My post is still there with the link back to AVSIM.You can find it here and I have quoted it below

Yes, I found it. Noticed you were there..L.Adamson

If this thread goes to record-breaking length, do I win a t-shirt or something?;)Andrew

Does OpenGL support gradient blending, such as used on the PFD's horizon?

Not 100% sure what you mean by gradient blending. OpenGL supports a lot of blending modes, a number of ways to create gradients, programmable texture transfer, and you can always use a texture as a source of sampled color info. So my guess is you can find a way!

Is there a native gps engine, or must one be created from scratch for each project?

The sim has a GPS engine...it might not be as full-functioning as you like - some people code their own, more advanced ones.

Is it possible to access information to code a TCAS?

You can get access to the other multiplayer planes via the XPLMPlanes APIs to find their locations.

Is there any native data support for approaches, or must theprogrammer code his own dataset for every airport?

No approaches right now, but the navaids are available...you'd have to bring in your own approach DB.cheersben

Is it possible to access information to code a TCAS?You can get access to the other multiplayer planes via the XPLMPlanes APIs to find their locations.Does it work with AI aircaft as well??

Ok... If I was ever considering buying X-Plane, Austin just gave me the reason NOT to do it :( I have used MSFS since version 3.0 and have seen the giant leeps in development it has made. Yes, MSFS has its shortcommings, but I invite anyone to show me a flighsim that is 100%. It simply doesn't exist and as far as I can tell it will take a looooooooooong time before it will, if ever.Due to large investments in addons and by lack of a high-end pc, I still stick with FS9, but when time comes, I will migrate to FSX.Bottomline: MSFS is a :( GOOD :( flight simulator.Regards,Frank

Is it possible to access information to code a TCAS?>You can get access to the other multiplayer planes via the XPLMPlanes APIs to find their locations.>Does it work with AI aircaft as well??

Yes - it works with all built-in "other plane" systems but only some plugins. Here's the situation:- X-Plane has a max limit of 20 airplanes as of now...1 for you and up to 19 for multiplayer or AI or plugins. We fully instantiate a completely simulated physical flight and we don't virtualize, so...well, they're expensive. This limit might go up a bit, but we'd be talking 30, not 3000.- Plugins that need more multiplayer planes can cope with this in two ways:(1) Virtualize the 20 planes -- that is, position the closest most important 20 planes using real planes and simply track where the others should be. This works well until more than 20 planes are near you, then the lack of "real" resources becomes apparent.(2) Because plugins can add graphics to X-PLane, plugins can just draw planes themselves using any number of methods: (a) use the airplane drawing code in x-plane (exposed in the SDK), or (:( draw OBJ models (exposed in the latest SDK) or © use any drawing code desired.XSquawkBox and X-Ivap (two large-scale networked flying plugins) use a free open source library (libXPlaneMP) to do _both_ of these things:- All planes are "drawn" to allow the use of X-Plane ACFs and OBJ models as planes, and to have no limit on how many we draw.- The real X-Plane planes objects are placed to correspond to the nearest 20 planes in the multiplayer environment.Because of this second behavior, other plugins (like a TCAS gauge) will perceive 20 of the planes that XSquawkBox/X-Ivap know about...hopefully the 20 closest.So in summary: a plugin can read the position of all of the "real" X-plane planes no mater how they are driven, but if virtualization is used, a plugin can only read the underlying physical planes; some plugins may virtualize in a way that is more compatible than others.But...this post is really not hanger chat, it's tech talk...I suggest that anyone who needs more detailed SDK info come over to x-plane-dev at yahoo dot com, or the X-Plane SDK wiki, or just email me. :-) One warning about the SDK Wiki - hackers in Russia sometimse attack it (because I have nothing better to do with my time than deal with this kind of thing ;-) so if you sign up, it might take me a bit to approve you. But you do not need to sign up to gain access to the content!cheersben

