Dozer

I found a four-year-old thread where Morten was lamenting the sorry state of X-Plane's ground model and its bizarre behaviour, and the prospects of overruling it with a plugin. Are things better now, or does the IXEG737 have custom ground modelling (tyre friction modelling etc)?

I understand that when X-Plane is built for 64-bit processors it will take advantage of significantly more of a current computer's power, which hopefully will allow the fully-featured weather to return. I'm regarding the 32-bit version as a demo/beta and hopefully will own a 64-bit PC by the time 64-bit XPX is available!

For me, XP10 is not complete until they get the weather and cloud rendering working properly again. Which I have a hunch will take place when they transition to 64-bit. Like you said, ground detail is nice and atmospheric (ironically) but sky detail is far far more important. Heavies are fun to fly if you don't use an aircraft that has an FMC - radio navigation is great!

Excellent. I can't wait to get my own PC back to Internetland and do some online flying again!

Can't you just override the art datarefs to draw the sun at a more convenient angle?

Can we persuade developers to build cockpits for the EADT KLN-90B instead of the hideous stock Garmin?

There's nothing wrong with making money. There is something wrong with banning content which doesn't make the publisher money.

Microsoft devs are, I'm very sure, making stuff for money. Third-party developers make stuff because they want the stuff they make to exist for its own sake. Look at Guy Montagu-Pollock's Comet - it's taken him over five years to reach where he is now. Will his sales revenue pay for the thousands of hours he's put into this? No, but that's not the point - he made it because he wanted it made, and the sales revenue is a nice bonus. Microsoft's developers do not have that freedom. You won't see any labours of love in a closed-architecture sim.(Except for Il-2 Sturmovik before it was cracked.)

You've broken such a lot of new ground with the Comet, plugin work will be relatively straightforward I'm sure. At least, it's a much more well-worn path!

I stopped using Microsoft's flight simulators because they became a technological dead end when Microsoft disbanded the ACES studio. Flight is a dead end if there's a mandatory paywall between the third-party developers and the users. The life of a simulator is in the creation of content by third-party authors, payware and freeware, and I am not interested in supporting any platform which places arbitrary obstacles between those creators and their users.

Just read the Avsim review. The panel screenshots were fascinating. A very artistic typeface for the radio tuners - not at all like 9-segment LED characters.

You will also see that in the first post of this thread. By the way, are there any developers who are promising full XP10 support right now?

They're like drug dealers - the starting cost is low, but they'll put a vacuum cleaner in your pockets if you get hooked. Then you'll be burglarising old ladies to get the cash for the simulated Garmin and Learjet 25 you just can't live without... Also: there's a difference between open- and closed-source, and open- and closed-architecture. Open-source means 'you can read the source code' and for flight simulators that means FlightGear and nothing else I know of. Open-architecture means 'you can freely add stuff to this sim', like X-Plane, FS9, FSX. You can for instance build an animated dinosaur-shaped aircraft for X-Plane and sell it without restriction. There's different degrees of openness - during Il-2 Sturmovik's classic period users could add repaints and missions without restriction but not aircraft or scenery, which could only be included with collaboration with the developers. Open-architecture sims (XPlane, FS9/FSX, Flightgear) are infinitely preferable because a) it's fun to create stuff and test it in the sim the developers don't have any veto on what appears in the sim c) third-party developers can compete and raise the standard of the sim much more easily. Related article: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the-king.html

On the subject of 2d panels, is there any way to pan them gradually? One freeware aircraft I've installed offers a choice of a view through the windscreen, or a view showing the HSI and other nav instruments, but not both at once. Using the up/down cursor keys the panel moves all the way up, or all the way down, with no option to stop it in the middle and see the important instruments and the runway at the same time. An absolutely critical failing of 2D pits is the lack of space for panels other than the pilot's main panel and the engine instruments panel. In MSFS it was very easy to have popup 2D panels for the overhead, pedestal, radio stack, flight engineer's panels, specialist navigation instruments etc. X-Plane never had this functionality, and it seems the only way to add it is with complicated plugins. Otherwise, if you're making a complex multicrew aircraft, you have to cram everything into one big square bitmap. To go back to the Comet again, it had a 2D panel early in its development: http://www.dh-aircra...6deb2d3-35.html Then it had a 3D interior, initially just to provide background textures for the 2D pit. The 3D pit rapidly overtook the 2D one and see where it is now: http://www.dh-aircra...ag-cockpit.html The Comet predates modern ideas about flight deck ergonomics and necessary controls and instruments are scattered all over the place, but using PilotView's presets it's very easy to quickly find anything.

Just before it goes out the door could you quickly put in a turbojet-powered version of the MU-2 with glass instruments and a working DVD player in the cabin which plays DVDs from the user's disk drive?

Nice clouds!

I was in the passenger seat when my mum nearly ran over a wedgetailed eagle (or wedgetail eagle?). She mistook it for the dead wallaby she'd driven past earlier that morning. Having seen this article I'm glad she stopped!

Is that true of the reverser axis for engines 3 and 4 too?

It may be possible to use the condition axis 3 and 4 as well, giving 4 repurposable input axis, or the reverse axis - I didn't properly investigate those though. Glad to be of help! I wonder if the SDK could be extended to allow assignable axis to be created (or repurposed) in the same way as the joystick/keyboard commands. As a stopgap Austin could throw in a bunch of generic axis. Of course the ideal way is to throw the stock FADEC out the window, override the throttles, and do everything in the plugin!

