I have modeled N7764P, the comanche 250 I co-own with 2 other Seagate engineers.
In the process of doing this model, I have also improved, worked on, or added
instruments, etc. to Instruments-3d.
* I fixed the adf so the azimuth card is tied to the correct property
* Added TO, From, and out-of range indicators to the 3d vor.
* Also added a manifold pressure gage and a pa24-250 asi (using digital photos
of the actual asi as the starting textures.
Affects on other AC. As far as I know, this will add to-from to the vor and
correct the adf behavior for pa28-161. It would be a trivial edit to the
pa28-161.xml to give the same vor performance to that AC.
Now both VORs act as one.
- Provide generic Nasal code to check if a pilot is abusing their aircraft
by extending their gear/flaps above the maximum allowed speed, exceeding
Vne, or pulling excessive G-forces.
- Implement limits within the C182.
This adds a TACAN instrument to the inventory. Range and bearing are calculated
to the TACAN or VORTAC beacon selected by means of the Channel Selector in the E
quipment/Radio pull-down menu.
A TACAN beacon has also been added to the aircraft carrier Nimitz (channel #029Y
).
Implement simple help system with global and aircraft specific dialogs:
The gui.nas changes have been discussed with Andy. All ac have a help dialog,
but some are empty. (This wouldn't have been necessary, as the system falls
back to the "Common Aircraft Keys" if an aircraft has no help defined, but an
empty dialog is less confusing and encourages to be filled with interesting
information. :-) I scanned all aircraft files for interesting performance
data and added some to the dialogs (stall speed, etc.) The Concorde and the
p51d have (over?)complete dialogs and can serve as examples. The format is
documented in $FG_ROOT/Nasa/gui.nas.
There is also a couple of other, minor fixes.
The following files have ugly MSDOS line endings:
$FG_ROOT/Aircraft/Hunter/hunter{-2tanks,}-set.xml
$FG_ROOT/Aircraft/A380/A380-set.xml
The Concorde-jsbsim.nas file is a useless copy of the real */nas file, which is
in Nasal/. I'was debugging the Concorde and wondered why changes to this file
had no effect ...
(Fixed Concorde in the help-ac.diff patch: don't use "interpol" keyword as
variable.)
The comm radio knobs are screwed. Left half increase, right half decrease.
Fixed that. (I wonder since when this is broken. Does nobody use it?)
To reproduce: $ fgfs --aircraft=c310
The c310's adf needle (HSI) doesn't work. The hsi.xml instrument does
still use the old property. The fix didn't have negative effects on
other a/c that I had tested.
Changes made 19/12/2004
Panel re-oriented
3d Compass shows through windows.
Wing-tips slightly altered.
Changes made 18/12/2004
Prop spinner shortened and widened
Nose area slightly remodelled to fit silouette
Nose texture altered to place lower intake correctly
Nose wheel reduced in size.
Nose leg Oleo guide added (does not rotate - is this correct with real ac?)
Nose wheel Axle added.
Nose wheel fixed to rotate about it's shaft axis.
Windscreen / panel mesh changed so that panel no longer protrudes thru dash
Panel instruments moved to represent the geometries of the real cockpit.
Pilot / Copilot Yokes moved inboard to represent the geometries of the real cockpit.
Alpha layer added to interior texture to prevent panel showing through seats / yokes.
Interior texture duplicated and mapped to panel only to allow panel to show.
Front seats moved slightly inboard.
Landing light pair added to port wing texture.
Alpah layer added to wing texture to prevent panel showing through.
Texture remapped to Flaps (no shows ribs again).
Wing strut outer joins brought inboard to point of wing taper to match real aircraft geometries.
Wing struts thinned in front profile and thickened in side profile.
VHF aerials moved aft to their usual position.
Maingear legs altered so they now join with the fusealage (previously, 20cm gap)
Rear window altered slightly to match silouette.
Rear (white) Navigation Light made to translate with the rudder.
Not yet done: independant landing and taxi lights on port wing
I've finished the emigration of the radiostack, and I've also removed it
completely. It turned out that the comm radio is completely implemented in
the ATC subsystem. I've changed the affected ATC files to point
to /instrumentation/com, but I guess that the maintainer of the ATC code
should decide wether to make it configureable, and how.
I also had to change some files in Network and Main. The changes in network
should be obvious, but the changes in Main were a bit suspect. The files
included radiostack.hxx, but they weren't directly depending on
radiostack-hxx. They were depending on other files that were included by
radiostack.hxx. I got it to compile, but I'm not sure if I included the
correct directly depending file.