Well I have been working Xplane out a lot more-and have found a lot more things to like.Good-Great:1) Water is amazing imho-reflects trees and mountains, rivers looks extremely real-shading from different times of day amazing-was following the Columbia in Western Washington and it really looked real-not cartoony as I find fsx rivers/lakes.2) Engine sounds-there is a change of sound when using prop/manifolds-one of my pet peeves of the fs series. In multi flying I can actually sync the props by sound! I can't believe the amount of reality this adds. Drone of engines-excellent! It is amazing how a small feature like this can add so much to reality.3) Runway lights/lighting-look more realistic to me-as well as fog-low visibility-again sloped runways add a lot of realism.4) Roads when turned to max seem to have very good coverage-much like adding utx to fsx.5) Cars and trains on roads below look great!6) Single engine response on multi pretty good. Feel of straight and level flight better than fsx7)Mountain area of western US spectacular and much better than fsx8) Autogen trees blend in more to the textures , look more realistic, and less cartoony than fsx9)I Like the ability to place your aircraft not only at an airport but on a final of different ranges10) Autogen buildings look more real imho than fsx/fs that look too cartoony and low res. Even saw a Walmart that looked like a Walmart!11) Lack of stutters, smoothness-this really is nice (though turn everything to the max and you can get performance that makes fsx look stellar). Sliders are universal...Needs improvement:1) Autogen buildings. Seems that there is no landclass for autogen buildings-turn it to extreme settings and you get a mix of buildings, houses, oil refineries etc. dropped as one simmer put it -like a bunch of toys randomly. At that point it looks like sim city 2000. This is too bad as I think there is great potential here. 2) Lack of approaches built in like FS-a huge one for an instrument flyer like me3) Atc/Ai traffic-not really here-at least not like we are used to in fsx.4) The lack of momentum in the flight models. I worked quite a bit with joystick setting and you can make it better-but again anything but level flight feels a little like permanent slow flight with reactions way too quick in the 3 axis's.5) It doesn't bother me-but visibility is limited I think to 25 miles. (Again, a much missed performance enhancer fs is capable of-most run unlimited)6) Generic airports are very limited. Some may not have all taxiways-buildings forget it. Fsx has spoiled us by making not only a huge selection of custom airports, but making the smaller ones fairly accurate (hangars, buildings etc.) on a generic basis.7) The big one- I feel-Xplane needs some stellar aircraft in the default program to display what it is really capable of. Right now it seems to be somewhat of a mystery-from my readings on the boards it seems others feel the same-even the fans. The potential is there but has not been realized or illustrated really well-yet-or one has to wonder-is it really possible?8) There needs to be a better effort to integrate hardware that is available for flightsimmers. We invest a lot in such-and if it isn't really usable or doesn't make use of its' capabilities a lot will be soured here. Although I seem to be making progress on my personal aircraft-I am not convinced yet that I will ever be able to get one that fly's and looks like the real thing. I am not a professional 3rd party developer-and I don't have a lifetime to wait for such. If I can get a reasonable one myself that will be fine-or better yet pay for one-but I can see that designing the actual aircraft and 3d panel is just over what I can do. I see nothing available that fits the bill or comes to the quality of a typical fs add on. It does appear that it can be done though-and there need to be some to show off the program-especially if the goal is to convert fs'ers who are used to such as a normal. All the freeware planes I downloaded were at best marginal-and the payware ones at least by looks and descriptions didn't look that much better (and I am talking GA-my only interest in a sim).I at least highly recommend getting xplane for the cost of a good fs add in. Spend some time with it. Let's hope that some developers like Jean Luc get in there and start making some real instruments, and some aircraft developers get in there and make some high quality aircraft.Flying over Lake Chelen. Now I have to see how hard it is to make those hand drawn gauges look like real ones..

