SIAI-Marchetti S-211 for Aerofly FS2

  • In the last few days I realized I'll never have the time to complete it...let alone having the time bring it to bring it to the quality level of my payware releases for FSX/P3D.
    But given that the aircraft is flyable (and looks pretty cool in VR) I have decided to release it "as is" for free. You can download it from my blog:

    https://indiafoxtecho.blogspot.com/2018/10/siai-m…erofly-fs2.html

    Just let me know if it works - I have only tested it on my PC.

  • Thank you so much ! Sad to read you have to discontinue this development, but that's very nice of you to share your work as is.

    I will give it a try asap

    Hope you have the opportunity to catch up later and resume developping aircraft for AFS2 !

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • In the last few days I realized I'll never have the time to complete it...let alone having the time bring it to bring it to the quality level of my payware releases for FSX/P3D.
    But given that the aircraft is flyable (and looks pretty cool in VR) I have decided to release it "as is" for free. You can download it from my blog:

    https://indiafoxtecho.blogspot.com/2018/10/siai-m…erofly-fs2.html

    Just let me know if it works - I have only tested it on my PC.

    How unfortunate! After Lionheart halted his efforts, I was hoping you would be the first to get a quality plane into Aerofly. I'm sure we will enjoy this, but it's a shame you were not able to take the project to completion.

    Maybe Jetpack can take a look at it and catalog what needs to be done.

    Devons rig

    Intel Core i5-13600K - Core i5 13th Gen 14-Core (6P+8E) @ 5.5Ghz / G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 32GB RAM DDR5 6000 / GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070Ti GAMING OC 12G / Sound Blaster Z / Oculus Quest 2 VR Headset / Klipsch® Promedia 2.1 Computer Speakers / ASUS ROG SWIFT PG279Q ‑ 27" IPS LED Monitor ‑ QHD / 6x Samsung SSD/NVME's various sizes / Windows 11 Pro 64-bit / GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX LGA 1700 ATX Motherboard DDR5

  • Yesssss ! It works !!! Thank you so much Indiafoxecho !

    This one is very good looking, and you are the first to offer us a freeware plane addon in AF2 ! Congratulations and a big Huuuurrrraaah to you !

    I just need to set correctly the spoiler - it is funny but the spoiler stays down all the time. But I will investigate !

    Once again, thank you very much ! Your name will stay in the history now ;)

    Friendly from Switzerland, Herve

  • Seems to work fine!

    https://imageshack.com/a/img922/45/TuNhGM.png

    https://imageshack.com/a/img924/5337/HlPYJJ.png

    https://imageshack.com/a/img922/2862/oidDWQ.png

    It is just that I have too many projects on my desk at the moment... however, apart from the radios and a couple of gauges, it by and large a complete aircraft - it should be good enough for some joy flights and basic traning.

    I am donating $20

    Devons rig

    Intel Core i5-13600K - Core i5 13th Gen 14-Core (6P+8E) @ 5.5Ghz / G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 32GB RAM DDR5 6000 / GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070Ti GAMING OC 12G / Sound Blaster Z / Oculus Quest 2 VR Headset / Klipsch® Promedia 2.1 Computer Speakers / ASUS ROG SWIFT PG279Q ‑ 27" IPS LED Monitor ‑ QHD / 6x Samsung SSD/NVME's various sizes / Windows 11 Pro 64-bit / GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX LGA 1700 ATX Motherboard DDR5

  • Thank you for your work. I am sure many in the community will be truly grateful for your dedication to AFS2, and for your attempts to be a pioneer. Having said that, many of us will also understand the need for you to set priorities regarding both your future efforts, and the choice of platforms they are designed for.

    - Kenneth

  • How unfortunate! After Lionheart halted his efforts, I was hoping you would be the first to get a quality plane into Aerofly. I'm sure we will enjoy this, but it's a shame you were not able to take the project to completion.

    Maybe Jetpack can take a look at it and catalog what needs to be done.

    same thoughts here. I was disappointed too when Lionheart drew a line under his project. Are FS2 planes a lot more complicated or is it just the fact its a new learning curve and the market for payware FS2 planes is still small?

