C441 mod to hide pilot's yoke, but keep co-pilot's (including screenshots)

[ThomasAH 61]

Hi!

 

There is something that often bothered me in the Flysimware planes:

1. I want to hide the pilot's yoke, but not the co-pilot's.

2. I do not like the colorful "return yoke" labels. I have the yoke on my desktop, I don't want to return it to the aircraft.

3. I want to hide the pilot's yoke by default when loading the aircraft.

 

Today I tried to find a solution and found one:

I opened the file FSX/SimObjects/Airplanes/FLYSIM Cessna 441/model.Main/Cessna441_interior.mdl in an editor that supports editing binary files, in my case: vim with the option "-b".

There are 19 lines like these two:

(L:YOKE,bool) (L:YOKE,bool) if{ 1 } els{ 0 }
(L:YOKE,bool) (L:YOKE,bool) if{ 0 } els{ 1 }

The first shows something (the "return yoke" label) when L:YOKE is true, the second hides something (the yoke and attached parts).

 

In the first 2 of the 19 lines I change 1+0 to 0+0 to never show the "return yoke" labels.

In the next 10 lines (3 to 12) I change 0+1 to 1+0 to hide the pilot's yoke (and attached parts) by default.

In the last 7 lines (13 to 19) I change 0+1 to 1+1 to always show the co-pilot's yoke.

 

To clarify, here is the view of the original (left) and the modified (right) file in the editor:

 

And here is the result in the cockpit:

 

As you can see in the screenshot: Because the co-pilot's yoke is always shown, the clickspot to unhide the pilot's yoke is still available.

 

A similar change can probably be made for other Flysimware aircraft, e.g. the MU-2B-60 has 18 lines for this purpose.

 

Maybe this is useful for someone else, too.

[SkipperMac 1]

This looks excellent, but short of spending some hours to try to understand Vim and opening/editing binary files, I might have to just dream about this better yoke arrangement 

 

Any tips will be gratefully received, digested, attempted ... and might even result in some measure of success.

[ThomasAH 61]

Vim was just an example, because that is what I am using.

There are other editors that should work, e.g. dedicated binary file editors like hexplorer.

 

I would prefer if you (and others) can manually apply the changes, because this gives the most flexibility for situations like different versions of this aircraft, different aircraft from Flysimware, maybe even different aircraft from other creators, combining MDL edits for different purposes, ...

 

But if everything fails, I can create an xdelta3 binary patch, just tell me if you need it :smile:

[JYW 2,980]

 

 

But if everything fails, I can create an xdelta3 binary patch, just tell me if you need it :smile:

 

Yes please!

 

Sterling work, sir. :smile:

[ThomasAH 61]

I just uploaded a zip with the xdelta3 patch, instructions and the information from this thread to the file library. I will post here as soon as it gets accepted.

[ThomasAH 61]

The file has been accepted: http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fsxacrp&DLID=195691

The title is a bit short (Mod Cessna 441), probably because the one I entered was too long.

 

Tell me if it works for you.

[ThomasAH 61]

Does it work for you?

[ThomasAH 61]

I have made the same modifications for version 1.9 of the C441.

Did anyone use the xdelta3 files for 1.8 and want an updated version?