Posts by Jet-Pack (IPACS)

  • Any more news on possible fix for shimmering?

    I think the causes are identified but fixing it is not as easy as one may think. Basically we have to work around the existing limitations of the graphics cards.

    In general there are multiple potential reasons for shimmering

    • z-fighting: at a great distances nearby triangles like the triangles of house roofs and the ground are don't have enough depth spacing and tend to switch places in the depth priority: one frame the house roof is in front, the next the ground is in front.
      A solution for decals is already implemented in the Aerofly, I don't know if houses or city models are also rendered closer by... When a lot of houses are in front of each other at great distance under low visibility angle they also start z-flighting, I don't know if it would be suitable to distort the town model and drag out elements that are far away from the camera to fix this?
    • shadow-flickering: at great distances the shadow resolution is reduced to save processing power of the graphics card. But then one pixel in the shadow map is as large as an entire house thus causing large differences in shadow color each frame
      Maybe a rendering technique relative to the ground can be invented so that the shadow map pixels remain static on the ground?
    • anti-aliasing: sharp edges of brightly illuminated roofs and dark walls hit each other in a very few pixels on the screen. The edges tend to jump by single pixels which can be observed by the human eye. Even better smoothing of the edges would take up more processing power.
      But Anti-Aliasing is turned on, maybe it's not sampled often enough? (8x, 16x?)
    • texture-flickering: under a shallow angle high resolution textures become and create artifacts.
      Mip-mapping is already in use to fight against that.

    So yeah, it's not easy to create a non flickering scene with great resolution at great distances and at the same time have high resolution very close to the camera. The native format of floating point numbers used in graphics card just isn't optimal for this. Double precision graphics card are on it's way but it looks like we might be stuck with these sort of problems for a while. It takes a lot of effort to work around these issues so to answer your question: We're working on it and will probably have to experiment with new techniques to get rid of all of the shimmering.

  • Thermals

    Thermals are implemented but too rare. We had a similar thread a while back where we stated that we will look into this.

    It's a known issue and we'll try to fix it by changing a few parameters.

    My thermal experience origins from real world experience for years. Yes the thermals in Aerofly FS 2 are too rare and not good enough for cross country flying.

  • Force feedback

    Hi Jay, as we mentioned in past postings, we would like to provide a good force feedback simulation but it's a lot of work and there isn't any hardware for it yet. And there probably isn't any hardware because no simulator does it right yet... :D

    Cheers

  • Force feedback

    Hi Antoine,

    yeah but in cars you have a direct link from the wheels to the steering wheel, that's why vibrations of the wheels can be felt on the steering wheel. But in an aircraft you don't have that. From my personal experience with with gliders the elevator behaves pretty much like in the video. But the ailerons are different more damped than shown. In our gliders the control forces are too low to significantly accelerate the stick, I can steer the aircraft with two fingers only and if I let go it barely returns to center. That is probably aircraft specific as well.

    What would have been nice to see is the aircraft in a sideslip. Then the center of force of the aileron tends to move to an asymmetric position. Same with rudder, where it can actually suck or push the rudder to the full deflection in some gliders. Only during sideslips though, again showing how little control forces there actually are in modern gliders.

    Also how have you modeled stall buffeting?

  • Force feedback

    Quote from Jay 737

    Thank you guys for your answers..

    @ Antonie - I will do some more testing now when I know what to expect ..

    @ Jan - I've tried that several times but the video won't show up in the post. I do that via "insert link" button right?

    I just fixed it for you: opened link in another browser tap, deleted the entire line of your text, pasted the url with youtube.com and no &feature=youtu.be at the end

    I think it was stuck on creating a link with text != link text. Anyway it's working again

    So if that happens again just remove the entire text line and try from scratch, paste just the url, not the copy paste from the forum or your previous text.

  • Force feedback

    Quote from Jay 737

    I also have a question for Jeff or any admin person..

    I don't know what I've done wrong but when I posted the link of my video originally, the video was actually shown under the text..

    Then I edited the link and some of the text in the original post and the video won't appear any more. Instead there is only the link it self.

    Does anybody know why?

    Hi Jay,

    you may need to add the full url not the abbreviated youtu.be but youtube.com. Just copy paste from your browser url, that should work.

  • Glass display SDK

    So far all glass cockpit code is programmed directly into the Aerofly executable code because it is much simpler and a lot faster in terms of rendering doing it that way. To my knowledge there hasn't really been any request from external developers to create own displays for an Aerofly aircraft. If you plan to create such an aircraft I think its best to get into direct contact with IPACS (though the support mail or something like that).

    At some point in the future we might create tools to create custom glass cockpit code.

