The second landing of that 748i amused me, I could almost hear the Pilot Monitoring saying "okay, extend the float a little so that we get past that crater".
Beiträge von Ministry of Truth
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I remember in the summer before Covid, occasionally seeing this and the other BA retrojets passing over my place in the west country, out there on a recliner beneath a hot blue sky. The summer of FR24!
I heard a few years ago that two of the BA retro 747s would be preserved, I assume those were the Negus and Landor liveries, and not BOAC?
My inactive sim is locked in 2019, which preserves these aircraft in my AI setup.
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In theory you should be able to swap out the 16-bit items for the newer RealityXP units in your Dreamfleet aircraft. As noted, those who bought the Dreamfleet aircraft without the RealityXP gauges have no problem modifying the panel to take the newer RealityXP gauges and units (these used default instruments and GPS) . If you bought the delux versions of Dreamfleet aircraft that came bundled with the RealityXP, it is very difficult to make the swap.
I have all the RealityXP gauges, I've just never felt like making the time to fit any into the aircraft in FS9 that I intended to. The GPSs are just in the Aeroworx King Air, if I remember correctly, might be the Carenado C90. I can't presently check. The Archer III came with the gauges built-in. I bought it on the strength of the standalone RXP weather radar I already owned, which was the first gauge I bought from them - I liked the clarity and smoothness. I found fiddling with panels to be a real PITA, especially as at the time I was gravitating to using a VC, and thought a readymade RXP installation might be nice. I think the DF Archer was what got me into preferring a VC, along with the somewhat more rudimentary F1 Commander 114/5, although helicopters were also a big part. Now, I'd find it hard to settle for a 2D panel.
With the Archer, it's not only the RXP gauges. There were many panel switches that either didn't appear at all, or refused to function. Even engine start wasn't possible without slewing to altitude and then exiting slew, after which the aircraft would be flying with the engine running. So, assuming the RXP WAAS units could be substituted (after all, the panel coordinates are already there in the CFG) there are still many other problems that would then also need to be worked through. That process is far down the list of things I'd like to do for fun!
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I wonder how it works with systems created by VGDS-tweaker. I used these for my Abu Dhabi scenery donkey's years ago.
Docking system creation (ASM tweak) - FSDeveloper Wiki
A lot has changed there since then. The airport doesn't even resemble the architectural plans I'd been given at the time and based the airport layout on!
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Die Dreamfleet Archer ist auch ein Topmodel Oli. Aus welchem Grund auch immer, bekomme ich das Original Panel auf meinem Windows 7,
64-bit System nicht mehr zum laufen (vermutlich Reality XP).@Andreas: Wie Du vielleicht auf den Screenshots gesehen hast, funktionieren die Nav-Instrumente nicht, sie bleiben schwarz.
The Dreamfleet GPS-related gauges at that time used a GPS simulator created by Garmin to help educate Garmin GPS users on the operation of the units. While the gauges were okay, the Garmin simulator was the culprit - that was the component that would no longer run. I think it was a 16-bit application.
The problem with the Dreamfleet Archer extended beyond that. Many of the switches would not longer operate once a user had moved to a 64-bit platform. Bits were missing from the panel entirely, and some features of the simulation would no longer work.
I contacted Dreamfleet about it at the time, and their response was to discontinue support. It's the problem of reliance on 3rd parties. Sometimes we get the rug pulled from under us. I've no doubt that Dreamfleet could have invested in encapsulating the Garmin unit in some way, to allow it to operate as it used to across platforms. I think they just decided that they'd gotten the sales from it that they needed.
It's a real pity, since I remember it being a very nice simulation of the aircraft family that I learned to fly on, probably the best one.
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This was a part of my reasoning for freezing my AI setup in 2019, the main one being the amount of work needed to simply stay "current", and the loss of carriers in the years immediately prior (think Monarch, Flybe, and Thomas Cook in the UK alone - and that was before Covid).
Consequently any concern about the community migration to newer models was moot. The only carriers I was interested in were already painted on the existing models, so a model migration was not particularly an issue.
I think the only AI aircraft that are on non-typical models are a couple of B78X for BAW, and a similar number of A35K for VIR. Those are on Camsim. So, for me, undergoing a conversion process for a half-dozen airframes is probably not great use of time!
I guess if distribution permissions came up and I got back into FS (presently on hiatus) I would "dot that i".
It's one reason for improving my repainting over the past year, if I want to see something on an older model, I need to get out the old paintbrushes. My Falcons will be supplanted over the next year or two, although I may re-map them to a version that uses (converted) DFAI textures, and run those in parallel. Free repaints! That's a long way off yet. Who knows, the DFAI remakes might use my format and save me the job!
