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[Ghost129er]

Great news and good job Stainless! Glad to hear that! I'd hand you a KitKat, but I don't think that's physically possible from all the way here..

Cheers!

[Stainless]

Huge day.

I used the wind tunnel to spot a couple of bugs in my F4 code. Interestingly it wasn't a bug in my FDM, just in the F4.

Now she flies like a fighter.

I HAVE WRITTEN A FLIGHT SIM. 

Ok, it's a crap one. No weapons, no terrain, no game, but I can take off and fly and land so ... it is a flight sim.

Nearly broke my arm patting myself on the back. Got some funny looks on the train as well.

Party time, excellent.

[hello]

Congrats! Looking forward to your next step. Which will be .... ?
I am checking this section pretty much every day. 

[Stainless]

Next step....

I guess the next logical step is to do an in cockpit view and fly the plane a bit.

See if anything else feels off.

If I can do some circuits and land, then I'm ready to move on.

Then I will need to put in another aircraft, this time a propeller driven aircraft so I can test the other engine code.

 

[Chaoic16]

CONGRATUATIONS!!! You have NEVER ever given up with your strong passions in this simulation development.  It is going to be very interesting to see what goes on from now on!

Let's rock and roll!

[Stainless]

I have come to the decision that it is impossible to fly to an accurate flight plan using a keyboard. Especially on a train.

Since I really want to be able to fly very accurate flight paths so I can test the accuracy of my FDM, I have been forced into starting to write the AI.

At the moment I only have simple commands in, the F4 closes it's cockpit, starts engine, lights afterburners, and pulls back on the stick at the correct time to take off.

I am going to add a lot more commands so that I can put together standard maneuvers and record the data generated for comparison with real life.

For the modder, I am going to extend the test tool to allow you to create AI scripts for your aircraft. So when you do a mod you can use the tool to create a script to do the pre-flight checks and all none standard actions. Once it's done you can easily run a test script to test it works and get back data you can check against real world data.
 

[Stainless]

First test video

The video grabber is crap, can't handle 60hz, but at least it's something to show you all.

I should mention that unlike other flight sims I have looked at, my auto pilot FLIES the plane. If the nose needs to come up, it moves the elevator, roll it moves the ailerons. No cheating here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhPF4GvytrQ&feature=youtu.be

[DD_BadAim]

One man can indeed change the world! BTW Tiger Balm works great on those muscle strains in your arm and shoulder.

[Stainless]

This week has been frustrating.

I have put in the cockpit, but it's not going smoothly.

I added the cockpit him and all it's resources and it displayed in the wrong place. So after a lot of digging around in my code, I went back to il2modder and loaded in the F4. Marked the location of the cockpit. Then loaded in the cockpit.

It was in the wrong place ( and rotated slightly out of plane).  Not my code. I threw a few fucks into the air and added a cockpit position variable to the game, worked out where it should be and set the variable.

Now I had the problem that the aircraft mesh was being drawn as well as the cockpit. So I went back to il2modder and worked out which bits of the aircraft need to be hidden when in the cockpit and added support for that.

Tested that and the correct parts of the plane disappear nicely, along with the cockpit.....  WTF!

Was trying to fix that when some thoughtless woman brought her two young children onto a commuter train and let them run riot. 

Why do they do it?

It's more expensive to use the commuter trains, it's more crowded on a commuter train, they have all day to inflict there badly behaved brats on the world, why do they do it in my coding time?

Luckily I didn't have a gun.

[DarkBlueBoy]

Awesome job Stainless. Don't let the brats grind you down. The joys of school holidays I would suggest.

[Stainless]

Had some time to work on it yesterday and got the cockpit in.

Wired up a lot of the dials and got things animating nicely, but was a bit annoyed with "jaggies" on the edge of dials. So I tried to turn on full screen anti-aliasing. However it seems it is bust in XNA.

Great.

So I went back to adding more instruments and quickly hit an issue.

The cockpit I am using doesn't have some of the instruments I really wanted to use. Particularly engine oil pressure. At first I just thought "no biggie", but then I started to think about damage indication.

I really don't want some kind of artificial display, something like a text string coming up over everything saying "engine damage 10%" I hate that.

So it becomes really important to have all the cockpit instruments up and running. Engine damage usually shows itself in engine temperature and oil pressure. I want the hydraulic system to be able to be damaged, so you need hydraulic pressure displayed.

Cockpit instrumentation is a lot of work for a modder though. I can hook any instrument up easily, but if the instrument isn't animated, I'm screwed.

Not sure what to do about it.

Ideas?

[SAS~Tom2]

..my idea..take a break, enjoy some good tasty non alcoholic or alcoholic drink of choice and get some distance to the prob. That often helps me.