Pete_SMS

Dear Beaver and Bush Pilots, I really hope that you enjoy the last update of the Beaver which is mainly featuring the pure floats version and I wanted to let you know that the final patch for that update is around the corner. This version will then be used for the port to XP9. I know a lot of you bushies are waiting for the Beaver in XP9 and as promised, this is my next big goal to achieve before I do anything else, but I am also looking beyond that and wondering about the next step. You should get something valuable, something that is really enjoyable for you and I could sit here for days and weeks thinking about all the cool things for the Beaver and bush flying in general to give you that real sense of being there, accomplishment, involvement and flying for a purpose, BUT... How would you like it if YOU could have a say about what YOU are really missing, what YOUR biggest pain point is, what shortcoming YOU have always seen? If you want to have your say please consider filling out my questionnaire in the link below Have YOUR Say HERE The Survey I created a little survey where you can have your say. In there you will see a few questions and it shouldn't take you longer than a couple of minutes. However, if your time is really limited, only answering the first question would mean a lot to me. In that survey, I am also asking you for your contact information, but I wanted to highlight, that this is completely optional as well. I am not asking for this in order to collect email addresses or whatsoever. I would love to talk about your desires and deepen the conversation, because I am genuinely interested. If you are not happy with the email address, but still would like to get in touch, just let me know your "Nickname" and on which forum you are active with that name. I could then get in touch with you like that. One thing is very important for me: Please do NOT answer any of the survey questions in here. Of course I am interested in your answers, but I am also interested in unbiased answers and answering anything in here will influence the fresh mind of other people and this is not the goal here. So I would appreciate if you would do me the favor. The survey will run until November 15th, 2015 and the first 30 entries with a descriptive answer to Question 1 and contact information will receive a 50% off whatever product comes out of this. So Have YOUR say HERE Thanks a lot for your time in advance!

Dear Beaver Pilots, Just a small info as the Beaver update is around the corner. Below you will find a few screenshots of the next liveries you can expect and the Beaver with just floats attached to it. Hope you enjoy them.

Hi, I wanted to show you a WIP picture of the upcoming Beaver with pure floats. So no takeoffs from runways anymore and who needs one anyway? This Beaver version will be included in the official Beaver package and will be available with the next update, which should be there within the next two weeks. Liveries for the Floats Beaver will be the one below and one from Kenmore Hope you like it:

Hi there, This is a new livery for the DHC-2 Beaver, which will be included in the next release package, besides two more. The screenshots are showing the Clipper Aviation Beaver over Flensburg Germany.

Thanks a lot Cameron. I really appreciate that!

Hi Goran, Thank you for your reply! I also want to comment on SASL. Well, SASL is not exclusive for the org. I can sell wherever I like and a few other developers using SASL, like Carenado, do so. When I started with the development I built myself a C++ framework, but switched to SASL along the way. I even made a post about that on this forum about 1.5 years ago. You can read it here.

Sunday Beaver Update 28 Hi there, So, I guess everybody was thinking or at least hoping that today is the day and honestly, today was the planned day, since I talked about a release in May. Well, the last week has been very hard work, because I had to iron out a few important things things and lso had to re-code my CHT and Oil temperature simulation, as I was not happy with it after discovering a strange behaviour. This whole thing ate up more time that planned and I also had to do some last minute implementations. I guess it is like that. Therefore, I have to apologize, that I spet more time on this stuff, but it was necessary. However, the Beaver is now technically frozen. That means that I won't do any further changes, and won't introduce any new things for the initial release anymore. Unless, the beta team picks up a show stopper, but so far all looks good with the release version The part missing is documentation and I decided to put together a minimal set of documentation. However, this set of documentation will allow you to safely operate the Beaver and you will get an explanation for everything in the cockpit and what it does. Of course I will give you performance numbers too. Once the Beaver is in your hands, my work continues, implementing even more cool stuff, making the current things better and also give you a nice POH for the simulated Beaver. I said it before and you know it by now. The release of the Beaver will just be the beginning of a journey and I am looking forward to go on that journey with you all. So having said all that, I guess you know that the Beaver is on short final and close to touchdown. Just give me a few more days, and I am not talking about a week You can also expect a video shortly after this post. It is uploading at the moment. In this video I will show the different views and options you can select via the menu's and you will also hear that beautiful R-985 engine again Have a wonderful Sunday!

