FlyAgi

So it's also impossible to inject some kind of generic fake reflection bitmap onto the water (derived from the actual SMP cloud coverage but simplified) or into the PBR engine? And, I forgot to mention: Is it possible to add a clouds brightness control to the menu? I think the clouds in your preview screenshots are a bit too bright when seen from below but as this is a matter of taste maybe this should be adjustable. In the previous SMP releases there also where darker clouds depending on weather, I hope those are still avalable in the v5 release.

One more thing: Are you bringing back the water reflections when using Vulkan rendering? Not having water reflections is currently leading me to not use SMP 4.x because when flying Helicopter mostly nose down I see more water than clouds and XP water sadly looks very bad without reflections (this is an XP issue of course).

Voxel based clouds but faster than ever - here we can see real professionals at work. Awesome news. :-)

I second this, engine sound is much to weak in cruise flight now, it may be more realistic then before but not enjoyable to me, no matter what I do to the noise cancelling it's getting on my nerves pretty soon while I really enjoyed the older engine sounds. I see there are some subtle improvements in the sound overall, the second fuel pump for example is now audible and when taxiing it seems more polished now but engine sound in cruise is a step backwards I think. Further, there was a pretty cool engine crackling sound after shutting down the warm engines, this is barely noticable now. And at last the left fuel tank selector does not produce any sound while the right one does.

The 1.1.1 version also has a new soundset it seems but the new one does not sound good to me, the engine pitch is much higher now and overall the older soundset from the 1.1.0 version was much better regarding engine sounds.

As I did not find anything regarding experimental flight model in the manual I have one question: Is the BN-2 supposed to be used with experimetal or with standard flight model? :-) Agi

Thanks fpr the painter friendly texture mapping, it's really a joy to paint on your BN-2. :-)

For me some items are not restored too. These are: Fuel tank switches (both are opened at every flight start) Headphone plug (but volume is restored) Mixture Throttle Prop pitch Red electrics bar Edit: I found one more item: Fuel quantity

I finally increased the cloud coverage radius (about 30.000) but this ended up in frequent and regular microstuttering while my general FPS where still the same as before (60 FPS with Vsync). Those stutters immediately vanished after I moved the slider back to 10.000 and averything was smooth again.

That's funny... for me the default clouds are much faster with vulkan, the high gpu load issues I always had with these clouds when close to a cloud layer is gone almost completely. Also I had no performance issues with SMP 4.9.3 so far, aside from a micro stutter issue when increasing cloud coverage radius.

Thanks... will try to do that... maybe it get's even better. :-)

Awesome shots... do you think it's save to increase cloud coverage distance now? I still have it on 10.000... BTW: May I share those screens in some german forums?

:-)

I think the new clouds lighting looks amzing, very natural and for me personally those are the best clouds I've ever seen in a simulator, including FS20 alpha (I don't like their clouds at all). Further I'm still impressed how the SMP clouds give a feel for their position, most cloud system look somehwat 'flat' like a picture but with SMP everything feels truly threedimensional for me (don't know what's the magic with SMP, no other cloud system ever gave me that feeling). Also the towering clouds seem to have improved over time, every formation now looks different it seems and I always loved those towers... :-)

Thanks. I thought I could make a work around until it's fixed... :-)

Is there a way to hack this using a dataref?

I made my own livery based on the blue one included. :-)

The plane will roll left - this is because of the propeller torque, the propeller is rotating to the right, so the airplane slightly roll to the left and this effect gets stronger at high power settings. In theory you should be able to use roll or rudder trim assigned to buttons to correct this but I don't know if the aircraft prevents you to do so for realism as the Sundowner has no roll or rudder trim as far as I know. I suggest to fly the sundowner at about 2500 rpm in cruise flight so the roll left tendecy is there but in a way I think it's fine. I personally don't like having no torque effect at all (of course, this depends on aircraft and engine configuration, if the real aircraft rolls left I want my virtual aircraft to do so as well).

Are you talking about grass strips and, does this also happen on default airports and their grass runways and taxiways? For me the Sundowner works well on grass (and paved ground of course) but some designers do grass strips and don't care for debumping the ground so this might be related to missing ground surface definitions on some airports. This might be intended as this is heaviliy depending on power settings, higher throttle leads to more left side roll and to some degree this seems realistic to me but I can't tell you if it's possibly overdone.

Well... I have to thank you for the sundowner... As I said before, this combination, high end visuals AND great sound AND great performance is really a rare combination and this is why I was always looking for new GA aircraft finaly not forcing me to make compromises in one of those categories. :-)

Thank you very much. :-)

I'm not sure if this is intended or an issue but I have the following problem with my landings: With full flaps and full nose up trim I can't get the nose up for the flare if the throttle is set to idle, power off (at about 68 knots according to the manual). On low speeds with power off it seems as if there is no elevator authority at all resulting in somewhat weird landings.

As you are working on an update I thought it might be useful to report a nasty bug I experienced: Sometimes I can't get the GPS turned on, it does not respond to the avionics switch and the display remains black no matter what I do. This seem (I'm not completely sure about that) to happen after switching from a different aircraft to the sundowner (in a single X-Plane session) and, if this happens, the file 'states.dat' shows 0.0 value for the 'GPSOn' line. Setting this value to 1.0 (or anything higher than 0.0) this gets fixed and the GPS gets powered on again. Great plane btw, looks and flies great, sounds amazing and has no impact at all on FPS for me - this is a rare combination, most high end GA planes are FPS killers or their (engine) sounds are pretty weak. :-)

Just watch my video - you can clearly see I don't use a weather injector, the video shows my weather options and the manual clouds setup. Later in the video I also change clouds to scattered and broken in the menü and you can see the effect instantly, clouds fading in and so on. Mabye Real Weather Connector does have some effect (I have this installed) but I think Frank has to tell us if RWC has an effect on weather presets or not - in theory it should be inactive if I don't fly with real world weather. I checked this once again, deleted all metar files and removed RWC from plugins, still I get the results shown in the video.

I always use 'puffs' for the cumulus.