    Right now, as far as I know, there hasn't been much demand for it so I don't think it's that high on the priority list at the moment but I could be wrong, too.

    Regards,

    Jan

  • Lionheart Aircraft

    I've had good contact to him and tried to help him with the limited time I had but the progress wasn't very fast. He said he needed a break and might come back to the Aerofly development. Programming an aircraft for the Aerofly is quite different to the way it's done in MS-based flight simes like FSX. There you name a part "gear-left" or something like that and it magically does it's thing. In the Aerofly you have the freedome to do what ever you want but that adds a little bit of extra work for the standard items as well. I love being able to program the aircraft in such a way that it retracts the landing gear with the the radar altimeter output or the aileron input or what ever other logic circuit I might need.

    I also hope he has not given up yet and will come back. With the upcoming update we might need to change a few things around before he can use his aircraft but nothing to serious. Just replacing some names.

    Regards,

    Jan

  • Dash 8: please keep an 'easy' option for beginners

    Hi,

    You've come to the right place. Aerofly is designed to be easy for beginners. There will always be an option to use a navigation dialog to create a simple route from A to B or place the aircraft on the runway, ready for departure. The Q400 won't be any different, if you select the runway the aircraft will be in a takeoff configuration with engines running. If you created a route with the navigation dialog the route will be loaded when you start flying. Later on we will (most likely) add options to create a new route from within the aircraft, via FMS and that FMS will probably be fully functional and realistic. But it will also have a "virtual data link" to be able to inject a new route create from outside the aircraft. That makes it easy to copy paste existing routes or create a custom route from within the nav.-dialog and you won't need to sit there and type each waypoint if you don't want to.

    Right now (at least in my version) there isn't an option to start "cold" so you won't need to be able to start the engines. I don't know if there are plans to add a button to initialize "cold and dark" or just "cold" into the sim right now, it probably will come at some point though. But you will be able to turn off the engines of the Q400 and then make them spool up and relight using the real world procedure. At this point in my developer version there isn't a fully automated start procedure (press one button and you're golden type of thing) but this might also come in the future.

    So to summarize: as you mentioned we design the simulator to be easy to use for beginners but also offer the option to go deeper for those that know how. The complexity of other aircraft will be increased in the future and we will probably implement intelligent features to assist non experienced users or those that just want to sit back and relax. A copilot that is capable of starting the engines or to change the configuration for takeoff and landing would be very neat and I think that would help a lot of our users.

    The proposed "lite" version of the aircraft it not a good idea. We have had that in the past and it didn't quite work out for us. The amount of work was almost doubled and it slowed us down in development any added feature would have to be implemented in a two different versions of the exact same aircraft. And it took a long time to undo that split into "simple" and "real". Instead of simplifying the aircraft we should make the complex aircraft more accessible I think. Create more tutorials on the wiki, maybe even an inbuilt flight school for that or the mentioned copilot that will do does a good job in assisting you.

    Regards,

    Jan

  • what program can import tmb and ttx files?

    No, because there is no need for it to read such a file. The plugin for AC3D either reads an ac3d file or directly exports from the model loaded in RAM. It then writes the tgi file as far as I know, that is just an intermediate file that can probably be reopened but maybe not. So maybe the export plugin can be used to reopen a tgi file but not the final engine format "tgb"

    After that the converter converts the tgi and bmp texture files to the final tmb and ttx files.

    But the converter works just one way as far as I know.

  • what program can import tmb and ttx files?

    the quote "txt" files can be opened by any text editor but I think you ment ttx

    The only software that can reopen the tmb and ttx files is the Aerofly itself.

    The tmb and ttx files are binary file formats that protect the raw model and textures.

    Currently there is no external tool to edit pilot figures. But you could theoretically create your own model and export it, I think the process is the same as for aircraft but I am not sure.

    Jan

  • Geoconvert tool in June?

    Quote from jozef

    Would be great if
    I could try some scenery myself before playing with the convert tool. Is there any way to have some scenery uploaded to wetransfer or something.

    Tnx!

    I'm afraid due to copyright issues of the satellite images it won't be possible to share the scenery legally, at least not outside of the US.

    It may be ok for personal usage only, I'm not really sure.

    Regards,

    Jan

  • Did I read in all this new information that the Autopilot upgrades will be released along with the Q400 - whenever that happens?

    Yes the Q400 aircraft comes together with the autopilot update. Fingers crossed I didn't make that many mistakes in the autopilot and you can all enjoy fully automatic landings really soon. I'll be posting a very long change log for you guys and girls, just to mention everything that has been added to the autopilot and to the airliners. It sure is a lot but you'll see for yourself :)

    Regards,

    Jan