    Is kickstarter a viable alternative approach? Perhaps those who have experienced FS2 would dig a little deeper than most to support investment in addons.

  • Well, here are my two cents after this first experiment (which by the way may not be the last!) with Aerofly FS2...

    First, let me say that whenever I needed help Jan from IPACS was very kind and quick in providing support - and I understand that IPACS is not Microsoft, nor Lockheed Martin. The following notes, which I already sent in an email to IPACS, are just meant to make things better/easier for developers and are not meant to criticize IPACS work.

    Second, keep in mind this was my first effort. I have a long experience in FSX/P3D development and a little in XP11 development - so this was brand new to me.

    So here we go:


    - Frankly the SDK leaves a lot to be desired. It does not contain all the information needed and forces you to peek into the stock planes and "guess".

    - From the conceptual stand point developing aircraft for AFS2 is not particularly difficult. However the approach is quite different from FSX/P3D and XP11. It requires you to undestand, for example, how a mechanical multibody simulator works (which I do as I am a mechanical engineer) and MANUALLY create objects and linkages. This is a lot of work, it is very easy to make mistakes, and could be avoided with a graphical tool.

    - Speaking of a graphical tool, having something like XPlane11 Plane Maker would be awesome. Actually it is almost necessary as browsing and manually editing the .tmd file is a PITA. The S-211 was doable as it is not much different from the MB-339 and I copy pasted quite a lot. But I could not work my way through the landing gear mechanics on my own. Ideally such graphical tool should be able to compile at least a part of the .tmd file automatically.

    - A number of AFS2 updates broke the compatibility with add-on planes (that is why I abandoned the MB-326...just frustration) - required changes were not clear, and again you had to go and check stock planes and work your way to understand what had changed.

    - Having to manually edit the .tmd to create animations is time consuming. Also, even when you understand the general approach of the sim, having to manually create sequences to support animation that could be done with keyframe (e.g. the gear doors) seems a waste of time.

    ...again, I do not want to criticize IPACS - however my concern is that without better tools for developing aircrafts, there is a good chance that we may not see many new aircrafts for this SIM. Which, by the way, is WONDERFUL - especially in VR.

  • Thank you for the honest review of our SDK and functionality. As you may already know we are a very small team and are working on many things at once so, although we try hard to update, the SDK tools sometimes get neglected. We did our very best to produce tools for that are somewhat easy to use but also had time constraints that hindered us from spending more time on the current tool set. Yes, we try hard to stay responsive to the community and thank you for noticing that.

    We will eventually improve the SDK tools and also provide better instructions and maybe even a step by step tutorial so please don't become discouraged and also please ask questions, we will do our best to help in your progress.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

  • - Frankly the SDK leaves a lot to be desired. It does not contain all the information needed and forces you to peek into the stock planes and "guess".

    - From the conceptual stand point developing aircraft for AFS2 is not particularly difficult. However the approach is quite different from FSX/P3D and XP11. It requires you to undestand, for example, how a mechanical multibody simulator works (which I do as I am a mechanical engineer) and MANUALLY create objects and linkages. This is a lot of work, it is very easy to make mistakes, and could be avoided with a graphical tool.

    Thanks for the plane and generously releasing it as freeware.

    As someone who's struggled with the SDK tools from a scenery generation point of view I'd agree with the above. SDK improvement appears to have stopped (for now). I hope IPACS carve out some time to improve it in the near future, even just fix the bugs, although I do appreciate that it's hard with a small team.

    Jan, in a recent post, showed us a GUI tool for aircraft building that IPACS have. He said it wasn't finished yet.

    I can understand the desire to not release stuff for consumers until it's ready. For developers, I think it's short sighted. An alpha quality GUI tool is much better than no GUI tool.

    Lastly, I think keeping the TGI and TTC file formats closed is massive own-goal for IPACS. This stuff is open and documented in every other flight sim I know of. If they were open we'd see Blender plugins, Sketchup plugins, better scenery tools. It'd take the pressure off IPACS creating SDK tools because developers would come up with their own solutions.

