Dozer

You're making a version without Garmins? Excellent!! I have some weird issues about navigating by GPS, perhaps I should see a counsellor, but I much prefer lining up those little white needles and watching the numbers on the DME. Flying according to the flight-plan I sketched beforehand on a sheet of paper, much better than using the mouse to dial it into a simulated computer! The X-Plane stock Garmin has become a visual cliché in my eyes now because it seems that every plane (OK, nearly every good payware plane I've got so far - chronologically, MU-2, BK-117, Duchess, Falco) has it on the panel.

Frankly the external model could be a Utah teapot and I'd still buy it if the flight model's accurate, the gauges look like they do in the first screenshot, and the systems are modelled in reasonable depth!

Manchester to Gatwick, both in England. I flew this route dozens of times in MSFS9, in Rick Piper's excellent HS.748 - a nice little hour-long route. Today is the first time I've done it in X-Plane, and I used the MU-2. IIRC the HS.748 cruises at about 150kt so the MU-2 at 250kt is much quicker! I need a new PC though: I'd like a higher draw distance, and to have buildings at airports!

I agree completely CaptainD, in fact I'm about to do exactly that with the MU-2. I am/was a glider pilot (haven't flown for fourteen months. Fourteen!) and don't expect a synthetic flight simulator to offer anything comparable to the real experience of wandering about the countryside from half a mile above it, at least not visually. Which is why I'm not phased by X-Plane insisting on dropping the draw distance down to about three inches whenever I load any reasonably complicated aircraft. The reason I moved to X-Plane from MSFS is that MSFS is dead; MS aren't developing it any more. X-Plane is growing (although how motivated is Austin to keep working on it now that he's made $millions from iPhone app sales?) and can only improve. And I reckon the transfer of users and developers between X-Plane and MSFS is only happening in one direction. I used to love flying aircraft with well-detailed systems in MSFS, which is why I'm excited by Tom Kyler's work here - he appears to have the same appetite for systems simulation. And the only developer I know of who's simulated the circuit breakers, and made it relevant too!

Indi- you don't need to use Dropbox, you can permalink to the original XKCD image, it's OK: http://www.xkcd.com/license.html Tom, instead of writing [b]your reply[/b] in the middle of a quote, could you write [/quote]your reply[quote] instead? Then your reply doesn't look like part of the quote!

This is good news!! The prospect of not being able to make any modifications was worrying. This is very pleasing, that Gizmo doesn't prevent .acf tinkering! I've just checked again - my untinkered Falco install has Gizmo entries in the Plugins menu, which let me check for updates and view activation window. The folder with the modified Falco has the same folders in the Plugins menu but they're empty - I can't check the activation or look for updates (even if there isn't actually an updater service running). That's what I was referring to. The only change I made was to open Planemaker, remove the offending Hobbs meter, and save the .acf.

His point summarises as: if your product is good (successful, desirable etc) then it will be cracked. If the DRM is a pain, people will torrent it instead, and if you're lucky then they'll go on to buy it as well if they're feeling particularly ethical. If the DRM is not inconvenient, then they're more likely to use a legit install than a torrented one. He hasn't been following the news, has he, or he'd know you've just gone to a donationware-esque model for Gizmo! I've never pirated a flight simulator addon (MSFS or X-Plane) but I routinely use torrents to get more convenient access to media I've purchased. For instance, I purchased Falcon 4.0 a year ago, and torrented the disk image while waiting for the physical disk to arrive in the post (and then used the sim for about five minutes before abandoning it). I've done the same thing with music CDs. I purchased the game Mirror's Edge as a download, direct from the publishers, EA. It was meant to be installed via EA's download manager service, which would require me to download and install the manager, and then tediously tell it to not run on Windows startup, not automatically download updates every fifteen seconds etc. Instead I torrented the disk image, which I can mount with two clicks. I've also done exactly the same thing with album downloads - it's easier than telling the customer support service that I can't get beyond the 'we are preparing your links to download, please wait' page on their website! I can't think of any time I've torrented a product for trial though. Normally I know I want a product before I use it. Unless listening to most of an album on YouTube counts as piracy? (I've got close friends who take this view, and won't listen to music on YouTube - won't even tolerate it being played in their presence!) I can tolerate DRM when it doesn't inconvenience me. So far, the biggest inconvenience of X-Scenery's DRM has been that when I removed the ugly Hobbs meter from the Falco, Gizmo's automatic updater stopped working (and as far as I'm aware, that's all that broke). But if the DRM ever presents greater limitations on the use of a product I've purchased, I do not hesitate to look for workarounds from all sources, as long as the workaround isn't inconvenient. For instance I've tried to mount the X-Plane disk image on my hard drive so I can put the disk in a safe place, but the disk's copy protection has prevented my unelaborate method and I've not bothered to get Alcohol to do it successfully. I'm surprised and alarmed that people are paying for access to pirated software though. That's news to me, and saddening.

