Leaderboard

Hi all. This COVID thing has affected my employment and sent me in a different direction.....full time back on X-Plane! (note...I work on more than just the 737 though) We are working on the update every day as of late; however, we are still going to wait for some 11.50 stability before we release. In the meantime, we're cleaning up things we feel we can without putting the plane in the hangar with the major renovations like the FMS/holds/VNAV. We are back in the FMS code somewhat though and have made the coroutes loading more robust. We will be including that folder in our update so as to not cause confusion, but we also now support about 6 flight plan formats, X-Plane 10/11 (*.fms), PMDG and Quality Wings (*.rte), X-FMC (*.fpl), FSX (*.pln) and AirbusX (*.flp). Like the real FMS, if a waypoint can't be located because of database incompatibilities with the flight plan, then the FMS loads what it can until encountering such a point and then provides the message, "PARTIAL ROUTE LOADED". I was testing this code with random format downloads from Flight plan database...and nearly all of those flight plans contain out of date data, so getting the FMS to load a full route was a challenge. I had to go in and hand edit the flight plan files to 'up-to-date' data. Once done though, they can be saved through the FMS as before. These coroute. loaders do not load SIDs/STARS, only the enroute portions, which is typical. As time goes on, I'll continue to work on improving the route editing, which will have applicability for the holds and eventual "in air" vnav entries. More to follow as we get closer to our release point. -tkyler

Hello all. I have not been able to get onto the FMOD sound conversions as of yet for personal reasons; however, things have transpired during the reorganization process such that we are now maintaining two development branches. A longer term branch which will use the new XP11 navdata I've written about above, with revised FMS and we'll also maintain a "now" branch which we'll use to make compatibility patches and small fixes as able until the major revision comes out. The 'now' branch is a combination of our current FMS code base, but with the new 3D development pipeline....and juxtaposing those two elements has been the focus over the last few weeks. As many have noted, this tact will allow us to not have to wait for "big ticket' items like the FMS/FMOD conversions in order to get the smaller improvements to the current product. Until we finished our "pipeline renovation" though, this wasn't as easy as it sounded. We have begun flight testing again and making tweaks to the flight model as X-Plane updates come out. In particular, we are working with the 'experimental' flight model in version 11.41+ as we feel that will become the norm. In addition, we have XP 11.5+ test builds so we can test the Vulkan and Metal graphics also. The plan now is to get a XPlane compatibility update out asap, with scroll wheel support. This patch will have small fixes for the exterior lighting/MCP issue and flight dynamics etc. After that, we'll resume our development in earnest. -tkyler

Please don't change the engine and environmental sounds as they are the best of any airliner in X-plane and please don't reduce the frame rates in Vulcan. keep up the great work it's most appreciated. Steve

It should also be noted that running with maximum uncompressed textures offers no benefit at greatly increased memory usage.

Sneak peak - new material for throttles:

So this is a heads up that it might go quiet for a few weeks. Not because we're not working on it, we definitely are, but the conversion of sounds to FMOD is going to be a very intense task. We wrote our own sound engine before X-Plane adopted FMOD....and our system is quite versatile and very quick to add sounds in code, but its also based on OpenAL, which is going away in XPlane 12 IIRC. Now we could probably distribute an openAL DLL as a solution; however, that is probably asking for more trouble trying to play alongside X-Plane's FMOD sandbox....so we might as well tough-it-up and make the change. We have over 1400 lines of code that control various sounds in the sim...and we have to go through each of these situations, audit the behaviors and then port that behavior to FMOD...probably having to write new code just to drive the FMOD inputs. In the same way we ported the 3D, we will chip away each day on this task until its done and report back as we progress. -tkyler

Conversion of all 3D to the new toolchain is complete and we have exported out all of the 737 objects from the new version of Blender. Jan and I will begin testing the functionality to see what I may have missed in the conversion as I had to hand-edit an enormous volume of elements to prep it for the conversion software. Next up is converting the sounds. The attached screenshot shows a "quickie adjustment" I made to test drive the 3D update process......about 15 minutes of fooling around in Blender to see how quick I could make an update to the 3D with the new toolchain. (I know, the circle isn't perfectly round....but it was only 15 minutes) -tkyler

So the following screenshot tells two stories. 1). We have almost completed the conversion of all 3D assets to to the new Toolchain. Two assets remain and I'll probably knock that out over the weekend. The second story....is that with the upgrading of our assets, we finally have a workflow between 3D and Substance Painter® for texturing....in this screenshot the glare shield has a bit of a texture to it, nothing major, but adds to the immersion that's so important to us. We'll be able to start sharpening up several 3D elements that are a bit low-res by todays standards. The roadmap after this 3D conversion is to then convert the sounds to FMOD, upgrade the 3D a bit, including a revised cabin and working doors and make any adjustments required by the X-Plane flight model itself for stability and we'll probably put out an update then. Then I'll move back to the FMS to finish up my integration of the XP1100 data format and get the holds integrated, the VNAV cleaned up and several other FMS polish work. -tkyler

Hi, Was watching some of Q8Pilot's video's on youtube, one of which featured the mighty Saab.. Gave me a bit of inspiration so gave tutorial video making a go. Have to admit, it's nothing flash, just a one clip take of start, takeoff and an ILS for beginners. Any comments or suggestions for other videos appreciated. Think I may have waffled on a bit, hope my voice isn't too annoying

Been working on some shorter sequences instead of the initial marathon. Introduction to vertical profiles and visual circuit.

Turn off the option "show vertices" in the IXEG side-bar menu. Cheers, Jan