Posts by Jet-Pack (IPACS)

That is not normal but you can actually use the real world procedures to deal with this emergency LOL

There are trim cut of switches on the pedestal that should prevent the autopilot from automatically trimming any further. If you look through the internet for "MCAS" and "737" you will find plenty of people that know how that stabilizer cut off works.

What do you use to trim your aircraft normally? Do yo have a trim wheel or do you use button or key strokes to trim?

Did you have any flaps extended and was your autothrottle on as well? When you're flying too slow the autopilot might be able to trim aft quite a lot before it finally disconnects on its own. But usually it doesn't even get close to the full 15 degrees of travel.

When exactly did this happen? Did you have a flight plan set up, where where you in the flight? (Departure, cruise, descent, landing, go around?)

Hi Dylan,

The functionality is as far as I could get it for now. There is no direct to function in the underlying route yet. I can't promise anything and don't know when of if this direct to function will be fully functional.

As a work around you can try deleting some of the route waypoints, though that doesn't always yield the desired result in terms of "direct to". It just removes large chunks of the route and leaves your stranded far away from the flight plan, you'll have to navigate back to the route manually with heading select.

I'm sort of repeating myself a little bit (sorry)

The animations at Key West are just that, animations. There is no physics that you could use to tow an aircraft with this or do some form of winch or catapult launch with these animations. The animations are far away from the physics, they don't even run on the same thread on the CPU. And the communication is one way: physics to graphics thread and there is no way you can affect that from the outside.

Loading two airplanes at the same time is not possible at the moment in Aerofly FS 2. There are also no actual dynamic objects in FS 2, I think the wind turbines have no actual physics, just sort of a "sample wind and spin this fast and turn this way" kind of deal.

But a user made aircraft tmd can most certainly simulate two or more aircraft at the same time. You could have a 3D model of a towing plane and a glider in the same 3D file or add a winch model to your glider model and you could have a two aerodynamics and rigidbody setups that are independent as far as I know. To connect them you could have multiple rigidbody elements that act as a rope and chain them together, creating a rigidbody chain e.g. with 16 elements or so. I'd not go beyond that cause it's fairly expensive to simulate rigidbodies.

What I don't know is weather you could actually disconnect the "rope" without causing a crash. That means you would have to set the simulation reset time to infinite but that is doable. I'm not recommending that you should go and do that, I'm just saying it should be possible. These are the kind of things I used to do (automated glider towing in Aerofly RC 7) and it got me to do more and more stuff and here I am working for IPACS and doing it legit without "hacking" .

Regarding catapult and winch launches, these are kind of tricky to do, as I said. I mean you could modify your f18 tmd but there are no good elements to fake the necessary forces. You could have two jet-engines that normally face into each other to cancel the net force and then tilt them backwards or forwards to accelerate or decelerate the aircraft (could have side effects on the flight model of the aircraft).

For the catch hook it would be really difficult to get the positional trigger. I guess you could move the carrier over a waypoint in the database and then check the fms or dme distance output to that waypoint and then trigger it when the distance gets below 20m or so and the radar altitude being close to 0.2 m or something. Not easy at all though, definitely not recommended spending many hours on this only to be frustrated afterwards.

I don't think it's possible to increase the wheel friction to the level necessary. And if you bounce a little bit (which you do a lot on a carrier landing) you'd lose the grip and not come to rest at all. Also impossible to adjust engine values on the fly. All you could do is add additional engines that normally cancel each other and are tilted to create thrust in a certain direction.

But by that point you're closer to creating a Harrier aircraft, which would be nice, too

Look, if we add in code that changes the barometric pressure it sure won't be a secret mcf setting, it would get a slider in the weather setting.

There is no point in adding hooks to change the pressure and then not add the in-"game" option for everybody to use it. Why add a secret option when it could be an option for everyone. And why just add hooks for an external software and not use the hooks ourselves?

Adding an option to set a fix barometric pressure as a global simulator setting also goes into the wrong direction. This option would have to be removed again once an actual weather simulation is added, because we obviously want the barometric pressure to change from airport to airport.

It's a great idea to have changing barometric pressure but this feature will be added naturally if and when we decide to go and make a new weather engine.

I finally got around to testing the Apollo 50 and it is an impressive and amazing project!

A big thank you to everyone who was involved in making this, now I finally have a runway wide enough and long enough for any aircraft

Doing the space-shuttle approach

Couple of things I noticed, mostly related to the file names and contents of the tsc files.

File names like KTIX_v3.0.tsc are a no-go. File names should be lower case and limited to the characters a-z, 0-9 and underscore. No dots, no capital letters and obviously no dots within a file name or folder name except for the file extension.

-> This makes this lovely add on also work on operating systems like Mac

Within the tsc files I noticed comments that started with #-----, yeah those are not valid comments and are interpreted as file content. Only the text in a line after a double slash // is a valid comment.

-> Can cause issues loading the file

There are also files like the Hornet_Heli.tsc (should be renamed hornet_carrier.tsc) that have an invalid syntax, cause some lines were commented out but you forgot to comment out the last trailing > In this case this doesn't make a difference but it's not a clean syntax.