For the data directory I changed every occurrence of /radios/
with /instrumentation/ with this simple one-liner that I found on the net:
find -name '*.xml' -type f | xargs perl -pi -e
's/\/radios\//\/instrumentation\//g'
Instead of me sending all the files that got changed by this I suggest that
you execute the one-liner yourself. Of course I can not guarantee that this
will work perfectly, but I considered hand editing to be not an option (I'm
lazy). I don't want to test every aircraft to see if everything still works,
I think it's better to wait and see if anyone complaints about broken nav
radios/instruments.
I've made an encoder and a transponder. The transponder gets C-Mode altitude
information from the encoder. These two might not be very usefull right now,
but I think they might come in handy when the ATC network gets going.
Here are some updates to the KAP140 autopilot in the default c172. It now uses
ailerons and elevator instead of aileron-trim and elevator-trim. I've started
to "upgrade" it to the "two axis altitude preselect" version. Vertical speed
select rounds to nearest 100 fpm.
I've also modified the c172 electrical configuration to turn on the gps
instrument.
Perhaps the most important change is that the nasal script for the KAP140 has
moved from data/Nasal to the c172p aircraft subdir. So it is important that
you delete data/Nasal/kap140.nas. Having the kap140.nas script as a global
script was not a good solution. Now it is aircraft specific, and thus
included in the c172p-set.xml file. Ideally I would like it to be instrument
specific, so that it would be included whenever the KAP140*.xml instruments
where included on the panel.
Instrumentation and systems are now configureable from xml files. The two
generic configurations generic-systems.xml and generic-instrumentation.xml
configures the systems and instrumentation as it was hardcoded. You can
override the generic configurations in a similar way as you override the
autopilot configuration.
All necessary elements for an ADF gauge had been migrated from
Cockpit/kr_87.cxx to Instrumentation/adf.cxx. Migrating the sound
related elements was apparently planned, but not done yet. This
intermediate state broke the ident morse sound: it couldn't get
turned off and it always indicated "SF", regardless of the tuned-in
frequency. The following patches continue the migration:
adf-radio.diff => Base/Aircraft/Instruments/adf-radio.xml:
---------------------------------------------------------------
* sets maximum volume to 1 (rather than 2); Not only is 1
loud enough (and 2 unpleasantly noisy), it also prevents
the knob from being turned to non-existant positions. :-)
* fixes wrong use of /instrumentation/adf/ident
* the voice/ident selector(?) remains unchanged, but as it's
not switched to "IDENT", there'll be no ident sound by default
this is consistent with other sounds and DME.
radiostack.diff => src/Cockpit/radiostack.[ch]xx:
---------------------------------------------------------------
* comment out use of FGKR_87 class. kr_87.[ch]xx is now no
longer used. kr-87adf.xml would no longer work, either, but
isn't used anywhere, anyway. Future adf radios have to use
the adf instrument, using xml/Nasal for specific hardware
implementation details.
adf.diff => src/Instrumentation/adf.[ch]xx:
---------------------------------------------------------------
* adds ident morse sound capability using two new input
properties:
- /instrumentation/adf/volume-norm (double)
- /instrumentation/adf/ident-audible (bool)
Here's some new AI stuff.
1) AI objects must now be defined in a scenario file, not in preferences.xml
or a *-set file. (Of course this doesn't prevent objects from being created
dynamically, as with Durk's traffic manager).
2) A new demo_scenario file is attached. It creates 3 aircraft, a sailboat,
and a thunderstorm.
3) Objects without flightplans live forever.
4) FGAIShip::ProcessFlightplan() is not yet implemented.
5) preferences.xml should now define only <enabled> and <scenario>
Here is the KAP140 Two Axis Autopilot update.
I think it's fairly complete now, all the modes are working. I tested the
localizer and glideslope hold and it was pretty stable all the way down to
the middle marker.
In the pilot guide for backcourse hold (REV) mode it says to reset the heading
bug to the _front course_. I haven't figured out how to implement this so for
the time beeing one should reset the heading bug to the _backcourse_. Apart
from this the panel should operate identical to the way the pilot guide
describes.
Here is the KAP140 Two Axis Autopilot.
Aircraft/Instruments/KAP140TwoAxis.xml
Is of course the instrument config file.
Aircraft/Instruments/Textures/KAP140.rgb
The texture.
