1 hour ago, bendead said:

I need them to manually activate the forum account before I can read the post... I feel 20 years younger

FWIW, I never received a confirmation. I registered last night and tried it this morning and it just worked.

15 minutes ago, odourboy said:

FWIW, I never received a confirmation. I registered last night and tried it this morning and it just worked.

Cheers, I will keep an eye open

21 hours ago, pmplayer said:

Does it work without that Test or is this a must be done for the System?

Both ILS Frequenz was set also both course

for copilot and pilot.

cheers 😉

Test must be done otherwise it will lock you out of being able to use it.

So I was able to get access to the forum a couple of min ago, and the technique is toying with the controller settings and curves...

I don't get why Leonardo is not using a system on the EFB or FMS to calibrate the throttle, like FBW or Aerosoft did, it's also the same for the Simbrief integration.

16 minutes ago, bendead said:

Simbrief integration.

But EFB has simbrief integration you can load W&B and whole flight plan separately 

26 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

But EFB has simbrief integration you can load W&B and whole flight plan separately 

I think he is referring to the automatic integration where you don't have to download two files to a specific folder.

6 minutes ago, rjack1282 said:

I think he is referring to the automatic integration where you don't have to download two files to a specific folder.

This.

Maddog_lm is an external process, I don't see why it could not connect and sync with Simbrief and then send the data to the EFB.

Edited May 5, 20224 yr by bendead

If it’s a wasm module,  it can’t connect to the internet.  According to reports, the PMDG will have the same limitation.  Java coded stuff doesn’t have this limitation, but does have others.  Current sdk restriction as far as I understand.

1 minute ago, ShawnG said:

If it’s a wasm module,  it can’t connect to the internet.  According to reports, the PMDG will have the same limitation.  Java coded stuff doesn’t have this limitation, but does have others.  Current sdk restriction as far as I understand.

So how is Maddog_lm able to get the route weather when it's not connected to MSFS? I am sure it's using internet

Continuing on my attempts at trying to enhance the VC textures, things are going pretty well. I'm still refining it, experimenting, trying to make the VC a bit less "dirty" looking too. Of course the best would be to entirely redo the texturing almost from scratch for bigger surfaces, but that would take too long and is honestly above my skills lol. For the moment most of it is enhancing techniques but there is some tradeoff. Some big parts like all the back of the VC, and pretty much all of the VC structure has their textures all crammed into only 2 4096x4096 textures and share the texturing space with an awful lot of smaller parts, this means for example that the entire back of the cockpit only occupy like a quarter of one 4096 texture (except for the fuse panel), the seats for another example only occupies like 20% if not less of the other 4096 texture. To put it into perspective, know that the FBW A320 uses an entire 4096 texture, in its entirety, solely for the seats. The MD-80 uses some texturing techniques that made sense a decade ago when people had less VRAM and less RAM, but not by todays standards. I'm trying to counter this by upping the textures resolution of most big and detailed areas (those 2 specific 4096x4096 textures) to as much as 16384x16384 but this is not considered very good practices for most GPUs.

 

• Things are coming along nicely though, and I could definitely use some help for beta testing the mod in the coming days. I would be especially looking for people with higher end GPUs which have more than 8GB VRAM (I have an RTX 2070 super), people who have less than my 32 GB of RAM, and also people with lower end GPUs than mine. The idea is to bring the mod in two separate iterations, one with some of the textures to 16K for like users of high end GPUs with loads of VRAM, and another mod with 8K instead.

 

One thing I've been very happy with yesterday is that I was able to at last find the reason for those horrendously pixelized fake shadows that are everywhere and are so low-res they looks like stairs lol, see:

In fact, they're part of some not so small textures (4K), but it is obvious it is a remnant of some old optimization fake shadowing technique (ambient occlusion as we calls it) which was in favor in rendering engines from a decade ago and more, as real time ambient occlusion was quite GPU hungry back then. Problem is, it looks like it was a 512x512 texture that has been simply overstretched like crazy to 4096x4096, giving catastrophic results 😅 I can't believe this has made its way done like this in MSFS for such a high priced product. This is really cutting the corners, they should have subcontracted a seasoned 3D artist/texture artist for this release. I thought Leonardo was even more god-tier dev than PMDG?
I'm getting rid of that since MSFS already has built-in real time ambient occlusion (we're in 2020+ you know...) and might experiment with it a bit (touchup here and there to emphasize sense of depth).

Don't get me wrong, the texture work was not inherently bad at all for the time it was released in P3D! I'm not criticizing the artist behind it, it was actually good and solid work! BUT it is work from a bygone era of old rendering engines and GPUs and their limits at the time... With that being said, there's so much noise and low-res pixelization that the enhancing softwares and techniques I use have a hard time coping with it and has a tendency to make things look artificial a bit, like it was hand painted and have a bit of a cartoony look (or oil painting look). Still it looks better IMO, and I'm working on not enhancing but replace some parts from scratch where it can't be enhanced enough. For example windshield seals, some details like the jeppesen airway manual, etc.

 

So far it can look like this (seals have not been done yet minus an experiment that will not stay on one of it):

 

I'm also planning to do a bit of enhancement on the PBR texturing which is not very good as to how it comes up in MSFS. Probably was good enough in P3D but certainly not in MSFS (it hardly looks like there's some PBR work at all)

Definitely looking for a few people to beta test and give their thoughts on performance in the coming days, ideas and look. Feel free to PM me.

Edited May 5, 20224 yr by alanlj44

14 minutes ago, bendead said:

So how is Maddog_lm able to get the route weather when it's not connected to MSFS? I am sure it's using internet

Isn’t the weather info in one of the two files from sim brief?  I don’t have the mad dog, so I’m guessing based on other addons.

21 minutes ago, alanlj44 said:

Continuing on my attempts at trying to enhance the VC textures

Nice works 👍

I was wondering if you could have a look, between the texture resolution settings and what the texture looks like. On every other plane the cockpit textures looks quite sharp at medium, high and ultra, it's just the outside textures that are really changing a bit, the gain in FPS is massive

On the Maddog, switching to medium for exemple, will make some texture on the VC look horrible, like the map/ND control and some okayish

I will post some screenshot tonight

Edited May 5, 20224 yr by bendead

5 minutes ago, ShawnG said:

Isn’t the weather info in one of the two files from sim brief?  I don’t have the mad dog, so I’m guessing based on other addons.

No, for this test, I am using a departure and arrival airport that are not on simbrief nor on the files, it will still get the metar. I am using the fuel/route planner.

Edited May 5, 20224 yr by bendead

46 minutes ago, rjack1282 said:

I think he is referring to the automatic integration where you don't have to download two files to a specific folder.

Oh I see. Well I figure the only thing I have to run simbrief downloader that automatically drops file in MD80th folders and then just type route in EFB inside sim. I'd call it semi automatic LOL

1 hour ago, CaptainNick said:

Test must be done otherwise it will lock you out of being able to use it.

Hi ,

I did another flight today landing at EDDS RW25 and the Autoland work fine at this time ( with no test done, so i belive this is not absolutely necessary )

cheers 😉