Dozer

Oops, I forgot the smilie! Every time I load it I appreciate more how nice the Duchess panel is. Looking forward to all the stuff you're building Goran!

Spent most of my 3-hour lunch break trying to make level stripes around the nosecone, without realising it's possible to precisely rotate Blender's viewpoint with the numpad (I was just using arbitrary angles using the mouse middle-click to pan). Then GIMP crashed and I hadn't saved any of it. What I have now is the elements of the last .png I'd saved, as an opaque layer on top of the paintkit. If I summon the energy to tweak it further I'll more or less have to start from scratch in that area! Pleased with the logos though. Typeface isn't really heavy enough, but it's the heaviest one I've got! Things to note: the Bandit paintscheme reflected in the nacelle chrome...

You've made a Saab 340. You've started a DC-3. Why not combine the two? http://www.baslerturbo.com/

Marcmec, I've written a plugin that already does this with the v1.1.1 MU-2. The command /Dozer/MU2/Landing_Light_Inc and /Landing_Light_Dec will move the MU-2's landing light switch if the MU-2 is the active aircraft, or the default landing light switch if you've loaded a different aircraft for some reason ;-) Also, /Dozer/MU2/Landing_Light_Toggle will toggle the default landing lights or move the MU-2's switch between off/retracted and on/extended. It's the first plugin I've published (out of a grand total of two) and I'm still quite new to it. You might need to alter the MU-2's description in Planemaker, and you'll need this file from Microsoft until I learn more advanced ways of compiling stuff. The plugin is on the org here: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=12628 I'm assuming you're running Windows! edit: I've bound Landing_Light_Inc and _Dec to one of the momentary switches on my Saitek X52 - I did that for testing and quite like it. Move the switch up twice to activate Landing_Light_Inc twice and turn lights on, move it down twice to extinguish then retract the lights. Simples. Tom, a very minor plea - I quite like the three-position switch, it's a nice detail. When you say you're skipping the extended/off position, you are just talking about your own commands, right? Will it still have that position if you're using the mouse (or setting the dataref from your own plugin)?

Right, that's enough for one nigh... one morning. It's not like I've got work tomorrow or anything :-\ The following screenshot was brought to you by the GIMP keyboard shortcuts F, Shift-B, and Delete: Lots of iterative fun trying to make those stripes go across the belly in nicely straight parallel ways... edit: before anyone asks, yes the Civil Air Ensign is meant to face that way on the starboard side of the aircraft!

I think it needs to be open - I have to mouse over the UV window, then press Alt-R for 'reload texture'. Yep it's pretty straightforward. Took me an embarrassing amount of time to realise the right fuselage side is mirrored though :-) I have Blender 2.5, but so far haven't used it for anything but this. I watched all Dan Klaue's tutorials but couldn't get into meshmaking - I think they're slightly misleading - you can't build an aircraft from a 300px 3-view taken from the manufacturer's brochure! Plugin creation, and doing basic GIMPery, is a lot more fun.

Cheers Cameron!

Got a message just now when trying to upload a screenshot: "The upload folder is full. Please try a smaller file and/or contact an administrator." I've looked for it, but I can't find my own upload folder to delete old screenshots etc. Anyone tell me where it is? (Would rather not faff around with external image-hosting sites to be honest...) I've been very enterprising and googled the problem. I only find messages from SMF forum admins, not users, with solutions that use admin privileges. Not helpful!

I really like this Painting With Blender thing, it's very satisfying to get such quick feedback on your textures! My Department of Aviation scheme is about half done. This is what I'm going for: http://www.airliners.net/photo/Department-of-Aviation/Gulfstream-Aerospace-695A/0940149/L/ Edit: I'm spending an awful lot of time waiting for Gimp to export copies as PNG....

It looks fantastic, and I really like the reports I'm hearing of the detail and fidelity of the flight model... but, it's completely different to the kind of flying I like to do, which is rolling around the UK's airways system, using as many VOR, DME and NDB displays as possible, and ideally at 250kts. My PC's too poor to run (and I don't have the inclination to obtain and manage) any decent visual scenery :-( If I were to buy it, it would just be to encourage Carenado to make more stuff, hopefully including stuff I'd like to fly... That said, if I ever were to seriously be about to embark on a PPL, I'd be all over this like a shot.

Excellent! I read a fascinating website today about Australia's radio navigation. I might try to make a fictitious Australian Department of Aviation livery, as worn by their Gulfstream G1000s (not to be confused with the Garmin G1000!) - http://www.airwaysmuseum.com/Gulfstream%20G1000%20VH-LTJ.htm

That's amazing! I have never seen anyone provide a Blender mesh to assist with the paintkit before.

Glad you could resolve the insanity of the paintkit files!

