SDK released early plus Holiday Releases

[SirDan 471]

So anyone else think that maybe some of these guys that got the SDK early and that have had this SDK for over a year, cough cough A2A. Might have something for us by the Holidays ?   hummmmm

I sure hope  !!!!

[LHookins 3,102]

1 minute ago, SirDan said:

So anyone else think that maybe some of these guys that got the SDK early and that have had this SDK for over a year, cough cough A2A. Might have something for us by the Holidays ?   hummmmm

I suspect it might be quite a while before we see A2A aircraft.  Scott indicated they're making the Aerostar for MSFS, so that's likely to be the first.

There are a lot of missing features in MSFS.  There doesn't appear to be a way to bring up 2D panels in MSFS, and that's how A2A does their walk-around pre-flight inspection and maintenance hangar.  

Given the difficulties I had converting a relatively simple aircraft from an older sim to run in MSFS this is not going to be anything like straightforward.

Sorry, I wish I had better news.  And I sincerely hope I'm wrong and we start seeing A2A ports before Christmas. 😄 

Hook

[Jetman67 517]

I don't know if it's completed enough for a full on addon yet

[SirDan 471]

3 minutes ago, LHookins said:

way to bring up 2D panels in MSFS

you mean panels like this ?    This is MSFS 2020   this was done by one guy with no clue after only 2 days of playing with the SDK  , 3 days after release 

 

Edited September 4, 2020 by SirDan

[LHookins 3,102]

2 minutes ago, SirDan said:

you mean panels like this ?    This is MSFS 2020   this was done by one guy with no clue after only 2 days of playing with the SDK  , 3 days after release 

 

I checked out a version of this which didn't work, CTD after about 20 seconds.  Someone made a video that had the aircraft appearing to work, but didn't show the extra panels including the interactive checklists, and there were no voices... and no other aircraft specific sounds that I could tell.  This version still had an active 32 bit .dll file in it.  I didn't bother trying to fix it.  It looks good in any case.

Manfred Jahn is not happy about these unauthorized ports.

Hook

[SirDan 471]

2 minutes ago, LHookins said:

Manfred Jahn is not happy about these unauthorized ports

Yeah , I can understand that and might be upset a bit myself. Point though is if one guy with 0 experience can port this in a day or two what could a group with experience and having the SDK  for over a year do ?

Edited September 4, 2020 by SirDan

[LHookins 3,102]

1 minute ago, SirDan said:

what could a group with experience and having the SDK  for over a year do ?

The problem with the SDK is that it is incomplete.  It would have been even less complete a year ago. 😄 

There is obviously enough there to make an aircraft.  I don't know if it would be any more sophisticated than the default MSFS aircraft.

Even a straight port isn't going to work quite right without a lot of massaging. And it's not difficult to make a straight port, the difficulty is getting it to work.

Hook

[MattNischan 3,778]

4 minutes ago, SirDan said:

if one guy with 0 experience can port this

It is neat to see some planes getting transferred in, but I would caution heavily against assigning any kind of effort value to these. They aren't ports.

They're really just the loading of the old format art assets into the sim. Zero percent of the code, which is where the majority of the meat of these planes exists, has been ported in any way. None of the existing old C/C++ code can work, and only a little bit of XML gauge code will.

In other words, the "ease" by which these assets has been moved in is not predictive of the actual effort that will be involved in actually completing a port.

[SirDan 471]

Well lets say from scratch no ports , what it takes to go from nothing to a full on study level aircraft. One to 1.5 years.So I doh Know my gut says I bet we see things coming out during the holidays. How good ? Study level maybe not but I bet they do drop something.  $$ is money 

[n4gix 4,947]

20 minutes ago, SirDan said:

you mean panels like this ?    This is MSFS 2020   this was done by one guy with no clue after only 2 days of playing with the SDK  , 3 days after release 

No, that is not a 2d panel. It is the VC, or at least as much as could be imported/converted.

[SirDan 471]

3 minutes ago, n4gix said:

No, that is not a 2d panel. It is the VC

Funny I can remember a friend that use to swear I'll never use VC only 2d. Can hear his voice now in Vent. " I don't care how realistic it is"   lol

[LHookins 3,102]

4 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

only a little bit of XML gauge code will.

The port I'm working on has XML gauges that work.

I suspect most existing XML gauge code is in a .cab file and MSFS might not be able to read those.  I had previously unpacked the .cab file to make a normal folder and all the gauges work as expected.

The biggest problem is that some of the parameters from the .air file are not being calculated the same way they were previously, and I'm having to edit the .air file to get reasonable values.  I'm seeing some of the same things in the default aircraft.

Half the cockpit click spots do not work or are hidden by what may be other click spots.  For example, I cannot click on anything in my throttle quadrant or the fuel cutoff or magneto switch.  There are some tooltips for these click spots that appear elsewhere in the cockpit.  It's... crazy.

I may eventually document my efforts to give people an idea of what it's like to make a working port.

Hook

[SirDan 471]

14 minutes ago, LHookins said:

I may eventually document my efforts

You really should , I would encourage you 100%. So oh so many new people coming into MSFS 2020. It would help people I would think. If anything it would maybe be a good point of reference for others. There is a lot going on atm documentation is always a great thing to have. 

[Chock 17,769]

1 hour ago, SirDan said:

Well lets say from scratch no ports , what it takes to go from nothing to a full on study level aircraft. One to 1.5 years.

Going from scratch to creating a complex add-on aeroplane would be seriously pushing it if you were trying to do it in 18 months. You could maybe manage a complex GA aeroplane in that time, but a realistic airliner in 18 months total development time, is really unlikely to say the least, especially for the new MS sim, where it's uncharted territory in many respects.

Granted some of the time involved depends on how many people are on such a project, but you can't put an incredibly large number of people on the task to get the time down, since all of the wages involved would make it prohibitively expensive unless you were going to sell absolutely loads of units, and even if you could make the wage bill balance, there comes a point where you end up with too many cooks anyway, and more people just becomes counter-productive.

FSL's A320 took about six or seven years to go from being an idea to being a product on sale if I recall correctly, and that was with people who were making stuff for a sim they were very familiar with and one they'd already made several airliners for, including the original 737 NG and the MD-11 for PMDG. Even then they had to start really thinking outside the box to get the thing to work in FSX with all the things they wanted it to do.

Some of that lengthy development time for the FSL A320 was because they had to figure out how to do all the FBW stuff in a base sim which was just not designed to handle that level of complexity, but even a study-sim of a comparatively simpler airliner, such as a B737-400, could easily take four years from initial meeting to finished product if you were aiming for it being a quality product which was based on studying the real aeroplane hands-on. And that's not even considering the fact that a lot of airlines currently have bigger fish to fry at the moment with the present status quo, than collaborating with a developer of a flight simulator add-on.

I strongly suspect Just Flight will be one of, if not the first, to manage it with their 747-200, since they do have a bit of a track record for pulling off such surprises with add-ons for new sims; they've been the first developer to get a payware add-on aeroplane into a total of three brand new sims over the years if I recall correctly.

Edited September 4, 2020 by Chock

[desbean 357]

2 hours ago, LHookins said:

Manfred Jahn is not happy about these unauthorized ports.

I would rather wait and see what Jahn comes up with, assuming he is going to do it.