Dozer

That's awesome! Sadly I'm in my internetless flat for another two months (hooray for contract extensions!) so there's no way for me to update the MU-2 until April, now. Unless the DRM allows the update to be downloaded on a heavily limited corporate laptop, put on a USB stick, then installed over the top of the current version. I'm also hitting my head on the wall while trying to code for hardware - in this case though, I'm building my own hardware. A plywood box with toggle switches mounted on it represents an early autopilot console as used in the DH Comet. Clarity of thought is needed to connect toggle-switches to datarefs...

I haven't flown with AI aircraft enabled since about 2006 when I discovered VATSIM. Before that, I'd spent hours tediously curating FS9 AI traffic flight plans. AI traffic and AI ATC seemed completely silly in comparison to VATSIM. (Which is silly in different ways, true.) When I've relearned how to fly a neat holding pattern in arbitrary weather I'll start flying there again...

You push the hat switch forwards for trim-up! This is blasphemy. This is madness! Also I keep thinking your avatar is a Longbow Apache. I blame the very narrow viewing angle on this laptop's screen, for turning the car into a silhouette.

If you're interested in building stuff for your home cockpits, see what Paul Stoffregen's just done: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=55952&st=20 He makes a very small, cheap USB interface board called Teensy, which depending on model provides a combination of 25-46 digital input/outpit pins, 8-12 analogue inputs and 7-9 pulsed outputs. I emailed him exactly eight days ago asking about flight simulator applications for Teensy. He has no background in flight simulation or aviation, but in less than a week he's written code allowing a Teensy to communicate with the datarefs and commands in X-Plane. It pretty much makes hardware equivalent to generic instruments and 3d-cockpit manipulators in how they interface with the sim. I'll be using one to build the autopilot console from the Comet airliner to begin with. Just waiting for the boards to get across the Atlantic. They're cheap enough I can buy half a dozen and use them on frivolous things, like wiring a bunch of potentiometers to the dimmable cockpit lights in one of my favourite aircraft, or building a switch panel for the MU-2 overhead which would be useless on any other aircraft. Or the annunciator panel for that matter. It would actually be cheaper to build my own MU-2 overhead panel and wire it up using a Teensy than to buy a graphics card capable of running X-Plane at a high-enough texture resolution that I can read the labels on it!

As in, an easily accessible platform for them to start flying with, before moving onto X-Plane? Yes, absolutely.

I'm in temporary accommodation at the moment. I've put my Saitek pedals under the desk, and stopped them from sliding all over the place by putting DVD cases between the base and the wall. In front of the pedals, I've put my PC tower. In front of that, there is my chair. I put the X52 joystick on top of the tower so I sit at the chair with my legs each side of the PC and the joystick roughly between my knees. Throttle, mouse, keyboard and monitor sit on the desk above. No-one else is using such a setup?

That will coincide with me getting my X-Plane PC back into Gizmoland! Awesome.

I think someone resolved a throttle animation problem on a different aircraft by having the visual 3d throttle mesh, and a separate invisible mesh for manipulating the throttles. All you've said about the MU-2 has pretty much gone over my head so I have no idea if that's a technique that could be useful here! [as I don't have internet on my own PC the release date is sadly moot for me - I look forward to flying the MU-2 v1.5 in February when I get home!]

That looks incredible. I'm most excited by what you've said about systems simulation! Hopefully by the time you're done I'll have a PC which can run XP9/10 with VFR-suitable scenery! My current system is useless except for completely IFR flights... I remember Rick Piper's excellent Chipmunk for MSFS9, years and years and YEARS ago. I liked to fly IFR then, too, and launched confidently across northern England, heading confidently in the approximate direction of my destination. Once I was out of sight of the starting airfield, I started looking around the cockpit for the VOR tuner. At that point I realised this Chipmunk had no VOR. I think it might have had an ADF but I'm not even sure of that! I don't remember how that flight turned out. I think that was the flight when I realised that, by default, all the FS9 AI aircraft's strobe lights will flash at the same time. It looks very strange when there's ten aircraft in the sky in front of you. I might have followed the lights of the AI aircraft to find an airfield somewhere. Those were the days, when I could see for hundreds of miles - the AI aircraft and ATC was pretty pointless though.