...and here a new video

Sunday Beaver Update 27 Hello, I hope you all had a great Sunday so far. Mine was very busy with X-Plane work. As usual during the last weeks. So I uploaded my first video this week and I am glad that you liked it, even the video quality and sound was not 100% to my liking, but I guess you could work around that. Now I have a new scree capture software and I am more happy with the video quality and sound quality now. So I guess you will see more videos in the coming months. For sure you will see one next week again. I was not able to do it for today, but I am ure you will be happy to get more info during the week as well, right? I could list again so many things, because I did a lot this week. Mainly fixing and improving things which were discovered by me and the beta team. So I would say that I am very close to the technical freeze now. Technical freeze means that no changes will be done to the technical product anymore and it will be frozen for the initial release. After that only the documentation is missing. Work on the documentation started already and I expect the technical freeze around Tuesday or Wednesday. Most probably you won't get a huge POH for the initial release, but you will get everything you need to safely operate the Beaver and to fly her as she should be flown. More doc stuff will for sure come down the road. So just a few highlights from this week: - Continued my work with DreamEngine and added more sounds. All this adds a lot to the immersion and even if it is already great at this point, there is more to come in the future. - Improvement done for the amphibious version. Especially ground handling needed some attention, but all good now. - Added and tuned all malfucntions which are caused by not operating the engine and aircraft within limits. - Added two more views. I figured that it might be hard to see/reach the engine primer, when you don't use head tracking. I added a special view which helps to operate the primer and you for sure need to operate it. The other view zooms in to the trim controls, if you want to see where the trim positions are. - Did a lot of work on my own engine model again, and payed attention to all phases the engine can operate in (off, startup, running, shutdown). The code got kinda complex in the end, but is working great now. Also the sync with sounds is done. I probably missed again a few things to mention, but just because I did so much this week again. All I can say now is that she is almost technically ready and the release is really around the corner. Last Sunday I said, that I would like to talk a bit about the future of the Beaver and my plans with it. While I will not talk about everything, I will say, that development does not stop with the release. There is more to come and not just bug fixes. That doesn't mean that something is missing now. What I want to say is that there will be more to come in the future. You know, I don't want the Beaver to be just another aircraft in you virtual hangar, besides 20 others. My goal is to give you an aircraft that you want to fly over and over again, because you like it so much and because it puts a smile on your face. I want to give this amazing aircraft a soul and I really hope that you will feels this when you fly her for the first time and when there is more for her in the future. If you are into bush flying like me and enjoy the magic and true adventure of flying, then you will enjoy what there is to come. Stay tuned and have a look out for the video next week. Have a wonderful day!

Hi, Here it is, the video showing the floatplane docking. I am not overly happy with the video and sound quality, but it was a compromise between quality and file size. I hope you enjoy what you see. Have a wonderful evening!

Thanks for the comments and the link.

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

Sunday Beaver Update 25 It is Sunday and time for another update and I have to say that it was a busy week. There were a lot of things I was working on this week and I was jumping back and forth between topics really. I am not mentioning the nitty gritty details of everything I did, but I will highlight a few things. Okay, here they come: I continued my work on my Engine model and specifically on the CHT and Oil Temperature model. These are not driven by X-Plane default anymore, as I have my own plugin code for that and can tune it as I like. I am pretty happy now. Maybe a few tweaks here and there, but in general O consider it as finished, for now. That doesn't mean that I won't spend time on it again in a future update, if necessary. The engine behaviour, in case you abuse the engine, is working fine too. Then work continued on sound. This time my focus was on engine sound. So far I used the standard X-Plane way, which means that you use one engine sound file for the full RPM range. Actually, it wasn't all that bad, but since I have sound recordings for 5 different power settings, I want to make full use of this of course. I started on this already in the past, went back to default, and now I am back using everything I have and it sounds really nice! The XP9 Beaver got some attention as well. I am happy to report that she is now also flying in XP9. Well, there is still a good amount of work ahead, in order to make her behave like the XP10 version, but I am very satisfied with the progress I made this week. Yes, I know it is crazy that I am working on the XP9 version, while the XP10 release is around the corner, but that is just me. No pictures for today, as I was mainly working on things that can't be shown off really. So now I would like to talk about the feature I mentioned in my last Sunday Updates. The feature that bush pilots, especially those using floats, will like. I will call it "Floatplane Docking". Using this feature allows you to do the following: - when your taxi speed on water is below 5 mph, you will be able to enable "Floatplane Docking" and this will tie down the aircraft to that location, which means that it is not changing position anymore. However, it will of course continue to bob in the waves. - when you are in "Floatplane Docking", you can push the aircraft naturally back and forth, left and right and you can rotate it around its vertical axis. So just like the things you can do in realy life. I scenario would look like the following. You land on water and taxi to the dock. That dock is often not a "hard" object and that means that you will just slide through it, which is killing the immersion factor. Or sometimes it is setup in a way that you can easily end up in a crash condition, which is also not realistic and fun. So here you come. You taxi to the dock and when you are close to it, you cut the engine and glide towards it with the remaining energy. When you are now in the position you want and below 5 mpg, you can engage "Floatplane docking" and it will "tie down" the Beaver and it will stay in that position. Now you could use the controls to easily move it to the dock and fine tune your position. Now you want to go for another flight. Nothing easier than that. By using the "Floatplane Docking" control, and with contols I mean your Joystick, you push the Beaver away from the dock, put the nose where you want it to point to and release docking mode. Now you are free again, away from the dock and can do your waterpilot thing. Nothing feels unnatural when you do all this, because the aircraft is still interacting with the water and not in some kind of akward freeze state. I really like it. In fact so much, that I almost exclusively use the float version of the Beaver. I hope you are able to understand what I mean with all that. Well, I will show it next week in a video. As I said before, I don't want to bore you with very tiny details. I am just in hussle mode as I am closojg the finish line. Therefore, that's it for today. If I remember that I forgot something really important to mention, I will do during the week. You all have a wonderful Sunday and Happy Mother's Day to all your families!

