On 4/9/2022 at 1:52 AM, Bob Scott said:

If you use groundspeed acceleration, you'd have to manually adjust your time and fuel load when you come out of warp. 

Interesting, on CAE's Simulator, using 2/3/4X Ground speed acceleration would actually fast up on fuel usage (but FF gauges shows normal)

Not sure if it's on XP11, but maybe send a feature request to XP12 now?

12 minutes ago, C2615 said:

Not sure if it's on XP11, but maybe send a feature request to XP12 now?

It is a.) too late for feature requests for XP12 now and b.) this is exactly what accelerating ground speed is NOT intended to do.

Accelerating time is doing just that - it shrinks the time, just like watching a movie in "fast forward".

Accelerating ground speed is doing just that - accelerating the speed over ground, nothing else.

What we are still missing is "position freeze" where the ground speed gets set to 0, everything else still runs normally.

The difficulty in accelerating the time is - as Bob pointed out - that X-Plane needs to do all the calculations to GET to that point in time you want to go to. There is no "skipping ahead", because it is not like a prerecorded movie.

Asking for instantaneous skip ahead is like asking for next weekends lottery numbers - the process needs to play out, there is no way of predicting it. X-Plane constantly calculates all relevant factors to predict what the airplane does - it works in realtime, but needs about 20 calculations (loops of the flight model thread) per second to arrive at a result that is accurate enough to base the further flight on. So if you run at 60 fps, you can accelerate time to about 3x and X-Plane´s calculation can still keep up.

"Difficult to see. Always in motion is, the future".

Cheers, Jan

 

Edited April 11, 20224 yr by Janov

There's a close analog to position freeze already in XP11--you can stop the physics engine, which freezes aircraft attitude and position updates while everything else continues to run.  I found a lua script called UserAircraftFreeze that implements this (by setting dataref sim/operation/override/override_planepath to 0).  I use it just after making a jump to keep the aircraft in place while I adjust the fuel load, time, fuel system configuration, FMS direct-to etc.

The data loaded into a fairly complete modern FMS gauge can give us enough of a predictive capability to position an aircraft forward to a point along the planned route with remaining fuel and time adjusted per the prediction.  It's heavily aircraft dependent, though, so it would remain within the purview of the add-on.  What the platform needs, IMHO, is a more user-friendly interface to move an aircraft to a new position over the earth (lat, long, altitude MSL, true heading, and pitch/bank relative to the local horizon at the new position) without having to do complex trig to resolve Euler vs cartesian coordinates and orientation--and to do it without forcing an aircraft reload.

27 minutes ago, Bob Scott said:

I found a lua script called UserAircraftFreeze that implements this (by setting dataref sim/operation/override/override_planepath to 0).

Yup, that's mine.

 

One other thing you may be interested in is this project of mine, one of whose features is persistent datarefs across X-Plane sessions (as long as these datarefs are writable): https://github.com/JT8D-17/XLua-Utils-for-X-Plane

This may help with the cabin altitude dataref in the B742. Just find any datarefs you wish to make persistent (see documentation for methods), add them to an input list and enable the save functionality. I've added a customizable delay timer to ensure that the dataref state is applied after the init routines of the aircraft's systems, but even that doesn't guarantee a proper dataref loading state, so don't be too greedy when trying this with complex aircraft.

Thanks Bjoern.  Can XLua and FlyWithLua co-exist in XP11?

I'll experiment with this and the Feris B742.  I did already experiment with writing fixed values to the exposed datarefs that seem relevant with a script...I can see the cabin diff press and/or altitude bump momentarily when I do, but it returns to its previous state pretty much immediately, so I suspect there's an internal variable set when the panel inits that may be driving this.  Definitely worth a try, though.

Cheers

20 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

Thanks Bjoern.  Can XLua and FlyWithLua co-exist in XP11?

Yes, sure. FWL is a global plugin and always available when X-Plane runs, while XLua and SASL are aircraft-specific. All three plugins run within their own namespace and can not interfere with one another. (If you do need to communicate between them, you will have to use datarefs.)