I'll go and remove MU-2 Command from the .org, as it's a) nearly redundant now and b ) features a horrendous misunderstanding of how plugins can handle commands. Thinking of workarounds for plugin input - clearly it's too late now - but I've just checked and I can assign joystick controls to, for instance, Mixture 3 and 4, and get the input by reading the dataref sim/cockpit2/engine/actuators/mixture_ratio[2] and [3]. That could be a possible way to map USB joystick axes to custom condition levers etc. I'm really looking forward to this Tom! edit: having read the manual - is there a reason the MU-2 plugin can't republish the normal toggle_reverse and condition lever (F3, F4) commands? For example, XPLMCommandRef myToggleReverse = NULL; int myToggleReverseCallback(...); void XPluginStart (...) { myToggleReverse = XPLMCreateCommand ("sim/engines/thrust_reverse_toggle", ""); //note: this is the same as the normal reverse-thrust command XPLMRegisterCommandHandler (myToggleReverse, myToggleReverseCallback, 1, (void *) 0); // by putting '1' as the third argument here, we make sure our callback function gets called first, // before X-Plane can process the command. ... } void XPluginStop (void) { XPLMUnregister...etc } ... int myToggleReverseCallback(...) doCustomMU2ReverseStuff(); return 0; //by returning 0, we stop this command from continuing onwards to X-Plane. } I've used code like this to intercept the default X-Plane radio tuner commands, to stop the user from being able to rotate the <1MHz tuner across the x.00MHz mark. (The default X-Plane behaviour lets you go straight from xxx.95 to xxx.00 in one click, but the real unit can't rotate a full 360 degrees, so you need to go the long way round through xxx.50.) The plugin introduced the correct behaviour of this instrument without needing any changes to the 3d cockpit because it used the default radio tuner commands. If there's no reason why this couldn't work for v1.5 MU-2, I'll make a MU-2 Command v1.5 which reassigns the default reverser and prop commands to those three MU-2 commands you'd listed, so the user's existing control assignments will work with the MU-2.

I just found this article about the Falco's trim: http://www.seqair.com/FlightTest/Stability/Stability.html

It's a generation better than v1.1.1 Tom - and I reckon my tired old PC will be happier with it too. I'm looking forward to saying goodbye to nearly all of the 2D panel gauges. 3D instruments look so much better and they're easier to render. That, and the extended systems simulation - it will be great! Can't wait.

My ideal sim experience is pretty much exactly this. Except with more emphasis on systems simulation and navigation and less on the scenery. I used to fly gliders back when I thought I had more money and the world is beautiful from above, but I always thought that sim scenery could never be close enough to the real thing to be worth investing any effort into, at least on my aged PC. I'm probably wrong about that - flying over Tasmania with Smellybeard's Australian roads scenery (it's just roads converted from OSM data) and seeing the ridiculous roundabout with a railway crossing on it in my parent's town was very evocative, even if it was just grey ribbon roads and grey ribbon railway against green blurry ground. I can always fly at night - the runway lights are pretty even on a low-quality PC!I haven't flown on VATSIM for ages. I used to fly regularly, with FS9, but didn't fly enough practice SIDs and STARs in XP9 to be confident I'll be able to fly online without embarrassing myself. I'll be back online as soon as I have internet on my main PC again though. 2-hour flights are definitely ideal, ideally navigating VOR-to-VOR (no GPS or FMS thanks, but 1970s-generation inertial nav is fine ) With my FS9 VATSIM flights, it was an exercise in plate-spinning. Could I fly the aircraft precisely and operate its systems correctly and navigate accurately and communciate appropriately with the VATSIM controllers? The answer was often 'no'. One of the longest flights I flew online was with Dave Maltby's freeware Comet 4, from London to Helsinki I think. Somewhere over the North Sea I accidentally shut down two engines while trying to set the fuel pumps, and it took a little while to restart them. I ended the flight about a mile from the threshold when I completely botched the ILS approach and hit the ground. A bit anticlimatic really. I look forward to repeating the flight in Guy Montagu-Pollock's Comet 4 - I'm beta-testing it now and it hits all the right buttons. It's a labour of love, polished and polished and polished - lovely to fly, lovely to look at, very accurate flight model performancewise, and puzzling 1950s British instrumentation to add to the challenge/reward of flying it.

According to Tom, it's very very very close. Just documentation to complete and then it will be shipped. That is what was said in the MU-2 update thread.

With v9.70 and PilotView and a bunch of preset camera positions, I don't have a complaint with the 3d cockpit anymore. Being unable to navigate all the panels of Tom's MU-2 (3d cockpit) as easily as I could go through all the popup 2d panels on my favourite FS9 aircraft put me off X-Plane when I first tried it in 2009ish. PilotView's camera preset commands saved the day. I use the numpad to pan and tilt the camera and the hatswitch to move it - I find that most convenient as the numpad is next to the mouse. If you're making an aircraft because you like making an aircraft, go right ahead and use whichever technique you prefer and who cares what the rest of the community is making or using? If you like making aircraft because you want other people to enjoy using it, there will always be people who appreciate flying the particular aircraft you've modelled. I like Brett Sumpter's Berkut 540 for that reason, it captured my imagination when I was in my teens. But if you want to make an aircraft which matches the quality of the best available, you'll either need to work as part of a team of specialists or put years of single-minded devotion to your project. Look at Guy Montagu-Pollock's Comet to see what one person can do over five years - the entire project is his own work, except for a plugin which more accurately models the engine thrust. Flight model, 3d mesh, animations, textures - all to top standards. His 3d cockpit began as something to produce the background bitmap for the 2d panel - now it has animated 'ENGAGED' signs on the toilet doors... I think I've found my niche writing plugins. A little bit of utility plugin can make the life of the animators a lot easier, when they can have datarefs and commands which do exactly what they need instead of relying on extremely convoluted nested animations and vanishing manipulators.