Dozer

Hi Tom, I can see the problem! The white panel is some kind of luggage door. Possibly a separate object from the rest of the fuselage. It looks like the texture for it is in the panel between the two sides of the fin in the bottom left of the image:

Absolutely agree! I was in a quandry when it was released - the BK117 had by far the best-looking cockpit of any aircraft I'd ever seen at that time (others since then have closed the gap), and I didn't want to fly anything else. But I don't know how to fly helicopters properly, and I mostly fly IFR, and flying a helicopter IFR between cities is a veeeerrrrrrryyyyyy ssssssllllllllooooooowwwwwwww experience. If memory serves I solved that puzzle by playing Team Fortress 2 for a few months then buying the Falco.

I'm very impressed with your dedication to the BK117 Nicola! Especially when you discover tricks like the window tinting and rotor colour! I'm looking forward to finishing moving all my stuff into my new house and being able to play with fun X-Plane things like this again!

On a tangentally related note, are there X-Plane sound engineers who like to simulate the sounds an aircraft makes as heard by a pilot wearing these ANR headsets?

The Singapore Airlines one I flew on last year had better in-flight entertainment in economy class - we all got a remote-control thing with a lot of buttons to pick our films and music with. Didn't just have three buttons under the screen. Unless they were omitted from the 3d model for clarity! I have no idea how people flew long-distance in the days before all-singing, all-dancing IFE...

This text has been added to the description which I'm pretty sure wasn't there before: "ATTENTION: Gizmo asks for a donation in support of its development. There will be a temporary screen when you load up if you did not donate. This screen goes away after a set number of seconds. In no way do you need to donate to have the Q400 work as intended." Probably related to the other thread here. The Picasa album they link to for screenshots doesn't have the typos or misaligned textures in the cockpit I'd mentioned in the other thread either. I'd be surprised if they had to take the product down for hours just to change the description though!

The simplest mistake is that you need to enable specific Blender layers for rendering in 2.5. As far as I can find out, the only official documentation for the XP2Blender scripts are two videos on Vimeo by Sam256. http://vimeo.com/user5006039/videos edit @Goran: what do the 'big boys' use then? I was sure you use Blender - v2.4 is it?

I have no idea what's already been made for X-Plane beyond the top-end payware stuff. But I have the maintenance training manual (or part of one) for the Gulfstream II so solely for that reason I'd like to attempt to build one. I like cockpits from the electromechanical era, that period from approx 1960 to 1985 when the instrument layout and behaviour had been standardised but the only 'glass' (ie CRT or LCD) device on the flight deck was the weather radar. My Gulfstream would be a platform for me to practice systems simulation on. It's very easy to get sidetracked by trying to figure out exactly what the windscreen pillars should look like though...

so... no chance of a December 2010 release then? :) I am really hoping to fly this before last Christmas...

Are you also following Dan Klaue's tutorials? You're lucky to be building a jet newer than 1970-ish, after the point when they learned how to make curved windscreens!

Yes! Please do. The image I was talking about was the first image at http://store.armchairaviation.com/ ; the image is here. 'Windsheild' and the text is cropped at "Ice Protection", "APU"; "Baggage Aft", and above the panel light switches. If this is all fixed you really must update that image - the typo and text-cropping really stood out for me and it was the first image I looked at. It's funny, at the time I knew it would be wrong to write off the Q400 from that single screenshot - and I was right! The Q400 IS better than that screenshot made it look! (The 'Alieron trim' was from an early WIP of the IXEG 737. I pointed it out, which reminded that developer why he'd not published that screenshot earlier...)

I hate to point out spelling and grammar mistakes in released products (if it's likely to be too late to fix) in case the developer's first language isn't English. But I wish more people were available to proofread stuff before release. Absolutely. But as far as I know, Jack, Joe, and Nicholas all know English to the point to know that "cant" needs an apostrophe. I'm half teasing and half being serious here... I'm half Australian myself and my family members from there tease us about our English and vise-versa... Heh, I'm half-Australian too! But half British, so all my halves speak English and no other language. If you know more than one language Kaphias there's a chance you'll know the rules of English grammar better than native English speakers!It would be great if the next version of the Q400 could fix the typos on the overhead panel, and adjust the mapping so the words are all completely visible and not half-vanished off the edge of a panel. Typos - well I know many people who really struggle with spelling due to dyslexia and stuff like that, but failing to fix the misaligned text on the panel borders has no good excuse in a payware product I think; it suggests a lack of attention to detail, but I really hope that that is a wrong impression. For me the Q400 is competing with the Saab 340 in the 'being a regional turboprop' field and the CRJ-200 in the 'being a regional airliner with lots of LCD panels' arena, and that's very tough competition (both for purchasing and for flying time) - the Q400 needs all the refinement it can get! (Especially as it's priced at $40.)

