Help for development of the A330.

Looking very good! I'm guessing the outer flap texture UV unwrap is not correct yet or there is an issue with the normal vectors of the triangles?

Quote from Crabonoe

Jet-Pack (IPACS) Is there any way that the A330 could be modified for mobile like IOS/Android?

Regards,

Mr.Krabbs Son

Please read the full thread and the explanation I have there. To answer your question: Zero modifications to the airplane are needed for iOS and Android if it is created in a similar fashion like our airplanes. All out aircraft work on all platforms, that's the whole point of writing your own physics and graphics rendering engine like we did.

But modifications of the game content are not feasible so it would have to be sold by us to make it to mobile. That is because we need to keep the potential crash rate of the devices as low as possible. And for that certain quality standards would have to be reached. Of course we can help along the way but given that it takes us months of modeling work for full time designers to reach our desired level of quality whilst being economical with the use of textures and vertices we can't just put in months of work into a project that is not ours. So it's not that easy unfortunately. The reason why Aerofly FS is able to run on all kinds of devices is because we put in years of optimizations and fine tuning to squeeze the most performance out.

You have a lot of freedom when it comes to creating sounds. (Also is true for lots of other things in the aircraft).
File names are up to you (as long as they are using English letters, lower case, no spaces, etc.), sound modulation is up to you and done in the TMD file of the aircraft. You can layer multiple sounds and fade between them as you like. You can use basically anything you can think of to modulate your sound. Each input variable for the sound modulation (like the engine rotation speeds N1, N2 and also nozzle exit velocity) are send to the sound section by an output in the physics and then read in by a soundinput object. You can then multiply or map these input variables to sound volume and sound pitch (playback speed factor) as you see fit. It requires some work to set it all up and you can copy paste a lot.

Here is how I go about adding a new engine sound:

1. Remove all previous sounds in the TMD file that relate to engine noise. You could also comment out the wind sound and ground roll sounds to make sure anything you hear is just your own engine sound. Otherwise you may not be able to distinguish your own sounds from the flood of sounds that is being played at the same time.
2. Add the sound inputs that you will need back in, i.e. Engine1N1, N2, reverser position, exhaust velocity, fuel flow, burning state, starter bleed valve position, etc. by copy-pasting from other aircraft. Make sure that each sound input has an identically named output in the physics section at the top of the file, otherwise the input remains at zero.
3. Add the takeoff fan noise (as described below) for one engine. Modulate that sound using the engine rotation speed so that it fades in at an appropriate intermediate power setting and is at full blast and correct playback speed when reaching TOGA. Make sure the sound also goes beyond the normal 100% range, well into the 200% range, to make sure that even as the engine overspeeds the sound will continue to increase in pitch and not stop being pitched higher even though the engine is still increasing in rotation speed (if that makes sense).
4. Add the idle sound for the same engine.
5. Add the intermediate sound for the same engine and make the three sounds blend well together.
6. Add the engine start sound, bass sound from burner, white noise from jet exhaust, etc.
7. Adjust the 3D sound by changing the sound cone falloff parameters, so that the fan is best heard from the front, exhaust from the rear, etc.
8. Then copy it all over to the second engine

How adding one sound works:

1. You create a sound file that can be looped with external software, ideally in stereo at highest suitable resolution (e.g. 192kHz)
2. You split the sound into left and right channels, one for engine 1 and the other for engine 2 and export them as 22050 Hz mono *.wav files, file name is up to you but ideally it has some meaning to it like "engine1_n1_fan_extern.wav" and put them all into your aircraft intermediate folder (input for the aircraft converter)
3. Use the aircraft converter to convert the files to generate the TSB file format.
4. Open the TMD file of the aircraft with a text editor and add new a sound loop to the sound section and set the input for pitch and volume to 1.0 for testing, make sure to set the exact same file name. Then test it in Aerofly.
5. When you hear the sound being played in Aerofly (at constant volume and pitch) you can start to modulate the volume and pitch using the sound mappings, sound multiply, etc. So for engine sounds create a mapping that change the pitch from 0.0 to perhaps 3x speed (3.0) as your input rotation speed (N1, N2, N3 or what ever) changes. You can of course copy paste example code from other aircraft
6. When you are happy with the sound modulation you can also fade it in and out in volume by multiplying the volume mapping with another volume map and thus fade from one sound to another.

The length of the sound snippet depends on what the sound is. If you have a real world recording of the engine fan sound then it should be 30 seconds long if not more, especially if there are very characteristic parts that sound too repetitive if played on a loop. The more homogeneous the sound is the easier it is to shorten the sound. If you generate the sound, e.g. by filtering from white noise, then you can get away with 5 second snippets which saves a lot of memory. Single event sounds for buttons, switches etc. are a whole different topic.

One trick that works well for sounds during startup: If you plan on playing back the sound at just 25-50% of the recording speed (e.g. during engine start) then you should slow down your original sound from 192khz to 50% speed first, then export it at 22050 Hz. In Aerofly you can then play it back at 2x speed to meet the original playback speed but the sound quality will be much better when played slower than the original recording.

If you only have a mono recording or if the left/right channels sound too different and cannot be used on their own then you can re-use the same sound for both engines but you should either invert one of the sounds or reverse the sound if possible. You can also play them back at slightly different pitch levels in Aerofly.

The screens are rendered into one or two textures. We usually call this texture "display_light" and "display_light2" or similar. The exact texture name used is defined in the TMD file but the texture also has to be assigned as a material to the luminance texture channel and a light input has to be defined in the TMD.

The UV mapping of the texture usually spaces all screens next to each other in a grid with a small gap in between to avoid edge bleeding into the next screen.

To start I would recommend to copy most of entire A320 TMD file and comment out all Geometry and GeometryList lines so that you can load the aircraft. All objects specified in these lists have to exist in your model otherwise. But with this trick you can sequentially add more of your own objects over time and just have to remove the comment in front of the text line to re-enable it later.