Altimutater

I'll double-check what my min cruise preset gives me - I thought it was 98% but it might be 96%. If it happens again I'll inch up the RPM and see if that helps!

Hi folks, Can I get some guidance on this - I'm cruising at FL280, I've selected a cabin alt of ~9500ft to match, air sources are set to Both, but the cabin alt is stable at 11,000ft? Man Press Cont doesn't change the cabin pressure no matter where I put it, and I've returned it to approx its centre position. Is there anything I'm missing here?

Ah thanks - just needs a reinstall then?

I occasionally get an "Activation Required" notice, along with engine shutdown, usually just when I'm reaching top of climb. It's happened three times since I switched to Gizmo version 23 as described here: https://blog.x-plugins.com/2023/02/gizmo64-version-23.html How do I check if the aircraft is activated, before I start the flight? Having the flight end abruptly because Gizmo has decided it's not activated today, with no warning, while flying on Vatsim, is extremely frustrating. I wouldn't mind (well, I would mind, but not as much) if Gizmo still randomly deactivates the aircraft from time to time, but I can check this and reload the aircraft until it's happy, before I've invested 20-30 minutes into a flight. This was the first flight of the day. Started XP12, set up a flight out of LOWI. Load MU-2. Since switching to Gizmo 23 the console comes up with a warning that a URL for a Sportys competition has 404'd, I don't know what that's about. The silver lining here is the SID involves flying up the valley, turning around, and overflying the airfield in the other direction, so when the alert came up and my fuel dropped to zero, I was able to deadstick back into LOWI, which was pretty satisfying. I've now changed the X-Activation Preferences. It had "Automatically Update License", strict TLS, and a 10-second timeout. I've now enabled the licence update notification, deselected strict TLS, and set a 60-second timeout to accommodate any server network issues. Obviously I really enjoy flying the MU-2 - there's nothing really like it for X-Plane - and I'm hoping to keep flying it for a good while yet!

Flying into a small French airfield for an FSEconomy contract... turns out they're shut at night and have no runway lighting, except for a PAPI the airfield manager forgot to switch off (Still landed safely and mostly gracefully, though)

This is probably up the street of flight model enthusiasts everywhere, and SAAB fans in particular... Includes inflight demo of the stick pusher, 2g turns, "dynamic control response" i.e. give a quick shove to the control column and see how the plane reacts, Dutch roll... all with a couple dozen undergrads on board!

Did a bit more bugfixing - the plugin (source code and a Windows compilation) and user installation/modification instructions are up on GitHub: https://github.com/JDeeth/mu2tweak (shouldn't need saying but no assets/IP from the MU2 are included there, all modifications are at the user's risk and void support, etc)

I've extended my script and it now: filters the radio altimeter provides commands to move the prop levers to all four positions fixes/abuses the OEM nav radio stack NAV radios tune to 25kHz-spaced channels COMM radios tune to 8.33kHz-spaced channels… bit tricky with the 5-digit displays. If the 6th digit is 5 the 5th digit is turned partway to the next number. ~-~compromise~-~ provides a custom dataref for GPS power - if you pull the GPS-15 fuse it goes to zero

Found a dead simple way to get the leading zeros to show on the HSI COURSE and DIST displays! Also to get rid of the subtle extra glow on the 0.1s digit on the DIST display. Before: After: 1. open aircraft in PlaneMaker - after backing it up of course 2. go to 3D Panel 3. find "pilot_course" in hierarchy 4. change Key Frames and add 1000 to the outputs - 0 > 0 and 360 > 360 becomes 0 > 1000 and 360 > 1360 This means, when the course is 4, it displays 1004... but there's only 3 digits so we just see the 004. 5. do the same for "copilot_course" 6. for "pilot_distance" and "copilot_distance", change the mappings to 0 > 10000 and 200 > 12000 7. also change their properties from 3 digits, 1 decimals, -1 period width to 4 digits, 0 decimals, 0 period width 8. save changes in PlaneMaker gen_LED instruments are infuriating about displaying decimal places. They're supposedly a simulation of 7-segment displays, where the decimal place is the 8th segment underneath each number. But it makes a decimal place be the same width as a digit e.g 12.3 is wider than 123. The MU-2 has a clever workaround that makes the decimal place overlap with the 0.1s digit but that gives the double glow. The actual decimal place is already a separate PNG, so by changing the scaling, when the distance is 0.6 NM, it displays 10006 on the instrument and you see 0006 plus the separate decimal place.

Good shout, I never thought of that. By replacing the blank/space part of the texture with another 0, right? To get it to display " 00" on the ground you'd still need two gen_LEDs though - the left digits with blank-space png and the right digits with zero-space png. I think I'd rather leave the art assets as they are and keep the complexities and workarounds in my own code as much as possible.

Bit of experimentation but `sim/cockpit2/radios/actuators/gps_power` is good for the KLN 90B power supply dataref.

So with a little bit of scripting, and then a lot of swearing at X-Plane's generic instruments and a bit more scripting... I have calmed the altimeter! Seems gen_LED.png generic instruments will not display leading zeros including when displaying a value of 0.00. So this took a certain amount of brute force... (there's now two gen_LEDs in there and two datarefs in my script, for the first pair and last pair of digits separately. To make it display 00 on the ground the last pair are given the value 100 instead of 0. I hate this.) chill_altimeter.mkv

Found another one The CROSSWIND legend is missing from the Speed Limitations panel - cf pg34 of the Pilots Operating Manual. (I swear, I'm not going around looking for trouble, I was looking at this panel last week thinking "what do these numbers mean?", and only today I saw that bit of the manual!) Relatedly the "EXTED 20° or 40°" line could be tidied a little perhaps... the ° are overlapping and shouldn't it be "EXTD"?

Well, yes, I can create plugins/scripts for this kind of thing, I'm proposing this is added upstream though.