Landable/solid buildings in AFS4?

1st Official Post

    Just getting up and running after buying AFS4 in the Steam Winter sale. I have quite a few hours in AFS2 and one of my favourite things was landing the R22 on city rooftops. It was great practice for precise take offs and especially landings in tight spaces. The ground effect physics as you approached the building was exceptional.

    In AFS4 however, all the buildings seem to be non solid so you sink through them if you try to land and there is no air cushion when you get close to the surface either. Is this a feature that has been removed on v4 or is there a way to enable solid structures somewhere?

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    Quote from John Hargreaves

    there is no air cushion when you get close to the surface either.

    True, the ground effect seems to be a bit inadequate.

    One example is the Concorde which should (1) achieve smooth landing by just flaring 1 degree (!) and leave the rest for ground effect, and (2) get a noticeable pitch down tendency due to differential ground effect. Currently the FS4 Concorde just slams down on the runway without significant effects from ground effect.


    This is by no means criticism of IPACS’ effort in making the sim, just a suggestion for an improvement.:thumbup:

    Edited once, last by Max.M (January 6, 2024 at 12:11 AM).

    Quote from Max.M

    True, the ground effect seems to be a bit inadequate.

    One example is the Concorde which should (1) achieve smooth landing by just flaring 1 degree (!) and leave the rest for ground effect,

    Based on my research into aircraft codes, IPACS has indeed implemented ground effects for the Concorde. During flight, I also found that an approach at an angle of 11 degrees can support a smooth landing for the Concorde. Perhaps your experience might be influenced by insufficient ground effect forces.

    Compared to other products, Aerofly's aircraft handling can be overly sensitive. A friend told me this might result from insufficient aerodynamic feedback, causing minor details to be overlooked.

    IPACS prioritizes releasing aircraft quickly while ensuring aerodynamic characteristics align with the basic parameters outlined in the FCOM (Flight Crew Operations Manual). However, they are not a team specialized in aircraft development. They can't create products as extremely realistic as PMDG and FINEX.

    Writing aerodynamics is still an extremely tedious task. For my work on editing the B777, most of my efforts involve fine-tuning the aerodynamic codes, which consist of multiple lines of code. Even so, I'm just someone who has researched aerodynamic models and not a professional in this field. It's challenging to make every aspect satisfactory.

    XPLANE and MSFS utilize Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate the entire aerodynamic model within the game. Yet, I think achieving this in Aerofly would be quite difficult.

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    Quote from orangedog433

    During flight, I also found that an approach at an angle of 11 degrees can support a smooth landing for the Concorde.

    I tried again at sea level and yes, 11 degrees is enough. It could be because I flew at higher elevations (such as Denver) with thinner air and/or reduced the throttle too early leading to insufficient speed at touchdown.

    • Official Post

    None of our competitors uses actual CFD to simulate aerodynamics. This would require a super computer in the size of a huge data center to pull of for each individual user. CFD usually takes several hours to be computed for a single second of simulation and is not viable for real time applications and mobile simulators.

    Aerofly FS was one of the first simulators to compute aerodynamics in real time and not use some form of lookup table. We simulate wings based on the actual geometry and real world laws of physics. Some of our competitors have just added a similar simulation recently but Aerofly already has been using that for decades.

    Also you can't compare a single add-on aircraft that costs upwards of 100 dollars to an entire fleet of aircraft in Aerofly where the whole simulatoreith 30 aircraft costs less than this add-on. On mobile the aircraft are even cheaper but they still have the same quality as on PC. I'm flattered when our aircraft are compared to these expensive add-ons which means we are doing a lot of things right.

    Hello Jet-Pack (IPACS)

    Today while flying I spotted a weired texture BUG issue with the Computer Generated AI Traffic in the PC Version. The texture BUG gets frequent as the AI Aircraft comes closer to our Camera Range. Let me show you how is it looking. Maybe the images might help to get an Idea of what is the BUG and you can think of a quick fix to it. "Sometimes the Engine Nascelle Texture is overlapped, Sometimes with the Wings and sometimes the Landing gears"