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Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the conversation, but I thought I'd mention my experience in Gmax with materials. Anyone making models probably already knows this stuff very well, so, apologies for stating the obvious!
In Gmax you also apply materials to surfaces (polygons), and those materials can also have bitmaps allocated to them to show a texture when the surface material is rendered in the simulator.
The purpose for the material is to allow other characteristics for the surfaces to be defined. Specular shine, reflectivity, transparency, whether they receive or perhaps emit light, and so on.
When an aircraft flies between your viewpoint and the FS sun, the textures will show what the surface looks like, and the movement of light across the top surface is the material's specular shine doing its job.
An important consideration is efficiency. Each material on an object is another "drawcall", a fairly intensive operation in the graphics system because each material potentially causes a change to how the graphics engine will render that material (and any associated texture). With my AI models these materials are kept to the barest minimum, usually just one texture/material whenever possible. Many years ago, David Rawlins made some nice tutorials about modelling that passed on many useful tips about how the simulation works. At the time I first read these, they made no sense. Once I started to make models I went straight back and used them to help me find out what I needed to do.
The texture for AI models (and often many buildings) is often a collection of different parts of an object in the same bitmap, and these small sections can be independently mapped onto the model. An AI aircraft usually has one daytime bitmap littered with all the parts for the aircraft. If it has two daytime texture bitmaps, that implies that it also uses at least two materials as well. An aircraft can also have one texture and still use multiple materials with different properties.
In Gmax you can select the polygons you want to map a material onto, and then in the mapping tools use a "gizmo" that allows you to zero in on the area of the texture that you want to display on those polygons (it might be an entire fuselage side, or a wing surface, a tire, or a winglet). The gizmo allows you to stretch that small part of the bitmap onto the entire object (perhaps a winglet) that you are mapping.
I make a few propeller aircraft that need to use two materials. A fast propeller in the sim is a square planar object (well, usually two, one the front of the prop disk and the other the back), but against FS clouds, a propeller might cut a prop-shaped hole in the clouds because the simulator "thinks" that an opaque object would hide what is behind it, so clouds will not be rendered because the prop disk is in front of them. The sim doesn't know that an alpha channel is making the prop see-thru, it just knows there is a texture there. So you have to map the prop texture onto a material that is perhaps 95% opaque, slightly transparent, and then map your propeller disk (often on a different bitmap, but it doesn't need to be) onto this 95% solid material. Now, when the alpha channel makes the prop transparent, the sim "thinks" that the cloud can still be visible behind it because the material isn't completely opaque.
You can also map the same bitmap onto more than one material. I do this on aircraft with transparent bits, such as a Tiger Moth windshield. This can be on the same bitmap as everything else the airplane is made from. The fuselage can be mapped using the opaque material, and the same bitmap can be applied to the windscreen via the partly transparent material, so that the windshield doesn't cut little holes in the clouds (or in the case of a bubble canopy on a Vans RV-4, the canopy no longer makes the pilots inside disappear!).
I expect this is also possible in Sketchup and Blender.
A material is much more than simply the mechanism for applying textures, as modellers evidently quickly figure out! I must admit that it took me a while to understand the relationship between materials and textures. It was a completely alien topic when I got started.
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It's what gave me a weakness for the Dassault tri-jets. It's the s-duct and the lovely things it does to the tailfin and fuselage in that area. I don't care how geeky that sounds, it's just a marriage of engineering and esthetics that I really like to see. Fix this "problem" and make the results beautiful.
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Oh yeah baby! Tristar!!!
First widebody I got to experience, Luton to Hanover, paid for by my folks in their last few years of placement in Europe. Hanover Air Fair 1974. Court Line (yellow, not the pink one).
My lasting memory apart from the smoothness of the flight, was the terrible creaking from the MLG as the aircraft made the tight 180 in the panhandle at the end of the runway (we took off to the east, I remember that). It sounded as thought the whole thing would collapse before we even got airborne.
It must have been one of the bigger things to fly out of Luton. I took a DR400 into there in the early 80s, The landing fee is weight-based and the DR400 weighs very little, so it was a bargain. The lady taking the fee said "aaahh!" when I told her the empty weight. Happy days!
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I've been putting in a lot of hours photo/painting Hiroshi's lovely A35X gear.
Hi Ed, is that for personal use or is the intention to feed it to Hiroshi to "level up" the model?
It looks impressively realistic, along the lines of the Falcon 2000 paint you showed me a while back (C-GOHB).