I purchased a Captain Sim product once. Then I deleted it and used the disk as a coaster.

My internet connection is half-dead - the picture above didn't load last time I looked at this thread. Was watching radios.mov thinking 'and where is the aileron trim here exactly?' Very much enjoying the updates Tom!

Awesome! I used to love flying on VATSIM but in X-Plane i've made only one flight, a one-hour hop between two uncontrolled airports, just to see how XSquawkbox works and connects. The MU-2 is the most VATSIMmable a/c in my inventory (at least until Guy Montagu-Pollock finishes his Comet) so this is very welcome! I'd like to watch the video but my internet connection is being very, very slow and I've got to go to work. Farr1225 - I think you can set your own camera-position limits using Sandy Barbour's PilotView plugin, but I don't have time to explain how.

Looks excellent! Dear Santa, for Christmas I would like a new PC and a metric tonne of hard disk drives so I can do VFR as well as IFR flying...

I get a reasonably accurate view out the windows when I set visibility to 1mi and fly at night. Runway lights look equally beautiful in every sim and scenery package...

I've just checked RealityXP's website, and on the FAQ page for the X-Plane G430 (http://www.reality-xp.com/flightsim/gns430-xpl/faq/index.html) they state: Complaining to X-Aviation/X-Pilot/X-Scenery/X-Plane/Tom because the MU-2 doesn't support the RealityXP G430 under Linux is like complaining to Volkswagen that you can't put a jet engine in your Beetle if you're driving it in Germany :-) edit: I've just read the rest of the FAQ. It looks like, behind the scenes RealityXP G430 is really Garmin's own G430 simulator, which is a free download and certainly Windows-only forever (if you can afford a real Garmin GPS, you can afford to buy a Windows PC to run their trainer!). RealityXP 'just' link it to MSFS/X-Plane and sell the whole lot for $50. So for a Linux/Mac version, RealityXP would have to reverse-engineer the Garmin simulator and remake it for Linux/Mac, and they're probably not familiar with those platforms.

As many people have commented, the Duchess has a very minor bug where the instrument-panel lights controls are swapped - the 'instrument' (panel) control operates the instrument post lights, and the (instrument) post control operates the panel light. I've just discovered - it is very easy for the user to fix! 1) Back up a copy of LES_Duchess_cockpit.obj, which is in the folder you installed the Duchess into 2) Open LES_Duchess_cockpit.obj with a text editor 3) Find "sim/cockpit2/switches/panel_brightness_ratio[0]" (without quotes) 4) There should be two lines ending with "panel_brightness_ratio[0]", and then about eight lines of other stuff, then two lines ending "panel_brightness_ratio[1]". 5) Change the first two lines to have a 1 instead of 0, and change the second two to have 0 instead of 1 6) Done! And if it doesn't work, or if anything strange happens, then replace the modified file with your backup. And don't expect official support for modifying any files :-)

I think they're going to include Scotland when they can get it to stop raining long enough to get a complete set of well-lit aerial photos

X-Plane isn't a proper flight simulator until it gets a proper DC-3 On a completely unrelated note, those renders you posted look like resin models created from 3D printers. For a variable amount of money you could send your meshes to one of the 3d printing agencies and get a little resin model of your DC-3 in return!

