Posts by IPACS Support

I know many of you are waiting for a new Android update. The truth is, that its very difficult for us to maintain this platform, especially due to the huge difference in devices performances.

And simply saying, lets neglect all those users with slow Android devices, you are forgetting that those users make way more than 90% of our customer base! So delivering the update like you have testing in the Alpha channel basically means Aerofly FS 2 will no longer run smooth on 90% of all of our users.

Apple is making it much simpler for us: First of all the number of devices is much lower and Apple also allows to target newer and faster devices a lot more selectively.

We are not banning Android as a supported platform but we cannot push updates out as fast as we want. Just adding a minor small new feature or graphic enhancement basically requires us to test a huge amount of devices again and unfortunately many of those devices do have some serious performance quirks with their 3d drivers, making live very difficult for us.

The preview image should be automatically generated for a new repaint its not required to generate it yourself! Just ensure you have installed the latest Aircraft Converter. If that all doesn't work, Aerofly FS 2 might not find the installation files. A log file would be helpful in this case.

Geoff,

suppose your PC running Aerofly FS 2 and your iPhone, iPad or Android devices are in the 'same' network, then you proceed as follows:

- Find out the IP address of your PC, let say its 192.168.1.100
- Find out the IP address of your iPhone, iPad or Android device. The first 3 numbers should be the same as the PC, lets say 192.168.1.101
- Then for the broadcast IP address in Aerofly enter 192.168.1.255 and leave the port at 49002.

The port 49002 is not something we have chosen, its a port apps like ForeFlight are listening to.

Of course ensure you local firewall settings allow Aerofly FS 2 to send data over port 49002

We will try hard to always have high frame rates even if we add new graphic features. On a 'normal' PC we still have some extra CPU and GPU power left to add more stuff.

Have a look at KINGMAN, our ground objects like runway and taxiway support vertex colors that allow you to blend through the ground smoothly. There might be a bug in our exporter right now that if you didn't specify any vertex colors at all, the whole ground is transparent.

So please add vertex colors and see if the issue is fixed. We will check internally if we can fix this inconsistency.

We will add support soon. Its a little unfortunate that we have to distribute plugins for 3D Studio Max for each new version.

You can run Aerofly FS 2 with a command line option. To run it in Oculus Rift mode do

steam.exe -applaunch 434030 -othervr

If you want to run Aerofly FS 2 for Steam VR when using the HTC Vive call

steam.exe -applaunch 434030 -openvr

As drhotwing1 already mentioned, this will still start the Steam client first.

Hello,
open the main.mcf config file with a text editor and look for the line:

vr_render_native_view_on_screen

and set this to true.

Keep in mind, this reduces performance quite a bit!

Yes, the deviation is caused by a wrong transformation of lon lat coordinates into our global system. We have fixed this bug internally and will roll out a new release soon.

Dave,
yes you can fully use AC3D for aircraft modelling. The DR400 is already included as an example. Some advanced materials in Aerofly require you to add some text strings to AC3D materials, which is a little tedious, but once you know what to do its easy.

The size of the TGI is a mistake on our side, as we do not compress the TGI in the latest SDK. Don't worry and please verify it yourself but the exported DR400 from AC3D should look just fine.

We will add a AC3D airport example as well, but you cannot do vertex weights with AC3D so some advanced features are not possible.

And yes, there are dummy objects in KOKB. We haven't finished the sample yet, they are used to check if the lon lat coordinate system is working properly. The current release version of Aerofly has some issues with the positions, but we have already fixed it internally.

Once we have feedback, that the KOKB airports works and also people can use AC3D we will officially release the new SDK version.

Dave,
we have prepared the airport KOKB in the lon lat coordinate system. A preliminary SDK is available right here:

http://dl1.aerofly.com/aerofly_fs_2_sdk_setup.exe

Please note, that all the tools and plugins have been updated as well, so you need to install them over again.

Using the KOKB airport, it should be easier for most users to get an airport into Aerofly FS 2. Basically all that is required now on the user side is that one needs to get an aerial images for reference that is in lon lat coordinates.

Important: As we had to fix a bug in Aerofly FS 2, please contact us for an updated version via email at mail (at) ipacs.de. We have not uploaded this version to Steam yet as it needs further testing.

Further note: The SDK currently does not allow the creation of your own aerial images. This will be added later. However you can integrate the aerial image yourself in the actual 3D Studio Max file, but this isn't ideal.

Dave,
we have just prepared KOKB as a 3D Studio Max file using lon lat coordinates. We will send you a sample tomorrow.

If its working on your side, we will put this airport into the SDK as well.

Well, this is what should be used in Aerofly FS 2 but it seems like its not working in all cases on some user machines.

Still, you will notice this one frame drop when new resources are being loaded.

We strongly discourage the use of setting the affinity as this can lead to many bad side effects.

The only reason why 60 FPS with VSYNC enable does not feel smooth is the already mentioned fact that whenever we load new textures or 3D models and upload them to the 3D card, we get a few frames that take longer than 1/60 seconds, thus resulting in stuttering.

We cannot reproduce the issue mentioned here, if you have more test cases like this, please report it to us.

Dave,
we will prepare a sample MAX or C4D project for a single airport using the lon lat coordinate system. It should be easier for most people.

Please give us some more time.

Ray, we made a note of this, you are the first asking this. Keep in mind that we have to add a safety height here for this function to make sense.

Sorry, we do not support saving into JPG format. Please use an external converter for this.

Ray,
if you use the Aerofly FS 2 screenshot function ( freely assignable to any key or button ), the screenshots are saved into

Documents/Aerofly FS 2/screenshots

We have delayed the airplane for now as we are not satisfied yet with the engine physics and the sound. So please give us more time.

No, the amount of memory of your GPU is not important, this would only be the case if the memory is not enough. Activating all graphic features and flying around KSFO however currently will not consume more than 1.3GB to 1.5GB of memory. So any card with 2GB or more is just fine.

Unfortunately we have do direct way of getting in touch with NVIDIA or AMD driver developers, they might be able to provide more hints on what the optimal way to upload new GPU data is.