Thanks to all of you for your help. I'll try your suggestions next time I get to work on my model. One of the reasons Aerofly has become my favorite simulator is the extremely helpful and welcoming community it has. No arrogance or my-sim-is-better-than-yours attitude like sadly often found on other forums.
Best regards, Fabian
Hi Fabian,
The night textures should only contain the additional light, not the color of the wall.
It is not a replacement texture that gets loaded in, it is a light map that is always loaded but has greater effects in dark areas. When they are too bright reduce the strength of the light in the texture. White is like the brightest window that you can imaging I think, so it would be visible at day.
So you mean the texture should be completely black except for the small areas around the lit windows? Should it be a grayscale texture like a normal or specular map or may it contain colors, too?
Add Night Texture option in MCX is not the correct way to create night textures. Simply rename desired daytime textures in MCX with '_color', right click 'remove alpha' , export model in obj format. Once exported to folder, edit desired '_color' texture into night texture, when finished create a copy and rename it with '_light'. You should now have two BMP texture files. 'Example_color' and 'Example_light'. Hope this helps.
I understand what you mean, but the problem is how do I convert the textures to ttx format without MCX? In your tutorial video you just pulled the texture to the content converter executable, but when I do that I just get an error message that some config file couldn't be loaded.
Thanks for your help, guys!
I´m just beginning to learn how to create 3D models and add them to Aerofly. I´m still an absolute newbie and have to learn everything from scratch, so progress is very slow. At least I managed to create a model in Blender, texture it and export it as a collada file, which I then converted and placed with Model Converter X and exported it to the aerofly format. After some trial and error it finally showed up correctly in the simulator. Now I wanted to add a night texture to the model, whuch I made with Photoshop using a similar method as shown in ZoSoChile´s tutorial video. Then I added it with MCX "add night texture" option in the material editor and exported it again. Unfortunately, the night texture doesn´t work as expected. Here are some pictures to illustrate the problem:
This is the "day texture" I´m using:
Hi.
and this is the night texture:
In the game it looks like this (please don´t judge the model, it´s my first try and I know it doesn´t look that great, also the screenshot is taken from pretty far away):
And at night like this:
As you can see, the night texture shows up much brighter than it should (the upper floor part which doesn´t have a night texture shows up dark as expected), and the night texture also shows up during daytime (the windows shouldn´t be white in daytime). It seems like the two textures are just projected over each other all the time instead of fading into each other at night. Does anybody know how I can resolve this? I have the feeling that maybe MCX doesn´t convert the night texture correctly, but when I try to convert it with the aerofly content converter I only get an error message.
Cheers and Best regards,
Fabian
Great news.! You're really listening to the community!
So we have numerous real world pilots saying it's realistic, as an ex heli pilot, I know where my vote goes.
Perhaps the previous PRO version was not quite right and this latest version is spot on. If I were you I would be thankful the previous PRO wasn't quite right as it has obviously helped your desktop skills level.
The only way anyone can make a direct comparison is if you are proficient in both the real helicopter and sim world helicopter.
Steve
Display MoreThis is a funny discussion, especially because we see the same trends we usually see in the rotorwing community.
"If it's not way too hard, it's not realistic". I've been hearing that for years. Oh and the old "it models VRS, so it's a highly realistic helicopter sim".
Both are myths. I've seen helicopters model VRS quite nicely and the rest of the flight model is bogus. And I've tried very hard helicopters that pilots dismissed it as being unrealistic because they were just way too hard.
In the end, there are a few things that we all need to remember:
- These are games. No I will not start the "game vs sim" discussion but we are talking about something that runs in our home computers. They are prone to having some limitations from the start. Mainly because...
- ... our computers don't simulate highly complex, turbulent physics in real life. Not even full-blown class-D sims do it yet. Let alone our puny home computers;
- We all use different systems (computer + controls + settings) and all of that influences how we handle helicopters and how they behave in the sim;
- We lack the physical feedback pilots feel when flying aircraft;
IPACS and other companies do the best they can with the resources they have available. If I use a Pro Flight Trainer Puma and another guy uses a Thrustmaster T.16000 our experiences will be VASTLY different.
Who am I to say my perception of the R22 is better or worse than that other guy's perspective? We cannot compare both unless we were sharing the same computer.
IPACS is working hard to make the R22 a good helicopter for the sim and I trust them to make a good job. Does being realistic mean it's a bit simpler? Let it be, then. Haven't you heard pilots saying sims are harder than real life helicopters? Well...