I just wanted to say how pleased I am by the way you can trip the Falco's undercarriage circuit breaker by pulling too many g. For as long as I can remember, every time I press G in any flight simulator, the undercarriage will unfailingly go down. The only exception I've seen up to now is in Il-2 Sturmovik, where in rare cases you could get damage to the normal u/c system and you'd have to hit whatever you'd bound to 'manually lower gear' 60 times instead. But in every civil sim, there's no point in even looking for the green lights - if you've pressed G, you can guarantee that your gear is down. But the wholly undocumented (in-sim - I guess in real life this feature is prominently mentioned in the manual and probably on cockpit placards!) fact that you can accidentally break the u/c system in-flight means that when you're flying the Falco, you really need to check that those green lights are on - just like real pilots can't assume that just cause they've moved a lever, the system's done what they want. And better still, because Tom's included this facet of realism in the Falco, and left it undocumented for us to find, leaves us with paranoia about all the other systems on the Falco, even if they don't have any similar failures modelled! I just changed the VOR frequency. The display is indicating the new frequency, and the HSI is picking up a VOR. But did the tuner really change? Can't trust the display on this a/c, better go to the audio panel and listen to the VOR's morse ident! Even if, in fact, the nav radios have no hidden surprises, because the gear selector is unreliable, I can't trust the nav radios. Or the fuel gauges. Or the gyro-compass. Or anything else where Tom could have conceivably caused something 'fun' to happen if I take a shortcut or mishandle the aircraft. This is enhanced by the presence of all those circuit breakers. I don't think there's any chance that the ADF will short-circuit and I'll need to pull its circuit breaker to get the other electrical systems back online - but the presence of the ADF circuit breaker means that I can't be sure. This 'realistic uncertainty' really contributes to the illusion that I'm operating a real aircraft, a complex bundle of interacting systems in a streamlined aluminium (or wooden) case, rather than just making numbers change from 0 to 1 and back again inside my CPU. And, if some bug causes my flight to end in some bizarre way, I'm less likely to blame X-Plane or my system or the aircraft's modelling, but instead there is doubt that I'd made a mistake somewhere and caused the system to break. Even if the system isn't that complex and it really was just a bug... There's an excellent article I read a while ago, talking about creating suspense in horror films and games. I don't watch those kinds of films or play those kinds of games, but the article's still 100% relevant to systems simulation in flight simulators. Example: the film Psycho, the lead character played by the biggest-name actress gets killed really early in the film. And by killing what the audience had supposed was the star of the film, the author's established that anyone can die, which creates suspense about all the other characters. Something like that has happened with the Falco and the high-g gear breaking, I think! I found a copy of the article, it's quite old and this is from an archiving website. If you like it, I suggest you save it on your hdd. http://sirlin.dreamhosters.com/archive/suspense/ That author (Sirlin) has written a bunch of other interesting stuff, often on the topic of writing and competitive fighting games (Street Fighter etc) but applicable to a huge amount of seemingly unrelated fields! So, thanks Tom for including that easter egg in the Falco! And for not submitting to the temptation to trumpet it in the manual, marketting videos etc - 'look how realistic my aircraft is, you can overload the u/c actuator circuit!' - which would spoil the illusion that any other system could break in similar ways!

Oh dear, have I accidentally delayed the v1.5 release I haven't figured out how to create custom axis yet, unless we're to use the 'CustomSlider' axis, in which case I haven't figured out how to use .ini files yet to specify which one can be used to avoid colliding with someone else's plugin's CustomSlider assignment! I love the sound of those details on how the fuel systems will work. That kind of detail really helps the immersion that you're dealing with the massively complex assembly of different components and systems that a real turbine engine is, rather than flipping IsLeftEngineOn from 1 to 0!

Thanks; that first link was the one I would have liked an RSS feed for but there isn't one. However! The second link does have RSS and seems to have a tonne of other interesting stuff, so thanks very much for showing me that!

The XP10 feature I want most urgently is an RSS feed for the XP10 news page.

I especially like the ignition key!

I remember the first time I saw a Wilga. Was at a gliding club somewhere in Norfolk (in England), where seven of the eight days of the gliding competition were rained out. On the eighth day, the task-setters adventurously set a 50km task to fly, and everyone who attempted it ended up in fields. A fun week!

Excellent! This is something that never could have happened with the Microsoft sims!

Interesting to know you don't work from home Tom! Do you do X-Plane stuff full-time then? I assume most flight simulator 3rd-party devs work part-time alongside a full-time job!

Ironically, in the default scenery, many landplanes have no problem landing or taking off from water...

Given that my internet connection is working again - downloading now!

Well that's very reassuring. I'm looking forward to X-Plane v14!

Yep the trim-happy nature of the MU-2 is emphasised in the the tutorials! It was my first X-Plane payware, and in fact it is the reason I moved from FS9 to X-Plane!