Hi Geofa,I agree with you on a lot of the points about things we need to have in the default pack and don't (e.g. airplanes that show off the full sim capabilities, more population on runways, etc.).Land class: that bugs me too -- and I wrote the code. :-( Here's what's going on:- X-Plane does have the notion of land class.- X-Plane does pick buildings based on that land class.- The building placement is actually based on the _vector_ road grid, not the underlying terrain. - This happens when the DSF is cut, it's not inside X-Plane.In other words, the scenery generator IS playing sim-city.Fundamentally, a flight sim has to pick whether to be driven by the road grid or land class textures, because they don't play nice together. You can see this artifact in one of the pics you sent me of FS X - where they went the other way and drive buildings by land class texes. There is one building that is really a picture of a building that is part of the land-class texture. A vector road (an off ramp) goes directly over it, cutting it in half. (Actually, the land-class under the road cuts off buildings too now that I look more clsoely.)Now my speculation is that the auto-gen engine made sure that an autogen building wasn't a candidate for that "foot print" to become 3-d due to the road incursion.Compare to x-Plane: we have buildings in our terrain textures and our road grid and 3-d both just 'ride roughshod' over them.But - because the buildings are placed on the roads, you can get full building density (assuming you have an insanely powelful computer :-) and a _street level_ road grid (which is what we ship in the US and hope to extend to other parts of the word).If my speculation about auto-gen is correct, putting a road grid of that density over auto-gen land classes would have to either (1) remove a lot of 3-d bulidings due to road-footprint conflict) or just have roads and buildings colliding. But -- perhaps someone runs FS X with USA roads and already knows what happens?Now I'm not saying that X-Plane's approach is better -- in fact, for a lot of cases it looks worse. :-( But what I am saying is that there are fundamentally different design decisions at the highest level here, and therefore while X-Plane could improve due to better art asset _tuning_ (one of the things that makes FS X's autogen look so good I think is that the art assets are now, after a long time of using autogen, really really rich and well tuned!) even when we tune better, the results are going to be different -- perhaps better in some ways, perhaps worse in others.

Flying over Lake Chelen. Now I have to see how hard it is to make those hand drawn gauges look like real ones..

Not hard at all. :-) Please note though that you have TWO paths for instruments:- Simply provide alternate bitmaps of the same name for our default ones (in your airplane's "cockpit" folder) to do a direct artwork sub OR- Use one of the "Generic" instruments with the right mechanism ("needle" if you want to make a steam gauge) and then you wire it up to the data feeds and set a LOT more parameters. With the generics, it takes longer to get things done but you can do just about anything...and you might use two instruments. For example, an ASI with a needle and a bug, and a rolling window for the numeric speed would be made of THREE generic intruments in X-Plane...a needle for the bug, a needle for the, well, needle, and a rolling digits instrument for the numbers.I would expect that you can do MOST of your panel by repainting our instruments and only need to "go generic" a little bit.cheersben

Perhaps we are not talking about the same thing in autogen?Your placement sounds much more logical.I am speaking of the fact that my small town-when xplane autogen is turned up, is populated with oil refineries and high rise office buildings.My home airport which is in a suburban housing area with a few small businesses thrown in looks like New York city-and again lots of refineries etc in areas that are forested/parks.I know nothing can be perfect-but I was questioning the building selection types used more than their placement. A landclass for selecting appropriate building types in appropriate places?