Ah OK. So are you planning to release the MU-2 with both XP9 and XP10 compatibility, at some point in the future when XP10 (XPX?) has settled down enough that you wouldn't need to release a hotfix every second week to fix errors introduced by Laminar's bug-fixing?

Yep, that's the nature of peer-to-peer filesharing. The more people you can get data from at 5kb/s or so each, the faster you'll get the whole file. About the position of XP10 in the civil sim marketplace - what competitors does it have? The MSFS franchise is dead, despite the host of users and 3rd party devs happily living in its hollowed-out carcass - it cannot become better than it already is. Take On Helicopters is not really the same thing. What else is out there?

This is amazing. I'm definitely one of the 0.9% (I suppose claiming to be part of "the 1%" is not a good idea nowadays). I'm completely enthralled by this. Hopefully by the time it's released I'll have had a well-paying job long enough to be able to pay for an XP-10 capable computer that will do this justice. A thought occurred to me while watching that video - pretending the APU had failed and there was an entry against it in the logbook. Why not also simulate the logbook? External software to generate a scenario, a back-history for the aircraft you're taking over, including a smattering of minor failures and degraded equipment. You'd load the aircraft and the aircraft presents you with a logbook telling you what's not working today. Given that you're modelling everything in such fine detail, are you also including the facility to fail specific elements? (edit: and the facility for elements to wear out or break down individually and mysteriously). A model like this would be a great basis for a flight simulator simulator - an aircraft that behaves like the training simulator rather than the real aircraft, where a thousand things break every minute and the objective is to stress-test the flight crew...

Times like these? As in, times when a new X-Plane version is about to be released? Or is there other stuff going on which I've missed???

I found the email address (my address has changed since buying the Falco) and I'm 98% sure I had the right password. No joy. I've emailed X-Aviation support.

Hi X-Scenery peoples, was going to write my life history but you'd be bored. I haven't used X-Plane for four or five months, and I'm temporarily away from home and without an internet connection on my own PC. I decided to get back into X-Plane, and both the Mu-2 and Falco are asking me to re-activate. No hardware has changed (except the joystick). Is this normal and expected behaviour of the X-Scenery DRM? I'm now going to try and find the email address and password I used to register the Falco. If I don't come back, call the emergency services and ask them to send a rescue party...

Hmm. That seems likely to be beyond the scope of the CRJ's installer to set up automatically. What a shame; I won't be making any subtle virtual hijackings then! This HTML-based gauge is a great achievement, Philipp! I've not seen this technique used before. Do you think there's scope to use HTML5 for cockpit instruments that aren't visually a computer system? (I'm thinking here of systems like weather radar.)

Well this is awesome. What would be even better would be if I could use this to dial into other people's CRJs without their knowing, and send them on amusing diversions. Is this possible?

Yep it's possible! The scripts are maintained by a chap called Sam256 and you can get them from Github here: https://github.com/der-On/XPlane2Blender/ From the Github page, use the 'Wiki' link to find the videos that explain how to use it. (Last time I checked, a few months ago, there wasn't much written documentation, but about twenty minutes of video that explained pretty much everything!)

That's closer to the published value than I'd expect a real aircraft to be. Be careful not to make it too realistic or it'll be more realistic than the real aircraft and therefore become unrealistic!

No worries Tom! I hope it all goes well!

I might be wrong but that picture appears to not be antialiased at all! Not that it matters - it looks superb!

Looking good! Are you using separate texture files for the text labels and the panel background? You might have better results with polytext: http://www.dh-aircraft.co.uk/news/files/tag-polytext.html

I noticed there was textured detail of the baggage door latch in your screenshot, then just looked for that latch on the texture!

The T-28 isn't really 'my kind of aeroplane' but I might just get it anyway (when the paycheque comes in) just because it looks so well-modelled and full of clever features. The 'how difficult would you like your systems simulations today sir?' dialogue is admirable and definitely something I'd want in any aircraft I build in the future...

haha, the benefits of scrawling all over the picture in GIMP and scaling it down so the detail is illegible rather than nicely and exactly highlighting it :-)