Sunday Beaver Update 24 Hey, Time for another Sunday Beaver Update. The last week has been very productive and I was able to implement quite a few things and I had lots of fun doing it So probably you would like to hear what I have been busy with since last Sunday. Okay, here it comes: I know that there are people out there who would use an AP when flying the Beaver and therefore I implemented the S-TEC 50 AP and I guess you have seen it on the screenshots before. This week I spent some time to make all the modes working as they are supposed to work and when I was happy, I did the tuning of the different modes. The result was very satisfying and the AP behaves nicely. As the AP is located in the lower part of the cockpit, opearing it can be a challenge. Well, not really a challenge, because I even have a view available which zooms in, but I guess you would like to be able to operate the AP while still looking out of the window. Or you want to disconnect the AP at minumums after flying an automatic approach and you wanna do this without looking down, snice you are close to the ground. I hear you and this is the reason why I created a 2D pop-up with which you can control the AP in the same way as with the 3D part. It looks like this... Sounds got some attention as well, and I added doors sounds and the pumping sound when you operate the flaps. Then I spent a lot of time on the ground model behaviour in strong crosswind conditions. As you all know, standard X-Plane behaviour is kind of poor in this area, due to the strong weathervaning effect, but with some plug-in code, I was able to improve this a lot. The Beaver's max demonstrated crosswind component is 10 kts, but I was able to take off and land in winds up to 15 kts now. However, I really had to work hard, in order to not screw up, especially during the landing and slow down phase. I like it a lot now. Another thing that I never liked so far was the fact that you could often land an amphibious plane with the gear down on water, without any negative impact. This is not reflecting reality though and I had to solve this thing. Also here, my plug-in code came to the rescue. Do a landing now in the amphibious version, with the landing gear down on water, and you find yourself in a world of trouble... The following sequence of pictures of a landing accident was taking in Juneau around lunch time today. Well, fortunately the single pilot survived with minor injuries, but the aircraft will be out of order for some time now. Almost forgot to mention the ropes on the wings. They are animated and swing in the wind, depending in airspeed, power setting etc. Also this week, I had a lot of fun with this new feature again. The feature that was specifically developed for Beaver floatplane pilots. It is so much fun ,that I am thinking now "Who needs a runway when there is so much water." I guess I will talk about it next week or the week after Finally a word on XP9. Well, I have the feeling that there are a lot of bush and general aviation pilots out there who are disappointed that the Beaver won't be available for XP9. Well, I hear you guys. I have to say, that I developed the Beaver so far with only XP10 in mind and also the model and textures are setup for it. For example, I am using now 4K textures for the external model and XP9 is not supporting that. Re-doing the work again to make it work with 2K textures again was a no-go. However, I did a quick check and reduced the external texture map to 2K and was afraid that the result would look bad, but it does not. Even with a 2K map, the external model looks pretty nice and sharp. So that resolved a big issue for me. The cockpit and interior was on 2K maps anyway, so that is not an issue either. You can have a look here. The SMS Beaver in XP9. Therefore, I decided to create a version for XP9 as well, but unfortunately it won't make it to the initial realease, because I am very busy to finish the XP10 version. There might be a lot of people thinking "Why is he looking at XP9 while most of the user are on XP10 now. Why is he spending time on this, instead working on new features". Well, I am here to serve you all and I know that there is a decent number of XP9 users out there. Especially bush pilots, who enjoy the fact that XP9 has a lot more water, lakes, rivers at the correct locations, while XP10 is still missing a lot. Also a lot of pilots are using older machines which are barely able to handle XP10 at higher settings, while they can fly XP9 with high setting and high frame rates. So in order to not let these people down, I will work on the XP9 version as well. If I can make a person smile or give him or her a great time while still using 9, I am a very happy person too. So that's it for today. I hope you all have a great Sunday! Pete

