Warmbrak

Nice write-up Ola! I experienced an overgrown airfield myself today. Are you running 9.61 RC2? The airfield in mine was ok two weeks ago, but flew to it today and trees everywhere. I removed any scenery folders that could interfere, but still no joy ??? I probably missed a folder somewhere.

I will shed a tear the day the colours are so vivid in X-Plane as in that screenshot... :'(

I flew the Mentor again, and now I cannot find the smoke. I'm sure it was there 2 days ago. Tried a whole bunch of aircraft today and haven't seen it again. :-\

Probably an easter egg in the form of Cheech & Chong's bong-shack, compliments of Gizmo? ;D My fires, birds and deer are switched off as well, and it might only be when the Mentor is running. Will try it and report back.

Hi Dan, I've been seeing these as well once in a while. At first I thought it was smoke from a fire, but there is no source. Would like to know as well ???

Matthew, That flickering has been in MSFS for ages. Same as what Cameron stated for X-Plane, do the same thing in FS. Replay a landing, switch to tower view and zoom to your aircraft when it is still far away. Bingo, z-buffer flickers. Javier rightly mentions that this can happen in any game, DX/OpenGL whatever. It is not a big issue because it isn't the norm. I am surprised when people ask about whether these shots were done in XP10, seeing that there was a lot of labels (in video) mentioning it to be shot in XP9, even Austin stated that. Imagine what else you're going to miss out on if you don't read the fine print. For those that haven't tested XP 9.60 RC2, I'm getting the idea that some subtle lighting/reflection features are being tested that wasn't there before that surprised be. Maybe I just haven't noticed it and it existed for a long time. :-[ Excellent work Javier!

Thanks for your reply. What I meant with that link is that the throttle quadrant that you modeled appears to be the one from the normally aspirated Continental as found in the T-34B Mentor. The link provided is the quadrant for the T-34C Turbomentor with the P&W PT6A-25 turboprop. The "condition lever" should really be the current prop lever, not the mixture. Did you visit the link in the previous post? http://www.tpub.com/content/aviation2/P-307_wch3/P-307_wch30066.htm Another problem I had with a flight tonight is once I activated the autopilot, I could not activate the Altitude or EFIS page on the GPS unit. The buttons would engage, but still show the gps unit. So I could not change the altitude value for the autopilot. Not sure how that happened. If I can reproduce the exact sequence of events that caused the malfunction I will post it here. I love the way this PT6 growls to life and how one needs to nurse it to keep it in the limits. Very nicely done.

Any feedback on the throttle quadrant?

Nosewheel steering isn't working for me either - I am treating it as a free castoring unit at the moment and it makes taxiing feel like a tequila filled funfest. I enjoy the startup routine, and the aircraft flies really well. Excellent work Javier! I have one question though - shouldn't the throttle section be set up like this? What got me thinking was the mixture & prop levers in the cockpit (page 20 in the manual), but the checklist makes reference to the condition level (page 34)? I haven't checked, but is the beta stage modeled for this aircraft?

I've been flying Carenado products for many years now, and in terms of MSFS they are probably the premier GA aircraft developer out there. I will definitely get this one as my primary gripe seems to have been resolved. Having a look on the new screenshots on their website the GNS 430 (although the dimensions seem off) now has 3D knobs and is not the 2d perspective textured version anymore. Again, I am referring to their screenshots and haven't tried it for myself yet, but the night-lighting seems very rudimentary - to such an extent where some instruments just look like their daytime counterparts. This might be some if the quality issues Cameron was referring to. That is something wherein the X-Aviation aircraft really excels, and one cannot expect Cameron to point out the exact issues or course. Look, I don't know how long they (Carenado) have been involved in the X-Plane scene, but this is not a bad first effort. Their 3d work is very good as always, and their texturing manages to convey a real life look. I have sat in many old GA cockpits that looked like a cat's litterbox, and this cockpit is a great representation of that: missing instrument here, piece of rubber that will most probably pop out of the panel with the next carrier-deck landing there. It looks like an aircraft that has seen some flying, and something that I'm sure many real pilots used to hire&fly aircraft can associate with. Fortunately it is my birthday tomorrow, so I can get this one as well as the Mentor when the "buy the thing now darnit!" button pops up on X-Aviation. Ladies and gents, this is truly a great time for X-Plane, and it's getting better every day.

XGrinder will only convert X-Plane related files. I have no idea what the g2xpl files look like, but might give it a go sometime. I am making progress with the ortho's, and here is some of my first runs:

Simon, glad to see you moved that bin from the taxiway intersection with runway 26 - I almost clipped a wing on that thing when I was looking for parking on Sunday Speaking about obstacles adjacent to the taxiways at KMPI...

That is horrible news pilotman22. Some rumours suggest that communication by the pilot may have indicated the possibility of reversed ailerons. At least there are a lot of survivors - it is difficult to find the positives in something as tragical as this, and fortunately many passengers were given a second chance on life. Good luck with their recovery.

