, it doesn't. All in all, I don't feel like anyone even wants this work (minus like four or five people who constantly provide wonderful feedback). Plus will be a bit different from the old stuff and different even from the FSX stuff. In one regard, the plus will be better than the FSX scenery with 0.3m/1-foot imagery in and around airports. Also included will be pavement textures like those found on Lanai, and much improved at that. As mentioned before, MeshTool rewrites mesh without road data (who can blame it, it's not like it knows how), and with the plus version, we'll bring back the roads. It'll still look pretty sweet in the free version, but at night the island will be pretty dark without the flowing traffic. Seasonal textures, as mentioned in yesterday's post, will be included in the plus version. There will also be little bits and pieces only in the plus version - rainforest helipads, streetlights, select autogen, grass at airports - that isn't significant enough to be on the chart below but should still be noted. In conclusion, the free version is like buying the cheapest version of the car. You have to manually roll the windows, it doesn't have air conditioning and there is no chrome on the radio stack. Plus gives you all that. Kauai is a story for another time. If you can't spare $15 for an entire chain of islands, pick an (available) island that you really want the plus version of, shoot us an email and we'll see if we can accommodate you... or something. We're not trying to rip you off. Following table subject to change. Feature Free Plus Full 1M Orthophoto Coverage Yes Yes Full UHD Custom Mesh Yes Yes 3D Airports by George Keogh Yes Yes HD Airport Textures No Yes 0.3M Orthophotos around Airports No Yes Roads No Yes Seasonal Textures (Wet, Transition, Dry) No Yes

So here's what's happening. The Saab is still being worked on. Quite a bit of work in the programming department has already been done on it, as well as re-modeling and re-texturing some of the cockpit that was done in the 2nd half of last year. I'll post screenshots soon. DC-3 update is in the works. Mainly updates in code. Flight model has had a few changes made along with a few cosmetic changes and bug fixes The 747-200 and -400 are still moving forward but they are long term projects and a lot has been happening on those in recent months. Don't want to elaborate on that just yet. I really want to, and plan on finishing the Hawker 4000, but it will need quite a lot of programming and an FMC. I was almost prepared to just add some kind of basic FMC, but after talking to Cameron and Theo about it, we all agreed it needs to be done properly. So the Hawker 4000 is just on hold until we can get it programmed properly. So, after making a bunch of prop aircraft, and while Theo was busy texturing the DC-3, I had very little to do, so I started work on a Cessna Citation II sometime in November last year. It's quite far along now and shouldn't take much longer to finish.

Ok, here's a real report. In the last few days, we have seen very, very few gizmo crashes (from my bad programming) with regards to FMS work. There are a few fringe cases, but they are getting very tough to reproduce and usually come about when you start punching buttons like that kid in the movie, Airplane 2. ...stuff most of you would not do. In prep for the final steps before letting beta folks test it, I have refactored (programmer speak for "cleaned up") the code to be more user friendly towards VNAV predictions and debugging VNAV performance values......and that is what we are currently working on. If you don't plan to use VNAV, well I'm sorry, the FMS was ready for you a long time ago....but once you do learn it, and it actually works as expected, its quite satisfying and fun to experience....hence our efforts to really make it work. So tomorrow I'll be flying some test routes to fine tune the descent code....and if all goes well, we want to let the beta testing folks have a hand at it asap. I think Jan is planning a "full flight" preview, but no promises, I can't speak for him, he may not have plans for that. (no micro-management here). Now I know most folks automatically assume that once a closed 'beta' begins, that will uncover a slew of other bugs, which adds to the development time, but I have to tell you now...that I have NEVER seen a tester like Captain Jan Vogel! (He IS that kid from Airplane 2), except with 100x the knowledge (very dangerous). This guy finds stuff that nobody will EVER try. and when this guy says, "its good for V1.0", then I will challenge the beta guys to find something we don't already know about. Now note I said, "know about". We know there's holes in the FMS, but feel its getting to the point to handle a good 90+% (or better) of use cases. If you are that super hard-core simmer that likes to explore the fringes of FMS usage....well...I'd say, "fly some normal routes first or wait". Work continues daily! -tkyler

$15 for the finished product sounds like a very good deal to me. Look forward to purchasing the 'Plus' version when its ready!