I think it's interesting that they don't just describe his actions - they have to go up a few levels and just mention what categories his actions fell into. 'Inappropriate and disruptive behaviour' could mean anything! Jetstar - the first and only budget airline I've ever flown with. Had to leave a typewriter and approximately my bodyweight in secondhand books in Tasmania because of their luggage limits!

I hate to point out spelling and grammar mistakes in released products (if it's likely to be too late to fix) in case the developer's first language isn't English. But I wish more people were available to proofread stuff before release. On that note: any developer who's reading this, if you'd like someone to help spellcheck your work, drop me a PM. Ideally before you spend twelve hours baking 'Alieron Trim' into your cockpit textures. I won't ask for any payment; it just annoys me to see avoidable mistakes made...

Either he is or he's caused some other program to display 'Blender' in the title bar in those screenshots! (Actually, he might be working in, say, AC3D or Max or Rhino or Google Sketchup or Microsoft Excel and then importing the mesh to Blender for Blender-specific purposes - but I'm pretty sure he's said elsewhere in the thread he's using Blender for everything.)

Sorry Thiengo I wasn't clear! My English was bad... When I said "the APU doesn't use fuel" I should have said "If the CRJ's APU isn't using Fuel in X-Plane, then perhaps it's because of...".

The APU doesn't use fuel - is this to prevent the CRJ from breaking the FSEconomy plugin? I don't have either (yet!) but I've heard that tampering with your fuel in-flight, whether that's through the Aircraft/Weights and Fuel menu or directly with a plugin, causes FSE to reject your flight.

It's on my list of Stuff To Buy When Paycheck Comes In And Credit Card Is Paid Off. Hopefully it will run on X-Plane 11...

This is a very old thread now - but I have to say... WOW! Very impressed by this; very clever thinking!

That's really annoying! Just to be clear - if plane A overrides the prop disk and planes B and C do not, if you load A then B then C, B won't have prop disks but C will (or is more likely to)? There's a plugin I've been meaning to write for a while now, to assign key commands to load two or more specified aircraft. This would speed up the time I spend developing other plugins, where I have to switch from one aircraft to another every time I want to replace an aircraft's plugin. Stalled while I summon the effort to learn an interface for using .ini files which, long-term, would be used to record (or store) which aircraft are to be swapped. But if swapping or repeatedly reloading several aircraft can restore the propdisk, then my unwritten test-tool plugin could be used or adapted to load a dummy aircraft on T-28 exit, and immediately afterwards the aircraft requested by the user.

Well written Arno! (Don't safety belts prevent injuries from sudden violent turbulence?)

Isn't that what this whole thread boils down to? Someone's reluctance to pay the damn $10, under the pretext that it wasn't written up in large enough letters. Honestly, wait until life deals you a really bum deal then you get to see how trivial arguing over paying $10 is. Oh, for... I was never arguing against paying $10 for Gizmo! My thoughts were on ways the Gizmo payment could be more easily understood by the user, or included in the aircraft price. edit: Yes, $10 is not very far on the 'bad things in life' spectrum. But attention to details and 'trivial' things should still be reasonably made. I think it is reasonable to make Gizmo a little 'friendlier' to new people if it is possible to do so without a huge amount of loss.

Arno54 can't you put something in XPLMPluginStop to reset that dataref?

I'm bemused that the headset is 'designed for PS3' - I'd have thought a headset was a headset. I like the way it has two channels, one for chat and another for game sound. That would be a good feature for flight sims.

Not sure what's going on with you today, Dozer. YYZ never changed his name, and was not the same person you are talking about. You're thinking of David Rogers, he changed his name to "He who is not welcome here" and last I checked still has it that way. Thread here: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=2675.0 Not the same people. Not the same situation. Ah that's what I was thinking of. That guy who got very offended over... something... I'm still not sure exactly what. He was upset over people smiting his karma and I'd conflated YYZ's comment with his complaint: "I have to say that I found it funny that when I mentioned to Cameron about the .org staff group only having one star, the next day Ben had one star. After a few months Ben was back at 5 stars. A couple of days ago I put my little note under my username and today I see that he is back at one star... " And then there was Ben's comment about being five green stars in one subforum and one yellow star in another. In my head, HWINWH had seen the same thing and come up with some paranoid persecution theory that led to nastier things. But he hadn't, so it's all good (forum-star-wise anyway). Sorry YYZ for not recognising straightaway you're not the same guy as HWINWH. Actually I haven't looked closely at your username til now - I'd been subconsciously reading it as 'YZ Yacht Boy' for some time. Now I get the link between your username, your website, and those excellent VATSIM planning articles. Sorry for not being quicker on the ball there!