I think there is confusion: the Windows MU-2 supports the RealityXP GNS430 (which is a completely separate product, sold by a completely different company!). But you can't get the RealityXP GNS430 on Linux, I believe? I think Segfault's comments on Linux support completely relate to RealityXP, not X-Scenery (or X-Aviation or X-Pilot). Who needs GPS anyway when you've got two VORs, DME and ADF? On that note - Tom - when will we get MU-2 v1.5 :P

Both good news and bad news then! Eagerly anticipating v1.5 (and also XP10). Thanks Tom!

Of course not, one learns C++ because C++ is such fun to use Well given that my present experience of X-Plane development consist of building one 2d gauge from generic instruments, and installing Blender and what I'm now worried might have been the wrong XP2B script, and learning that a 3-view about 500px across from a manufacturer's brochure isn't really enough to build a Planemaker model from, I'm a fair distance away from having much need of any of it just yet!

I have standard plugin code for just about every kind of interaction and animation. It took a while to learn and set up (1.5 years :-P) but makes things very quick and efficient. As I mentioned though, Ben's Gizmo is a even more efficient step of coding and merges very well with what I'm doing. I'll be layering some gizmo functions right on top of what I have on the MU2....so if you want some painless and quick tool to try your altimeter in, do consider gizmo. It may sound like a sales pitch, but it delivers. Last night, in about 15 lines of code, I make a camera view that keeps the eyes on the horizon and rotates the 'head' based on the rate of turn / angle of bank to give a "look ahead" sensation when turning VFR final. Probably take a few hundred lines in C. Ah, but I want to learn to write plugins myself When I can do myself what the tool can do for me, I can then use the tool, because I'll understand the tool. If I were to shortcut now I'd end up in a confused mess down the line!

In future I will choose to live somewhere closer to the phone exchange so I can download via ADSL quicker than it would take to just walk to your house, wherever it may be, and just look over your shoulder... Looks great Tom! Dragging the light-switches on the overhead was a minor niggle when I started using the MU-2 - it's nice to see this changed. Very logical way of dealiing with the switchguards too. I assume you've got some standard 'not-instant-pop' plugin code written now for needles of that kind! For a while now I've been planning to build an altimeter (coincidentally. I don't have a fetish for altimeters or anything) that simulates the way altimeters work in gliders. Without an engine to agitate the moving parts, when climbing or descending in a glider the needle gets to within about 100ft of your true height and then sticks, because the force from the height-sensing mechanism isn't enough to overcome the resistance in the bearings etc. So if you want an accurate reading (for instance coming off the top of an aerotow, when you're charged for height as the tow-plane sees it), you tap the instrument panel near the altimeter, and the jolt frees up the mechanism for long enough for the needle to move to indicate your real height. Should be a simple exercise in plugin-writing, and that's about the limit of its usefulness to me as I don't particularly want to fly gliders in X-Plane while I do want to learn the art of plugin-coding!

It made me laugh! And where else could such a thing be sold? To be honest, X-Plane is probably the most accessible platform for building an accurate T-Rex simulation! ;) :D However I don't want dinosaur simulations - I want circuit breakers. So I'll just lurk here instead.

It's looking great! Good work LES!

Happy new year, and hopefully by New Year 2012 I'll also be in a timezone that's GMT+10!

Hi RushFan - pardon me for barging in, but you said it's fixed if you move the viewpoint. So if you move your viewpoint fractionally forwards (page-up key) it behaves properly? As a bodge fix, you could use the PilotView plugin to change your default viewpoint very slightly (and assign presets to useful panel-view - closeup of radios for instance - for easier cockpit navigation, while you're at it)