Thanks guys!

The cockpit lighting at dawn...

Rain effect is not implemented yet. However, more things and features are to come after the initial release. The Beaver add-on will have a product life cycle with updates along the way and not just bug fixes.

Oh...no way..the panel looks new from the distance. This is what it looks like close up

Here are pictures of "The office". Landplane Cockpit Amphibious Cockpit

Thanks for you comments! Yeah, the ground friction model of X-Plane is a PITA. I worked on a few things and the Beaver behaves OK. However, I plan to improve it more by using the new forces and moments datarefs, but this will come in an update after the first release.

Sunday Beaver Update 23 Hello, Time for another Sunday Beaver Update. I made some great progress during the last week and I wanted to share what I did and also show some screenshots. Well, I finally added some cold and dark pre-flight elements to the Beaver like the pitot-heat cover, wheel chocks and some heavy gear to fix the aircraft on ground in these strong alaskan winds. I also added a pilot to the cockpit now and he is only visible when you view the aircraft from outside. Did I add some fancy head and body movement yet? Nope, I didn't, because this is not one of my priorities for the first release. Will I add it down the road? Most probably. It is not that hard to do. If you are not spending hours watching the pilot from the outside in awe, I guess you appreciate more that I rather spend my time to work on a more realistic pitot-heat and icing simulation, instead using the standard X-Plane one. From my point of view this is adding much more value than having this little guys dancing around. He is there, he looks good and that's it for now. As you know I was talking about having three versions for the first release. The regular tire version, the cargo version and the amphibious version. That is still the case, but rather having these kind of fixed models, I added more flexibility. When you fly the tire version, you can decide via a menu, if you like the regular tires or the tundra tires. In addition to that, you can now have three different cabin configurations. Also these can be controlled via a menu without reloading the aircraft. I will make it so, that you can save your settings, so that you don't have to reload your prefered setting every time. The cabin configurations are the following: Full Pax Version Pax / Cargo Mix Full Cargo Version I worked on a few other cool things too, but I will report about them in one of my next Sunday Updates. All in all I am really happy and that I made it this far after the last 2 years. Along my journey to my first X-Plane product, so many obstacles have been thrown in my way that it would have been easy to say "Okay, Okay, I understand, I guess this X-Plane thing isn't supposed to be. I am going to quit and let it go." I have to admit that I had these thoughts too and was very close to just do that, but thinking about why I am doing all this and adjusting my mindset helped me a lot. The goal to produce the best bush plane simulation out there and to deliver great value to you as a customer pushed me through these hard times. I have the feeling that obstacles are thron in your way for a reason. It is a test of how bad you want something, your character, your passion and if you are aligned with what you do. I promised to deliver the Beaver and I DO WHAT I SAID I DO. This is one of my bigger forces driving me. Putting somebody down who was waiting for the Beaver, following me all these years by saying "The Beaver project is dead"? NO WAY! So the Beaver will be availabe for you in a few weeks and I am really pushing hard to make this date. I even implemented some features that were not planned or on my radar, but htey were far too cool to leave them out. And one of the coolest feature will be kind of a "First in X-Plane" and I will report about that in one of my next Sunday Updates, but it is something bush pilots will enjoy for sure. Oh by the way, the Sunday Updates will now become EVERY Sunday Updates again. So stay tuned and spread the word. You all have a great Sunday, Pete

Just relaxing my brain a bit

Sunday Beaver Update 22 Hey, As promised here a few more in-sim shots, showing the liveries for the final release. Since I already showed the two liveries for the amphibious version this week, I will continue now with the regular tire and cargo version. ...and now I come to the release date: It will be May 2015. I hope you like what you see! Have a nice weekend, Pete

...but the landing gear came up shortly after this shot. Who would go for a water landing with landing gear down. Any volunteers'?