Was wondering if PMDG could make a fix for the 747x, MD-11x and the upcoming 747-8x to impliment the VC rain effects that the J41 has?It would really add to the imersion.It's can't understand why it was axed by FSX development staff in the first place.Anyway I hope that this is possible as PMDG aircraft and the upcoming Flightsim labs Concorde X are all that I will be flying.RegardsMark Schilling

Hi Mark, I must say I also would love to see such a thing in the existing and slightly older aircraft produced by PMDG. However, such a task is much more than throwing a switch as you may already know. It would involve not only the normal code to implemement the graphics, but also the systems to counter balance the effect. It is Much harder than it sounds I think, but also would love to see the same someday.

As ridiculous as it sounds that was one of the things that put me off FSX. Are developers still leaving that out?, cant understand why MS didn't add a tick box for that.

The only FSX plane that shows rain on the VC is the RealAir Duke. I have heard rumors of a second plane, but don't know which.

The Lotus L-39 Albatros also has it.

PMDG J41 also has VC rain effects. That's why I was assuming that they could impliment it in their other craft seeing that they have gotten it working already.

Just to explain what goes into doing this effect in FSX guys - it's actually part of the model, it's not an "effect" like it was in FS9. You have to literally make the raindrops as 3D objects that are normally hidden and then write code in the panel that detects when there's rain hitting the aircraft in FSX, makes them visible and triggers an animation. We tried this on the J41 due to the large amount of user requests, but because of how complex the rest of the model geometry is a lot of users saw graphics corruption when adding this on top of the VC. The L-39 Lotussim did has a relatively simple VC by comparison and it doesn't reach the system load levels that trigger the corruption in the FSX engine.Now... beside the point of all of this though is the fact that you don't actually see raindrops hitting the window of an airliner in flight. The effect in FS9 is extremely unrealistic - RSR told me that even on the J41, the wipers were something that only got used on the ground and that you didn't even see "drops" hitting the windscreen like this while on approach or anything like that. It's more a transparent "film" flowing over the glass or something to that effect if you see anything at all.

Thanks for the explanation Ryan. I was'nt aware that there was so much involved in getting this to work.I don't know if you have played "wings of prey", but that does a really good job of the film of water effect that streams over the glass that you mentioned.Something like that would be amazing to impliment, although based on what you are saying I imagine that would be alot of work to do properly.Well worth it, if it worked and looked right though.

Yeah, Wings of Prey is also using a modern graphics engine with a ton of features - something we unfortunately don't have with FS... :(

Ah well, we can but dream :(

Who knows, maybe AFS2012 will be able to do it correctly...