Hi Geof,Ah - no, it is the same autogen (or for us pre-gen, because ti is pre-generated) but I sort of got side-tracked on other aspects of the system. I think there are a few possible problems, although I am not sure which combination you are seeing in your situation:1. The industrial land use may be assigned to inappropriate places. Industrial landuse in X-Plane 8 and 9 are algorithmically placed, they don't come from real-world data, so they can often be wrong. Indutrial buildings like refineries appearing in the wrong place are usually due to this.2. The choice of building size relative to land density (e.g. small town has NY style row houses) could be due to a lack of enough differentiation in land classes (e.g. we have I think 4 levels of urban, which might not be enough gradation) or it could be that some of the less dense land classes are populated with the wrong kinds of buildings.The match-up of an art asset (that is, a building model) with a tagged footprint (that is, the name of a theoretical asset, defined by its underlying land class and dimensions) is done throguh the library system, which is a matching service for art assets and scenery inside X-Plane.The library is what makes the buildings in Europe look different from the ones in the US. It is customizable, third party extensible, and we can tweak it without rebuilding the 70-something GB of scenery. (Compare to the land class, which is burned into the scenery.)So it may be that I can improve this in a patch by tweaking the match-up of art assets. We've definitely received complaints about the refineries! It may also be the underlying land class is borked. And I do not know whether our existing art asset library is "deep" enough in the right kinds of buildings to make certain areas look better. I do hope to spend some time during 930 beta at least investigating this.cheersben

Not 100% sure what you mean by gradient blending. OpenGL supports a lot of blending modes, a number of ways to create gradients, programmable texture transfer, and you can always use a texture as a source of sampled color info. So my guess is you can find a way!

The gradient blending on the PFD's horizon is where the blue of the sky and the brown of the ground gradually transition to white at the horizon line. With the exception of the C162 panel art itself, and the bezels used for each instrument, everything else is vector drawn graphics.Thank you for your detailed reply.

a) There is SquawkBox works for XPlane... you can fly VATSIM and get real ATC.... but yes the inbuilt ATC is not that great.:( How about the newly released MU-2c) Use FS2XP to convert FS9 and FSX airports to X-Plane. Not sure if it converts animated objects though.

a Big whoop, I am a RW controller and already use VATSIM with FSX, if I want to fly online. What do I do if I don't want to fly online in XP? I'm pretty much screwed...b I saw that video, looks nice, but what about all the stock aircraft? The stock FSX aircraft look quite good.c That would suck to convert ALL the airports in FSX to XP. Even converting the major airports would be time consuming. And who knows if the gates, fuel trucks, airport vehicles would show up?XP 9.xx meh.... maybe once 10 comes out I can revisit these points.

a Big whoop, I am a RW controller and already use VATSIM with FSX, if I want to fly online. What do I do if I don't want to fly online in XP? I'm pretty much screwed...b I saw that video, looks nice, but what about all the stock aircraft? The stock FSX aircraft look quite good.c That would suck to convert ALL the airports in FSX to XP. Even converting the major airports would be time consuming. And who knows if the gates, fuel trucks, airport vehicles would show up?XP 9.xx meh.... maybe once 10 comes out I can revisit these points.

a) If you are using VATSIM then neither inbuilt ATC of FSX or XP can compare:( Goto X-Plane.org and download some freebies or purchase 3rd party content.c) Do you intend flying to every airport? Just convert the ones you use or goto X-Plane.org and download the ones already converted. I use both XP9.22 and FSX.... but yes FSX has more add-ons at the moment

Honestly, I could try XP again, but for the love of Pete, give me a demo I can actually run more than 7 min before my controls start to stop working. How the heck am I to evaluate XP in that amount of time? From what I read XP is also a tweaking type of sim.... uuugh, make it last 30 min at least please....Maybe once 9,3 comes out I'll try it again argh. I'm mainly a GA flyer, and I'm a RW controller and a pilot. I'll see how the smaller aircraft handle...

This poorly timed, misplaced post seems like a cheap ploy to try and get FSX users to switch over to X-Plane. Although I've never used X-Plane, I was -until now, interested in checking it out. "Business" practices like this make me sick. I for one will now not be considering X-Plane as viable FSX replacement.Regards,Mark

I tried X-Plane a few years ago. NO WAY. It is....sucky.I would revert back to FS2000 first, if that was possible.And the "thousands already migrating over to X-Plane" is way over the top.That is B.S."You can play it on I-phone". Good god man, get for real.We are mostly "Hard core flight simmers".Go home and take your meds Austin.