Nasal/kap140.nas
Most of the work is done here. Without Nasal I don't see how I could implement
the NAV-ARM modes and the flashing annunciators.
Aircraft/c172p/Systems/KAP140.xml
The autopilot PID controllers configuration file. Maybe this file should be in
a more accessible directory and not hidden deep inside c172p!?
I've also attached the changes to the default C172 to include this autopilot
in the 3d-cockpit panel and the 2d vfr panel. Or at least I hope that I've
managed to include all that is needed.
Add clickable range selection for the radar and wxradar. Right
now it is clickable only between 20 and 40 mile ranges, which should work for
most uses.
OV10-jsbsim-set.xml has many changes. It creates a thunderstorm over
woodside VOR. It removes the lowest cloud layer so that the storm can be
seen. It sets the surface wind speed to zero, which may help stop the
"drifting left" complaints. It sets the radar range to 40 miles.
The weather radar instrument is corrected.
The radar instrument uses the above three items, and applies a scale factor to
the x-shift and y-shift in order to match the instrument's scale. Changing
the display scale can be done entirely in the XML code for the instrument.
Right now it's set up only to display a 40 mile scale.
The radar is an AWACS view, which is not very realistic, but it is useful and
demonstrates the technology. With just a little more work I can get a HUD
marker. All I need to do there is make a bank angle adjustment to the
current values.
This works great with one target. For two or more targets the radar
instrument will have to know the numbering of the aircraft model properties.
This isn't implemented yet.
David Culp:
I couldn't stop. Here's a better radar instrument. It has:
1) range select knob 20 and 40 nm (not clickable.. yet)
2) target altitude readout at lower right
3) target disappears when range exceeds 43 nm
4) range ring values now are read from instrumentation/radar/range
5) instrumentation/radar/range is preset in the *-set.xml file to 40 nm
The next step would be a clickable range selection. The problem here is that
the instrument currently displays the "blip" only if the target's range is
less then 43 nm. If the range scale is decreased to 20 nm, then the "blip"
will show past the edges of the instrument. I might need to make another
instrument for the 20 nm scale to make that work.
tasks that should be purely proportional. So I added support for my old
ultra-simplistic PI controller. This does wonders for stage #1 of the
altitude and AGL hold.
controls in the cockpit vs. which wheels they apply to. FlightGear now
sets /controls/gear/brake-left, /controls/gear/brake-right, and
/controls/gear/brake-parking. It should be up to the FDM to sort out
which wheels under which circumstances are affected by these controls
and ultimately what happens to the physical motion of the aircraft.
I added some more hotspots to Davids c172p since he already had done all the animation. Also I tried making the throttle and mixture knobs into hotspots even when they are moving adding extra hotspots for them. Also you can click on the trim wheel to trim now.
I added a directory for the labels for the white toggle switches, but there is probably better way to do the labels then I came up with. There is a short readme file which gives the path for the new directory.
I've added reheat to the engines to simulate water injection and then tweaked
it so that it's just about possible to take off with the full fuel load/ferry
configuration (a little under the mtow - 420,000lbs vs 450,000lbs).
It's interesting to note that the normal combat tow for the F model was
291,570lbs - equivilent to a fuel load of about 0.46 (this would actually
leave you with more fuel than in real life because some of that weight would
be the weapons load but here it's fuel)
Anyway, I've added all this info to the readme and explained some of the
reasoning behind the fdm there.
It still doesn't reach the correct altitudes, and certainly not with a full
fuel load, but it starts getting into the right ball park at combat tow.
I've also replaced the transparent instruments on the mini panel with some
text/digital ones. I wanted more accurate numbers when I was monitoring the
effects of fdm changes and the dials just didn't give the detail. They
aren't perfect and be difficult to see against certain backgrounds and in
certain lighting conditions but what the hey - nearly everything I do is a
bit of an experiment;)
Something I've noticed is that since I've started identifying flight surfaces
and gear components individually I've noticed some problems with the flaps
and gear in replay. I address the left and right flaps independently so they
have left&right-flap-pos-norms and don't get controlled by the replay
mechanism which must refer to the single flap-pos-norm. There's a similar
thing with the gear - I have to identify them individually so I can animate
them properly so on the b52 there're six gear elements but only the first
three are actioned in replay.
Personally, I think that the only way around this will be to provide
control-overrides for all these items, much like there're the AP control
overrides for throttle etc.