    AeroScenery - Easily create photoreal scenery for Aerofly

  • Hi

    It's very easy to be negative and its often hard to offer constructive criticism without sounding negative so here goes. I agree with all thats been said, specially the help offered by Jan, having done scenery development and now trying aircraft I have seen it from all sides.

    Scenery is time consuming but not hard once you understand the method's and naming convention's used by IPACS

    Aircraft is much harder, more time consuming and the real pain in the butt.. the TMD file.

    In the end one has to ask why are aircraft developers not willing to spend the time and why is ORBX the only player in town on scenery, I refer to third party here. Lets take ORBX, all their stuff is for another platform and simply converted, very little time so little cost. Aircraft developers, its to time consuming, even to simply convert from another platform. All this brings us to the real stumbling block, MONEY or lack of investment return. Our relatively small user base makes it difficult to justify all the time needed.

    So here's my two cents.

    Stay as we are in this closed loop and see aircraft development stall, or

    Invest some serious time in the SDK plus documentation to help both scenery and aircraft developers. We forum members say it often enough so perhaps it needs addressing.

    I am fortunate that I am retired so I can and will spend time developing my F104 Starfighter, if I was in it for the money it would be different story and it would go the way of the others.

    Hopefully constructive criticism but something I needed to say, back to the Starfighter now

    Steve

  • Indiafoxecho,

    While I do appreciate your gesture of giving your S-211 to the AFS2 community as freeware, I do hope you can find the time to complete the landing gear design. While the retraction and extension works very well, the give, flex, and absorption is nothing close to accurate.

    Actually it is a lot like trying to land a football. You know it will bounce but the unknown is how high and in which direction.

    Any tweaking would be greatly appreciated.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • I am sorry that the gear dynamics are not satfisfactory - frankly I did not find it particularly hard to land, but user have the final word.

    As I said, without a graphical tool, developing some parts of the .tmd files (such as the gear dynamics) is really time consuming.

    Hello Indiafoxecho,

    It is difficult to complain about a freeware aircraft in AFS2, as this is the first one that we have seen. The intent is simply to have a somewhat better feel at touchdown. The landings are all very hard as there are no means for any flex or absorbing damper action at all. I doubt this is the same design as the FSX/P3D model. The .tmd file does seems to be a large stumbling block as stated by each and every developer that has seen it.

    Thanks for all your efforts and for turning this one loose for use to fly.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • Hi there

    Definitely that is not the same in FSX/P3D - thing is, in FSX/P3D, the gear dynamics are completely different - and much easier to implement - also graphically it is much easier to implement it.
    On the other hand the mechanical simulation in AFS2 is a theoretically superior approach. As I said, I would have gladly implemented a better landing gear...but found it was very difficult to implement it without a graphical tool.

    ...so, given that I though that the aircraft was flyable (and not particularly hard to land IMHO) I left it with the "rigid" retractable gear kindly provided by Jan.
    Hopefully I'll have the time to improve it in future.

  • Hi there

    Definitely that is not the same in FSX/P3D - thing is, in FSX/P3D, the gear dynamics are completely different - and much easier to implement - also graphically it is much easier to implement it.
    On the other hand the mechanical simulation in AFS2 is a theoretically superior approach. As I said, I would have gladly implemented a better landing gear...but found it was very difficult to implement it without a graphical tool.

    ...so, given that I though that the aircraft was flyable (and not particularly hard to land IMHO) I left it with the "rigid" retractable gear kindly provided by Jan.
    Hopefully I'll have the time to improve it in future.

    Thanks very much for taking the time to explain the differences. I also do not find the AFS2 version hard to land - I find it lands hard. That is not a play on words. I have a lifetime of flying a lot of different airplanes including some similar to the S-211 and although many are quick to say their is no “feel” when flying aircraft in a desktop flight simulation, I disagree. This one does not feel quite right at touch down.

    We all may learn something more about the IPACS way of doing things here. There is no doubt that Jan can work magic with that tmd file given the proper motivation and time to do it.

    A few tweaks to the differential brakes would also be greatly appreciated.

    Regards,

    Ray