Success! I found my .pol file in OE and added it without any problems. Had a hard time getting the polygon points placed accurately, so I saved the .dsf and got to work. My original images have world files associated with them and are 2048 x 2048. Thanks to the wiki on world files, I managed to calculate the exact corner coordinates for the overlay polygon. I then downloaded the DSFTools from this page. These are very easy to use with the XGrinder interface. Simply run XGrinder and it will open a GUI window. Drag and drop your .dsf file in there, and it will output a .txt file. Here I could update the coordinates of my polygon with those I calculated in my spreadsheet to an accuracy of 8 decimals (I think OE only does 6). Saved the text file, dragged it into XGrinder again that converted the .txt file back to .dsf format. Fired up X-Plane, and my overlay texture was sitting exactly where it was supposed to. Now I'll try to get 4 overlay polygons together around an airport to see how it goes. Thanks for all the handy pointers!

Great work Justin. I like the way this thing is going - if your application can be the front end for meshtool and offer the user the opportunity to edit data (that is what I gather from your latest screenshot here), it will be the tool many of us have been looking for. X-Plane is in dire need of some kind of "flatten" tool to fix certain airports - are you planning on incorporating something like that in the future? I am hoping that with your future handling of DEM's, something like this will be possible?

Thanks for the feedback Simon. Whilst WED was skewing my images, it did create the .POL files so at least I have that. Using Windows 7, what would you recommend I use to open/edit .DSF files with? I see screenshots of folks editing them on a mac, but when I open them with notepad/wordpad they contain binary characters? I will give this a go in OE. All my images are georeferenced, and I hope that I can place them to specific coordinates without having to visually stretch something to make it fit.

Hi everyone, This is more a question than an answer. I learned from Ola that orthophotos can be placed using OverlayEditor. I tried doing this using WED 1.1 Beta, but ran into this problem. Can anyone please explain how to go about placing an orthophoto using OverlayEditor? Any tips or pointers will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Excellent, and very inspiring work OlaHaldor! Are you using WED 1.1 Beta to place the orthophoto? I am experimenting with Nearmap.com's ortho's for freeware scenery, as their public license is very generous. They also provide a great tool called Hypertiles that will download tiles from their servers, and allows one to export tiles in predefined sizes and resolutions. I have tried to create an overlay with one of these tiles in WED, but it shrinks my images. Is this the same way you create yours? I am really impressed with your efforts here, and look forward to seeing what you come up with. I especially like the custom texture on the runway, as the default X-Plane runway textures have a very "synthetic" look to it. Best of luck!

I have the same nosewheel clearance "artifact". Firstly I would like to applaud Leading Edge Simulations for this great aircraft. I have flown it a lot over the weekend, and have enjoyed every flight, and will be spending a lot of time with this one in the future. My main concerns are purely cosmetic. I am writing from memory, and will probably have to back my writing with screenshots and comparisons, but here goes: I find the shape of the windscreen to be slightly off - probably too rounded. The side profile looks about right, but the 45 degree front angles look off (too rounded) when compared to the real Duchess. I am just not getting that "Beechcraft" feel when I look at it. The wings - first thing that caught my eye was the short & stubby look of the wings. The real Duchess's wings look longer and thinner - I'm not sure of this is a wingspan issue or a vertical scale that might be slight exaggerated. Engine Nacelles - together with the wings, these look quite beefy and stubby as well. The real Duchess's nacelles are quite "small" (compared to a Baron) and elegantly shaped. These are purely my personal observations, and when I have the time I might add a screenshot or two to validate them. Please don't see this as criticism - your aircraft models are very good, and I would certainly recommend this plane to any X-Plane user. I do spend a lot of time admiring geometry and these are the things that stood out to me.

I am glad someone brought the topic up. I have been flying the Falcon series since the early days (more than 20 years now ), and during the evolution of Falcon 4 there has been some really impressive modeling of the various models of the F-16 (Look at FreeFalcon 5+ today). If I am not mistaken, the F-16C sold on the Org resembles the Block 40 with the FLIR projection HUD. This version was optimised for night operations, and IIRC projected the forward looking infra-red image directly on the HUD. This data came from the LANTIRN pod, which has not been modeled on this offering. On the outside one can see those vanes on the nose directly in front of the canopy (sorry, cannot remember what they are called). Based on what I remember those were not found on the Block 40, unless they were added later. Let me get to my point - this is a mix & match F-16C, with some elements of the real one thrown together for those folks who would like to fly a virtual F-16 but does not really care about what the real thing looks like. Nothing wrong with that, but just not everyone's cup of tea. Although the 3D cockpit appears to be of high quality, it lacks realism that can only be privided by plugins that will require an insane amount of effort. The HUD looks functional, but appears to lack basic symbology such as the flight path marker. The F-16 HUD symbology is a science in itself, especially when it comes to instrument approaches and and angle of attack. The lack of the flight path marker shows that this is not a IFR model either. The "Detailed Pilot" is way out of proportion, which detracts from the quality of the external 3D model which is done quite well. Textures could be better to compliment the external model - and I agree that the undercarriage is very nicely done. One can see that a lot of work went into this model, and I really commend JCS on the effort. This is not what I am looking for in a model though, and will patiently await Greg's version.