The files also contain the tab character which is not allowed either... You should replace all tab indentation with four white spaces.

-> Can cause a simulator crash when the scenery is loaded or in case we change something in our code

Some of the tsc tags like <[string8][lname][]> should not have a white space inside the last [] because then your long name is going to be " " and not whatever the actual name should be, e.g. it could be using the short name "sname" if the lname is actually empty but in case of a [ ] with a white space in the middle the name is no longer empty and things can start to break.

-> Causes undefined behavior

The tm.log file has a couple of errors and warnings

1.19-tmscenery: ERROR: (geometry 'C:/Users/Jan/Documents/Aerofly FS 2/addons/scenery/Apollo50/places/Kennedy_Space_Center/KTIX/.tmb' not found)

1.19-tmscenery: ERROR: (geometry 'C:/Users/Jan/Documents/Aerofly FS 2/addons/scenery/Apollo50/places/Kennedy_Space_Center/KTIX/.tmb' not found)

1.19-tmscenery: ERROR: (geometry 'C:/Users/Jan/Documents/Aerofly FS 2/addons/scenery/Apollo50/places/Kennedy_Space_Center/KTIX/v-22>

1.19-tmscenery: <[tmvector3d.tmb' not found)

1.20-tmscenery: ERROR: (geometry 'C:/Users/Jan/Documents/Aerofly FS 2/addons/scenery/Apollo50/places/Kennedy_Space_Center/KTIX/pa42_livery1_virtual_220_obj.tmb' not found)

1.33-tmfile_properties: WARNING: property 'element' is not a member of type 'tmsimulator_scenery_object' hash=6339722941103191957.

1.33-tmfile_properties: WARNING: property 'element' is not a member of type 'tmsimulator_scenery_object' hash=6339722941103191957.

1.33-tmscenery: ERROR: (geometry 'C:/Users/Jan/Documents/Aerofly FS 2/addons/scenery/Apollo50/places/Kennedy_Space_Center/Visitors_Center/.tmb' not found)

1.33-tmscenery: ERROR: (geometry 'C:/Users/Jan/Documents/Aerofly FS 2/addons/scenery/Apollo50/places/Kennedy_Space_Center/Visitors_Center/.tmb' not found)

1.34-tmfile_properties: WARNING: property 'element' is not a member of type 'tmsimulator_scenery_object' hash=6339722941103191957.

1.34-tmscenery: ERROR: (geometry 'C:/Users/Jan/Documents/Aerofly FS 2/addons/scenery/Apollo50/places/Kennedy_Space_Center/Port_Canaveral/3D_Autogen_Buildings_Jake/.tmb' not found)

-> Can cause crashes

The download also contains files like: toc_converter_config.tmc and tm.log files. Those should be excluded from the a release product. I also found a zip file A50_Center_T_Michael_FS.zip within the folders... 1.3MB large.

-> Increase loading times and download size

I went ahead added a runway and more parking positions to the carrier, see the file attached.

Sadly the F18 catches the fences at the end of the carrier deck on the two forward start positions.

But the start position towards the end of the deck works great and you can take off with full afterburner and a slight dip below the deck and some wet pants

This gap is sometimes causing issues during touch and gos though...

Quote from ussiowa

Now that we have somewhat useable aircraft carriers, I wish we'd find a solution for cables and catapults.

For cables maybe we could simulate a steep up slope without the plane moving up. Just an idea.

Maybe Jan has an idea how we could modify the tmb on the fly, or externally (if the hook hits a certain point on the deck, then the brake coeff becomes big or something to that effect).

Where can I get my hands on a usable carrier for practice?

The latest version that I have of a user made carrier still sucks me below the deck on contact.

That's impossible because of the realistic physics. Nothing in the 3d model can be done to create fake a catch hook or catapult.

I mean you could potentially modify an aircraft in such a way that a "catapult launch" or "catch hook landing" are possible but it's not worth the effort just for the sake of faking it.

By the way.... if anyone can edit that carrier:

The area on the right is ok. I can park there no problem. On the left... not so much.

And this additional surface is the reason why... I guess:

So if you could remove that, that would be great.

Cause then at least we then could do this:

or this:

even if there will be a 0% catch chance it will be kinda cool

tmb files cannot be edited at all.

tmd and tmc files are normal text files (behave like *.txt)

Quote from nickhod

That's useful in it's own right. Is it in a post here?

What I liked about converting to and from XML is that you can use any IDE like VS Code, and I could also split it into small files using XML includes.

Since I'm coding the TMDs in Visual Studio now too I don't use Notepad++ for that any more and the keywords are outdated. I mean you could renew them with the code snippets tool that I provided https://www.aerofly-sim.de/download/downl…re/codesnippets but I sort of got used to the black on white style and my eyes just snap to the important bits inside the third pair of square brackets.

