Compatibility/Incomaptibilty with AF5 models

Hi Mike,

the aerofly5 aircrafts are compatible to the aeroflyRC7 for the most part. They won't show any control surface movements and some may crash the RC7 if they are not well programmed (see below). But most of them load properly and you can let them fly by pressing "h" on your keyboard to give them some height. As mentioned before you won't be able to control them...
Simply install the aerofly5 aircraft for the rc7 and test it out.
Repaints might work out of the box - haven't tested it myself yet. But you mentioned they work, so :);):o

Edit the .tmd file of the desired aircraft to fix the control issue:
You need to replace any ".GetOutput" and any ".Position" with ".Output". Save the file and reload the aircraft. Now you can control it.
On top of that the airbrake channel of gliders need to be inverted.

If the aircraft crashed your RC7 there most likely is a problem with the rigidbodygraphics in the tmd file. You can only use one object of the 3D model once! Using one object of the 3D model (e.g. the fuselage) twice in two seperate rigidbodygraphics results in a crash of the RC7 (same for AeroflyFS). The aerofly5 is not as sensitive to that, so the developer of the aerofly5 aircraft probably didn't notice the mistake.

I use Nodepad++ to help me convert the aerofly5 aircrafts for the aeroflyRC7.

Step-by-step:
1. Install every aircraft properly to the aeroflyRC7 user-folder
2. Load up every .tmd file in Notepad++
3. Use the search and replace function of the program to replace .GetOutput] with .Output] using "replace all in all opened files" (or how ever its called in English)
4. repeat for .Position] also to .Output]
5. Save all files

Cheers,
Jan

Hi Mike,

oh yeah, I did not thought about that. I'm sorry!
You could use: replace all ".Position]" with ".Output]"!

Well I'm going to update my aircrafts when I have time to do it. Currently I don't...
The thing is, we all do this for free and we might want to do other stuff then sitting down for a finished and released project to make it work for the aeroflyRC7. I hoped we would never be in such situation but Ipacs decided to change some core parts of the aeroflyRC7 like they did in the aeroflyFS. The new .Output is better because its more unified throughout the entire file but I wished the'd kept a support function for the .GetOutput etc. so that you could load any aerofly5 aircraft and it works...

From what I've heard (long time ago, not sure if this is correct, never tried it) they do support it in some way:
If you load an aerofly5 aircraft and edit it with the inbuild editor and then save the aircraft it should be "converted" to the aeroflyRc7.
Never tried that and I probably never will, because I tend to not use the inbuild editor at all. I am much quicker with the external text-editor and its only there where you get the full access (e.g. implement an autopilot or change the description texts for every language).

[Now sth somewhat off topic]
As I mentioned before I am currently programming an external editor for the aerofly aircraft family (AFPD import; aerofly5, Rc7 and FS full edit capability). This project takes a lot more time than I ever expected and I now figure how much time it means to program a full simulator. When you've never programmed any larger project before you might think its easy and should not take such a long time for an update but when you did it becomes more and more clear that its quite hard work. So big shout out for Ipacs, they are doing a fantastic job.

My editor kept me busy for the last 1,5 years and it must be several hundrets of hours that allready went into it. And I only start to see the finish. Currently I am at a point where I can import AFPD aircraft and export them to the aerofly5, RC7 and FS. Of course you can also import from af5 and export to Rc7 oder FS if you so desire. You can drag templates of objects from a toolbox into the tmd, edit them in an easy fashion (several objects can be edited at the same time) and you get a nice tree-view like overview on how everything is connected together (e.g. which part is "glued" onto which)

That is where a lot of my free time goes into and I'm not getting payed for all this.

Now, it still isn't working perfectly there are a few hiccups here and there. But I am quite happy of what I created so far.
Future plans:
At the point of release I want the program to also be able to install any aircraft from a downloaded zip-file.
I also plan to make some sort of script functionallity that allows you to modify several aircraft at the same time. Lets say you have a bunch of airplanes and you want all of them to have smoke on their wing tips or you think this towing plane needs an autopilot, every engine now consumes fuel that gets drained from a tank and so on... It should be as easy as drag and drop that modification into a list that gets executed and everything is added. Yeah but that is a future plan.

I hope that at least a few hundret people are interested in such a program. It really flattens the learning curve and shall make creating own aircraft a lot easier. And if you read this you probably are one of these persons, I hope!
Do you want to see screenshots, maybe?

Cheers, Jan

Hi Michel,

thank you very much for your interest. As I am currently writing my bachelor thesis I don't have that much time to finish the program, I am afraid. The import of AFPD aircraft has not been touched by me for a very long time because I actually wrote an algorithm to detect any 3D model and generate aircraft that way. Soon I hope to implement an additional code that also grabs some key values from an afpd aircraft such as the masses and airfoils. Its not very high on the priority list at the moment though. The afpd input still works I think. I used the 3D detection though for the latest AFPD aircraft I converted. Look forward to an upload of that aircraft soon, once I am entierly happy with the flight behavior.

Regards,
Jan