ADI follow up and Help needed

[Guest MikePowell]

I expect to have some on my site in a few days. Mikewww.mikesflightdeck.com

[Guest]

Hi Mike, I would not discard X-plane so easily. The generic scenery is indeed limited, but the SOCAL freeware scenery makes a huge difference for the California area. The airports are detailed, and SOCAL sattelite scenery is on par with FS2002. I used to fly FU-III, and seems that X-plane comes close to it, esp. the feeling of flight. Even managed to get a wider view stretched over two screens via NView (I use Ti4200), although the cockpit looks weird then. It is possible to have multiple joysticks connected to make mixture and prop pitch controllable as well. Agree that multiple throttle and prop control is not possible, at least not via the direct joystick connection, but can be done via UDP communication. The http://www.x-plane.info/ website has lots of programs on UDP data exchange, which I'm presently exploring for my motion platform drive.If you have a fast connection, I recommend to download the 6.5 demo and SOCAL scenery. RgdsRoland

[Guest]

To Roland and Mike,I have SOCAL freeware scenery and it remember the first attempt using Satellite pictures in FS...5. Last and not least, it "eats" 7 Gigabytes for a small area going from Mojave to Camarillo as north bound and Santa Ana to - San Bernardino as south bound. I have made my IFR rating in Santa Monica 1988/89. I did also made a lots of VFR flights in that area. In X-Plane I do not recognize anything and in the generic FS2K2 scenery I can really recognize a lot and did fly there since 1992 ( My last Flight from Santa Monica to Las Vegas.I really had big problem accepting MSFS, first why I hate the Microsoft philosophy and why it's far from X-Plane as regards the flight modelling. But one thing is clear, Austin philosophy going more an more in the Flight Combat direction is also not my philosophy. He spent so much time trying to get some weapons on the planes and never updated several lacks as regards the pure fly. It's why I stopped using it.RegardsRoger

[Guest MikePowell]

Good morning Roland,Thanks for the additional info. Looks like I'll be busy for quite some time.How's your project coming?Mikewww.mikesflightdeck.com

[Guest]

Hi Mike, My motion platform project has been slowed down due to my lack of programming knowledge. Hardware wise I have hooked up everything as best as I could. Visuals have greatly improved after I found a large high-res freshnell lens 25x50" (from old projection TV) on the dump. I start to realize that pitch and roll platform movements are extremely limited for simulating motion. If you take a flight on a real airplane, you'll realize that the X/Y/Z accellerations are much more pronounced than the rotational movements. Maybe I could make the chair do some small X and Y movements separately. The interface from sim to external signals is the part I'm struggling with. After exploring several sims, X-plane seems to be the one that has the most readily available (fast!) parameters via the UDP data transfer.I succeeded in hooking up a second PC and establishing UDP data transfer, so that part seems to work. The X-plane-info site is a big help. My thoughts were to make a program running on the 2nd PC that grabs the UDP data, and sends each flight parameter to a data pin on the parallel port in PWM signal format. Say Pitch 0 degrees = 50% duty cycle, with + and - pitch angles increasing or reducing the duty cycle. With 6 or 8 flight parameters available on the printer port data pins in this way, the drive voltages could be obtained via a simple RC filters. (probably add an optocoupler-based isolation buffer first). By mixing the signals smartly (easier said than done) I could end-up with useful platform drive signals. On the other hand, most people I contacted said that mixing the different flight parameters via software might be a better idea. Anyway, I'm afraid I have to rely on others for the programming section. I'll keep searching. Best regards, and thanks for your great support on the home cockpit forumRoland

[Guest MikePowell]

Thank you for the update and kind words, RolandMikewww.mikesflightdeck.com

[Guest]

Hi Roger, Agree with you on the size of data being necessary for the SOCAL scenery, but this seems to be the case for most sattelite generated scenery. FU-III also required 1.5G for the Seattle region. On the accuracy I'll have to take your word for it, since I'm not a pilot, and never visited the area. I do find the mountains beautiful, and some of the airports are very nicely done. Still some minor bugs with 6.5 and SOCAL, as the localizer antennas occasionaly sit in the middle of the runway. Mainly I'm exploring X-plane for the UDP data for driving my motion platform. Do you have any experience with getting the UDP signals converted into electrical signals?RgdsRoland

[tigert 0]

>I start to realize that pitch and roll platform movements >are extremely limited for simulating motion. If you take a >flight on a real airplane, you'll realize that the X/Y/Z >accellerations are much more pronounced than the rotational >movements. Maybe I could make the chair do some small X and >Y movements separately. The "big" simulators do this with "motion cues" - which is, to "fade out" slowly at the end of the movement to fool the body into thinking the movement is still continuing, even though the motion platform has only a limited range of movement. So, to simulate acceleration, I think what they do is tilt the nose of the cockpit upwards so you get pressed against your chair back thanks to gravity (it feels like you were accelerating because the visual system if of course showing no vertical pitch) - then it gets *slowly* moved back to the horizontal position.Same with braking, tilt nose down -> you get pushed against the seatbelts and feel like you are braking, then again "fade out" the movement.My knowledge of this stuff is limited, but I agree that just tilting the platform according to the attitude of the plane is not enough since that is missing all the acceleration sensations you get on a real plane.Someone working with the "big boys'" simulators can probably explain more, but as far as I understand, the motion platform is really a complex part of the simulation. So I guess it'd require writing a "motion simulator" that gets the flight simulator attitude/speed/altitude data and simulates that movement using the motion platform and motion cues and whatever.I think the latest bleeding edge of simulators nowadays simulate stalling with a 20m deep hole under the simulator - when you "stall" the plane in the sim, the whole platform simply dives in the ditch to get real negative G's :-)Tuomas

[Guest]

Whoa, up to now my wife has been very understanding with my "time-machine" contraption in the study, but I may find some resistance when I start digging a 20m hole in the floor :-lol You are right on the motion cues thing, it is complicated. I used simple C-R differentiator network for the bleed back to center. better than nothing but far from perfect. Anyway, I'll keep tinkering with it. Roland