I'm sorry some of you are disappointed at this change but if you are asking for a more realistic environment, you may have to live with the fact that harder does NOT mean more realistic.
I am glad IPACS is improving helicopters. I've seen a lot of developers out there throw in an half-assed version of helicopters and never improve it. IPACS did a great job AND they are still making it better.
This very much sums up the way I see it too. Funny you mentioned that real life heli pilots sometimes find simulators more difficult than the real thing because of the lack of physical feedback from gravity and the forces on the Cyclic, one guy once told me that he flies a helicopter "with his a**" and being limited to visual cues of where the aircraft is moving makes simulators more difficult to him than real flying, maybe also because he spends a lot more time on real aviation than on simulation. So as you said, harder doesn't always mean better, and in the end it all comes down to how much you enjoy what you get. I'm very happy with what IPACS provided.
Perhaps it should have three modes: "Easy Mode", "Professional Realistic Mode" and "Hard Unrealistic Gamer Mode" ?
I'd also vote for a Challenge Mode where you need to take off and land on every helipad in the LA area in under 90 seconds while controlling the R22 only with a Guitar Hero Drums controller 
Please don’t think that this is trying to be offensive Fabian, it honestly is not, you can’t describe realism if you haven’t flown the aircraft or a very similar type, it is using knowledge that is really not there, another PC sim’ doesn’t count. This is a million miles from a trolling attack, I am only trying to be humbly constructive.
I have a very, very small amount of time, long ago in an Enstrom F 28, it is a piston single nominally 3 seater with a 3 blade rotor on a tall mast, so I have almost no experience in a different make. It didn’t have the initial FS2 R 22’s attitude rapid-twitchiness which I’ll agree does seem better but it moved a beginner more in all 3 axes more quickly and needed more skill to get into a perfectly stable hover, I never got close to it in real life!
I’m grateful for the valuable contributions from the R 22 pilots, they help the developers and us unqualified enthusiasts, I can’t read enough from them.
Of course I'm in no position to judge how closely the Aerofly R22 compares to the real thing without having actually flown it, but I got the impression that some others (not you) attacked the developers for changes they didn't even understand and claimed that this made the flight model less realistic without knowing how the real helicopter flies anymore than I do. Jan's answer seemed plausible to me and I just think that we should cut the developers some slack and have more patience if such a small team doesn't answer every question within a few hours.
Well, thank you a lot for your reasonable answer! You can see yourself, proper communication with us customers makes the whole thing a lot easier.
If your testimony is correct, and if the current OB's flymodel comes closer to reality than the previous one, then i can exist with that.
REALISTIC FLIGHT BEHAVIOUR GOES OVER EVERYTHING; and it is something for what IPACS and Aerofly are famous for, since its beginnings.
Okay, the journey goes on, together with Aerofly
All the very best and THANK YOU:
Ok, I finally opted in to the Aerofly beta and had 1,5 hours of time with the updated flight characteristics of the R22 with the bendable blades modeled now and here's my honest opinion : the flight model is a thousand times better than before, and here's why : before the beta, I found that the R22 was extremely and unrealistically hard to control, it felt like minimal cyclic and collective input made the helicopter jump and turn around wildly like a housefly on meth. Although of course I'm not a real life pilot, I have logged hundreds of hours in the Dodosim Bell 206 for FSX and P3D which is considered to be one of the most realistic helicopter simulations around and which is also used for professional training. And I I just couldn't believe that a R22 was THAT hard to control even for someone who knows a little about flight dynamics and aerodynamic effects of helicopters. Now don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that flying a heli is supposed to be hard and needs lots of practice, it took me hours to get the hang of flying the B206. But at least I saw an improvement over time. The R22 before the beta really got me frustrated because no matter how careful I was it was still a matter of luck to takeoff and land it safely. Now with the beta, I feel at home again and all the "muscle memory" I still have from the B206 finally lets me control the R22 like I thought it should be. It also showed me that the people complaining about the new behavior of the heli obviously don't have, just like me, real life experience with the aircraft but just noticed that something had changed and assumed that the developers had deliberately dumbed down the flight model to appeal to the mass market. As it turns out, the opposite is true, the developers implemented an important feature with the bendable blades that is probably MORE realistic than before, because in real life the rotor blades won't be completely stiff either. That flying the helicopter gets a little easier that way doesn't always mean that it's less realistic, it's still hard enough as it is. It also shows that a real physics engine doesn't automatically mean that you get better results than from a charts and numbers approach like Dodosim did in FSX all those years ago, if something important like bendable blades is not modeled then the flight model will be different from the original. Maybe people should think about things like that in the future before threatening to turn their back on the developers just because something changed they don't understand . Personally I'm really happy with the new R22 and I hope the developers will continue to improve their simulator in the future.