That's why for me an xml editor style would slow things down, I'm just not used to reading xml code. But if you're used to it I see that it might speed things up for you. and that's a good thing. The only issue that I would see is: how do I add comments and how do I indent parameters in a block form, e.g. like for aerowings. Usually I do " 1.0 0.0 0.0 " for the string, with leading and trailing white space, which might look weird in xml.... but in tmd block form it works great: [ 1.0 0.0 0.0 ] looks more like my c++ code ( 1.0 0.0 0.0 ) and without that it looks too cramped and isn't easy to read [1.0 0.0 0.0 ]. This makes a difference after 8 hours of work. In Jeremy Clarkson's voice: "Whitespace gooood. No whitespace baaaad."

And on top of the readability... I wonder how do you "ctrl+s", "alt+tab" + reload in aerofly then? I imagine you would have to compile your xml back to tmd first and that takes a couple more clicks or key strokes I guess? Unless you hook it up to your IDE commands. And I sometimes do that 10x a minute, so even the "ctrl+s" and "alt+tab" already gets annoying.

That Notepad++ language file also offers code folding but I didn't use it much. What I do do is have multiple instances of the same file open in Visual Studio, with vertical split and horizontal split.

I'm not saying that it always looks like this: but it can look like this and it helps to edit multiple sections at the same time.

( DO NOT SHARE THIS PICTURE - also because of what I'm editing ... no comment )

And on my wide screen monitor at my work place I have much more space laterally for this kind of stuff.

What I would like to see is an short hand version of the tmd code.

e.g. from this:

<[file][][]
    <[modelmanager][][]
        <[pointer_list_tmuniverse][DynamicObjects][]

            // hello world
            <[logic_greater][AGreaterB][]
                <[string8][Input0][A.Output]>
                <[string8][Input1][B.Output]>
            >
            <[logic_and][ABAndC][]
                <[string8][Inputs][ A.Output B.Output C.Output ]>
            >

        >
        <[pointer_list_tmgraphics][GraphicObjects][]

            <[hingedbodygraphics][SomeSwitch][]
                <[uint32][PositionID][Fuselage.R]>
                <[uint32][OrientationID][Fuselage.Q]>
                <[string8][GeometryList][ Switch ]>
                <[tmvector3d][Axis][ 0.0 -1.0 0.0 ]>
                <[tmvector3d][Pivot][ 0.0 0.0 0.0 ]>
                <[string8][AngleID][SomeSwitch.Output]>
                <[float64][AngleMax][0.3]>
            >

        >
    >
>

Down to something this:

modelmanager/DynamicObjects

// hello world
logic_greater AGreaterB
Input0 A.Output
Input1 B.Output

logic_and ABAndC
Inputs A.Output B.Output C.Output


modelmanager/GraphicObjects

hingedbodygraphics SomeSwitch
PositionID    Fuselage.R
OrientationID Fuselage.Q
GeometryList  Switch
Axis          0.0 -1.0 0.0
Pivot         0.0  0.0 0.0
AngleID       SomeSwitch.Output
AngleMax      0.3

We want to offer a solution that works for all of our customers and only a small minority of users know what Navigraph is. We need one consistent navigation database across all of our platforms to allow new features like new approach procedures or shareable user-defined routes to work on all of our platforms.

OK, so just the map on the GNS freezes and nothing else? (That's good news I guess)

Are there other aircraft where this happens? And is this the moving map with the ground textures or just the map with the airport icons and route (overlayed onto the map)?

Where are you flying and does this happen with or without a flight plan?

As far as I know the aircraft are not controlled, they are moving as animated vehicles similar to the cars but not "snapping to the ground".

As far as I know the Duchess 76 features the latest IPACS GPS430 which offers pretty much the same as the 530 just on a smaller screen.

There may be an update available for you?

Regarding the crashes: if anyone can reproduce this with the latest version then I can fix it. Some users reported crashes when using the GPS but I have never been able to reproduce them but I found a discrepancy in the code between the released version and my version which could have explained crashes in older versions of the Duchess and Aerofly FS 2. But there shouldn't be any crashes in the latest version and if there are, how can I reproduce them?

Currently the price for an up to date aviation navigation database is unreasonably high so unfortunately this has to wait a bit.

Sounds like your anti virus software might have snatched the executable...

Thanks, and are you opted into in the Aerofly FS 2 steam beta or not?

Which version of Aerofly do you use?

Steam or DVD/Aerosoft?

In the settings there is an option in general I think that turns the overlay off and on, you may have to reset that?

Quote from TomSimMuc

Thank you Jan for your comment.

Now as I have you here: is there a solution for XREF objects in toc files which need to be elevated?

Sorry but I have less experience in that regard than you do.

Nice work with the cars, though they are distributed too homogeneous. People don't like to walk that's why in real life you'll see most cars bunch up towards the terminal entries. Also makes it easier to land on the roof with a chopper if they are all on on side

When (and if) we add moving ships with helipads on them this will probably come naturally. As of today I don't see this being used much and it takes a few hours to set this up and test it without any improvement to the core.

It might be easier to set up a calculation table (excel, libre office) where you can plug in lon/lat coordinates and a rotation if you need to do this more often.