That would need a 737-400 first - you're looking at a long, long way down the line, if at all from what I've heard...

Major Update: March 19th, 2016 First of all, I won't be using my donations from last month for overdue books at the UVIC Library. Got them in on time. But no one cares. This is what you do care about, though: Molokai will have seasonal textures.* *Eventually. The "Eventually" of this will only be an offset of a day or two as I will have to cut every single orthophoto tile a second time from its parent for the two available seasons, West and Dry (Winter Spring, Summer and Fall respectively). Below is an early look at the difference between the seasons. Something to note is the significance of these seasons on future islands (such as Maui and Hawaii), where snow at higher altitudes in the winter is fairly common (I have seen it myself and have in fact had plans cancelled due to a snow storm in Hawaii). On the left is dry, on the right is wet. The reefs for Wet have not yet been finished. As you will see in following pictures, the reefs for dry have been finished, but finished incorrectly. They need to change with the seasons too. SEASONS? IN X-PLANE? No, not really. It will require one of two things: the first would be for you to decide whether you want to fly in ugly Hawaii or lush, tropical Hawaii, the second would be installing SimpleSeasons (I'm currently experimenting with this). Anyways, here are a couple of more shots of summer only shots with wet reefs. Wet reefs. Okay, wet season reefs. Reefs are always wet. In the dry seasons, however, there isn't as much runoff, meaning that the reefs can chance in appearance due to that and also changing temperatures. Science aside, the change just looks cool and that's mostly why I care about it. Something to note is that I have severely darkened the water around Hawaii using the water.lua script that I picked up somewhere along the way, and I have no idea where it's from but I will try to find out so that I can actually have custom water colours by the time we get to Maui. Bathymetry data has been destroyed by MeshTool, sadly. I'm experimenting with line files to draw the gradient in water colour change. Something else that was destroyed by MeshTool that I'm working hard to solve: roads. Because MeshTool only works with elevation data, it therefore redraws everything... without roads. With the help of St. Andras himself, I will hopefully be able to bring back road data that will bring the highways and dirt tracks of Molokai alive with blinking lights of traffic (not to be confused with traffic lights, of which there are none on this island). If there are any questions, please feel free to ask, although I have no idea how long an answer you really want to read because, as those who have asked in the past can confirm, I am not not particularly skilled at saying things quickly. And as always, please consider a donation. The $75 I received for the last two months is the biggest motivation I've gotten in this whole project (as sad as that sounds) and the main reason why Molokai went from being "barely moving" to "almost done" in a matter of weeks. Please visit the Hawaii Photoreal website to make a small but important donation to help this project along. Hawaii Photoreal/ FlightSim Jewels (FSX/P3D/XP10) FlightSim Jewels/Hawaii Photoreal

All due respect, Jan, but please don't question the abilities of Bill, Bob and Jebediah

I wasn't relating my post solely to the post you singled out... I'm not trying to moderate anything. and what did I do to receive this remark ? "Further discussion on this will NOT be had, and that's definitely my warning to you." *edit: feel free to respond in a private message, so we can keep the unrelated and non IXEG stuff to a minimum here

please stop playing big brother for the IXEG team... They might actually be willing to shed some light on it (as tkyler did a few posts later) I notice that I'm getting more and more irritated by the attitude you are showing from time to time... Most of the time questions like 'is it ready yet, when will it be released, how much will it cost' will sort out themselves. just save your moderator powers for when discussions really get out of hand. and for the IXEG Team: Keep it up guys, nearly there... I'll be cheering at the finish for you ! just my 2 cents

Poor little robobuddy. Such a push over

Please stop asking. You've already been told no.

The guy has asked me on Skype, in private message, and on here, as well as to other team members. He was told politely many times we were not seeking more beta testers. He's not asking for a progress update. I (or anyone) really didn't need you to chime back. No one was "moderated". I asked him to "please stop asking." Simple request. Don't blow this up. I'm now going to politely ask you to please discontinue any attempt to moderate or derail this topic. Further discussion on this will NOT be had, and that's definitely my warning to you.

Then your post had absolutely no business being in this topic. Back on topic, please. To all others: We have a pretty awesome product to discuss here! Let's keep it clean and on topic. Further posts like A121017's will be removed from the topic so as to keep this thread what it's really about. Nice screenshot Morten!