Thanks and best regards,
Fabian
Lukla and Switzerland are both great, for beginners Switzerland might be a little easier to fly because not all the airports are high altitude STOL ports. If you get Switzerland, be sure to check out flight-sim.org for drassaud's excellent freeware cultivation (=autogen) for Switzerland North South East and West, and also his mountain airstrips for a real challenge.
Sorry for the delay, I was away for a while and couldn't ask.
Yes we did change something in the R22. The rotor blades are now simulated as bendable! If you stop the rotor you can see how flexible they are, the blades can now twist and bend which of course also dampens some of the abrupt inputs and it also makes it a bit more stable and at the same time a bit softer and easier to fly. We did this to get more realistic simulation results in comparison to real world test data and to simulate the rotor response to stick inputs even better. The R22 flies extremely close to the data of the real world aircraft.
Honestly I'm happy to hear that. I found the R22 very hard to fly in professional mode even though I have a good hardware cyclic, collective and anti torque pedals and have flown the Dodosim Bell 206 in FSX for countless hours and was pretty good at it, and that one was considered to be the only realistic helicopter for FSX. The R22 seemed a little too jumpy and sensitive for my taste, I thought that it was because it's an overall lighter and smaller aircraft but still struggled to control it reliably. To me the bendable blades and thus more stable aerodynamics sounds sounds more like an improvement than an issue to me, and as soon as the beta goes live I'll try the new flight model to check if it behaves more like the Bell 206 that I was used to.
Display MoreWell, after days of meaningful silentness past by on the part of IPACS's developers (---> still no real answer to the other complaints of various users regarding R22 flight model issue - see above), I became pretty frustrated and flyiing the R22 pretty boring comparing to its beginnings.
That's why I tried another attempt today, and I had success
- it's pretty easy to accomplish:
- The only thing I've really done was just to go on Steam - Library- Right Klick on AFS2 - Properties - Betas -
- ...and disabling all Beta-Programs in the drop down menu !
- After you've done so correctly, the Steam updater starts immedeately rolling back your AFS2 version to its official release canditate (RC Version) - which means it deletes simultaneously the last two Open-Beta updates, which is very crucial.
- Don't be shy: you cannot harm your installation by rolling back your AFS2 version. Beside it the "update" is very small (just somewhat more than 100 MB).
After this fairly short process I was eager to do the same R22 test flight scenario I've dicribed in post # 11 above and the results became pretty clear a short time:
- I got Claude Vuichard initial R22 flight-model back
- the same wildly behaviour close above ground/during take off and I was forced to take a lot more of an attention during hovering.
- controlling this bird with only one joystick (see post # 11) became almost "impossible" - at least significantly catchier -compared to the last two OB flight model versions of the Robinson.
In my eyes this is the second clear proof that IPACS has changed the R22 during the last Open Beta Updates towards
- easier handling, more forgiving of the R22 flight model
- especially during take off and approach/landing/hovering phases.
- they literally cut down the feathers of an originally beautiful bird to fly. - but you can achieve this again (if you have AFS2 open beta installed currently) by rolling back to RC version.
The developers of IPACS only know themselves, in their own wisdom, why they've dicided for doing such a recess. And they've decided not to communicate this topic honestly and clearely in public, which makes me personally a little bit sad and angry.
Anyway, tomorrow is an official holiday in Germany !
So, have a good time and enjoy flying, enjoy it, enjoy it
all the best.
Well, opting out of the beta won't do you much good in the long run. As soon as IPACS thinks that the beta version is stable enough they'll release it to the public and then you'll have the altered flight model back.
I guess I´ll also wait for the Steam Version, also because any updates are automatically downloaded at Steam.
Whoever has some experience with aircraft addons in Aerofly FS2: I'm sure Aerosoft wouldn't mind if that someone contacts them with a product proposal to port it over.
I'd love to try this myself; but I'm simply overloaded with too many other plans right now.
A plane as complex as the Twotter would be quite a challenge to port over and I'm afraid the customer base is still too small to make it worthwhile for the developer. Maybe sceneries like yours help to convince more people to try Aerofly.
Wish that plane was flyable!
Someone needs to convince Aerosoft to port it over...
Why no use the R22 "pro" or non pro checkbox?
That's a good idea! 😊
You should also consider that a working GPS in a default aircraft also helps advertising Aerofly as a "serious" simulator which some people still don't seem to believe despite its achievements and brilliant flight physics. The moving map looks a little arcady to my taste and does not have a representation in the real world, while all other avionics are modeled to represent their real world counterpart. Maybe just add it to the Cessna and provide two options in the aircraft selection screen, C172 with GNS and C172 with standard moving map.
I also don't think that implementing the GNS makes the aircraft less accessible to casual or new players. If you create the flight plan in the Aerofly navigation menu you'll see it on the default GNS page and if you don't need to change something you don't even have to touch the GNS controls at all. In FSX and P3D I "followed the magenta line" for years without knowing anything about how the unit really works until I got more involved in the complexities of general aviation and tried to make sense of the different functions, which later led to me buying the Reality XP GNS 530 Addon and a hardware GNS unit for my homecockpit. But even if you just want to fly a route without worrying about real navigation the GNS lets you do that by just providing the path that you need to follow.
I also think that flight planning needs some overhaul, like you said a vertical navigation profile seems to be inexistent and I don't know which factors are taken into account to calculate altitude by the automatic flight planner. The few simple Flight plans I made so far seem to have something like a parabolic vertical profile, I continuously gain altitude until I reach a Top of climb point, then stay at that altitude until at a certain top of descent point I gradually lose altitude at a constant sink rate until I reach my destination. A real vertical profile looks more like a "staircase" where you climb and descend in steps and stay at certain levels for a period of time due to minimum altitude restrictions for specific way points. But I don't think Aerofly is capable of representing this yet.
A few days ago I only had around 30 minutes of spare time for simming so I decided to do a short helicopter flight with no specific destination. I decided to try out a region I never flew in before, around Denver in the free Colorado DLC which I downloaded some time ago but never used until now. I was pretty surprised at what I saw : the whole region around Denver seems to have full cultivation coverage and many custom buildings in the downtown area, the quality is on par with the recent payware Southern Florida DLC and for my taste an even more interesting place to fly. I didn't have time to explore where the full cultivation coverage ended but it seemed to be quite a large part of the scenery. I hadn't expected that because for the most part the default Aerofly scenery is just flat photoreal ground with some trees. Now I was wondering if there are other places within the default or free DLC regions that are of a similar high quality. Also, is this something that was part of the original release or has it been added in an update sometime? I know that the San Francisco area was greatly improved some time ago, maybe there are more of these goodies that we don't even know about?
Cheers, Fabian
I still don't understand why you think that the requests I and some other people made would make it more difficult for casual players to set up their controls. As stated previously, you can still have a default controller configuration that is automatically applied to all aircraft, nobody has to setup anything and if you want to fly the 747 with a 10 dollar two button joystick you can do just that. BTW P3D (and presumably Xplane 11 too) also assign a standard configuration to every connected controller. And if you are happy with that you just leave it as it is. But if you want to change something to better reflect a specific aircraft you do that and then you can save your changes and create as many profiles as you want. Later when you change aircraft you just load your profile and off you go. This is way faster than activating and deactivating several controllers. At the moment I have seven controllers connected to my PC, and whenever I deactivate one the axis that I setup for it get lost and when I need it again later I have to reassign everything for this controller. In P3D I just select my aircraft and FSUIPC automatically applies the profile that I created for it. And even without FSUIPC I could save and load a profile for each aircraft.
Regarding your question if someone really assigns different buttons to the landing lights on different aircraft, when I still had my old generic Homecockpit I did that. I assigned the switches to the lights in the same order as in the real plane (which is different between a Cessna, a Beechcraft and a Piper for example) and had little interchangeable plaques I could place above the switches so I knew which one did what. Also, the same switch that lowered the spoilers in the Lancair Legacy lowered the Water rudder in the Realair ACA Scout float plane. And many other differences.
Long story short, before you invest development time in sophisticated automatic assignment algorithms or Virtual Cockpit 3D menus just let us save and load controller configurations. This should be achievable with minimum effort and would be a huge improvement already.
Cheers, Fabian
