Cessna 421C for X-Plane – Kickoff – FlightSim Studio AG (flightsim-studio.com)

@Alec  just made me aware of some good News !

Interestingly FSS is the same MS / ASOBO Partner creating nice sceneries and AFAIK also involved in the soaring developments for MFS.

It's really nice to see a 3pd being open-minded these days !

Edited July 15, 20223 yr by jcomm

24 minutes ago, jcomm said:

It's really nice to see a 3pd being open-minded these days !

It certainly is and it seems  from their writing that they are pretty excited of this opportunity and to actually innovate new way of scripting that will help in their development efforts. 

Glad to see them jump aboard. 

Looks great. But it’s coming to Xplane 11 first.

It will be interesting to compare it with its little brother - Cessna 414 recently out of beta on 2020 -

which has turned out to be a great success in its Beta phase

9 hours ago, Randall said:

Looks great. But it’s coming to Xplane 11 first.

Ah ! I wasn't sure about that. Not bad anyway because after release I am almost sure it'll take sometime before XP12 stabilizes for more complex addons...

On 7/16/2022 at 3:00 AM, jcomm said:

Ah ! I wasn't sure about that. Not bad anyway because after release I am almost sure it'll take sometime before XP12 stabilizes for more complex addons...

It probably won't be long after 12 comes out that designers start modding native XP-11 planes to fly in it. I just started off with 11. Steam Sale. If ATC were better and more in depth and realistic with VFR and flight following options and voice interaction I would be content with 11 as it is. My own area, PA USA was nicely done. Even the smaller airfields look close to the actual ones. I can fly pilotage around here and PA as you know has some silly Appalachian terrain.

47 minutes ago, Gary1124 said:

. I can fly pilotage around here and PA as you know has some silly Appalachian terrain.

😳 actually I don't (*), quite... Too far, but here in PORTA LAND we have some tricky zones too, specially if you fly gliders 🙂

My base of soaring ops, LPMN, is actually in XP11 too, and it's a rather small aerodrome, although it has a paved runway. 

(*) But ! I would love to visit the USA !  Not on this life I guess, unless I win the Euromillions 🙂

Edited July 18, 20223 yr by jcomm

On 7/15/2022 at 2:52 PM, Randall said:

Looks great. But it’s coming to Xplane 11 first.

Yes the title to this thread is somewhat misleading.

2 hours ago, PDX Flyer said:

Yes the title to this thread is somewhat misleading.

Well, for me the interesting part is that it's going to be ready for XP12 when the sim becomes available, which is what counts right now... Couldn't care less about XP11...

17 hours ago, jcomm said:

😳 actually I don't (*), quite... Too far, but here in PORTA LAND we have some tricky zones too, specially if you fly gliders 🙂

My base of soaring ops, LPMN, is actually in XP11 too, and it's a rather small aerodrome, although it has a paved runway. 

(*) But ! I would love to visit the USA !  Not on this life I guess, unless I win the Euromillions 🙂

PORTA LAND? What country is that? We have like two Porta Lands over here I know of. One in Maine and one in Oregon. Now out that way in the West, they have even more seriously silly mountain terrain for VFR. Ditto Alaska.

On 7/15/2022 at 1:07 PM, jcomm said:

Cessna 421C for X-Plane – Kickoff – FlightSim Studio AG (flightsim-studio.com)

@Alec  just made me aware of some good News !

Interestingly FSS is the same MS / ASOBO Partner creating nice sceneries and AFAIK also involved in the soaring developments for MFS.

It's really nice to see a 3pd being open-minded these days !

I hope the X-Plane 421 will be as good as Alabeo's is. With GTN and user mods it is even better, nearly A2A realistic. My favorite twin piston in P3D

6 hours ago, Gary1124 said:

PORTA LAND? What country is that? We have like two Porta Lands over here I know of. One in Maine and one in Oregon. Now out that way in the West, they have even more seriously silly mountain terrain for VFR. Ditto Alaska.

Eheheh, sorry, far from those two PORTAs 🙂

Portugal !  The most gorgeous place in the World 🙂

7 hours ago, jcomm said:

Eheheh, sorry, far from those two PORTAs 🙂

Portugal !  The most gorgeous place in the World 🙂

I'm sure it is very pretty. I am ex-US Navy and I have been to Spain. I have been to many countries. Many very scenic although I was not impressed by North Africa or the Horn of Africa or the Persian Gulf area but a lot of scenery in Europe reminded me of home. Everyone loves where they grew up. I Love my rolling, tree covered mountains and ridges with all the forests and farmland in the valleys and the beautiful, wide but shallow, Susquehanna River meandering through it all. 

I hope you get a chance to come over and visit. 

Some News

 

We received a lot of questions about the Custom Scripting Engine, which we mentioned in our kickoff post. Therefore, we will now go into more detail.

Basically, X-Plane provides a large number of functions by default. For the average addon this is often sufficient. For us, however, it was clear from the beginning that we wanted to implement things in the C421 that X-Plane does not provide. Therefore we looked at different options at the beginning, such as:

Xlua: A variant of Lua adapted for X-Plane, which is also used by standard X-Plane aircrafts like the 737. It is characterized mainly by its rather simple approach. Even less experienced programmers or even complete newbies can achieve good results after a short learning curve. Disadvantages, however, are a limited range of functions and only moderate performance.

In contrast, SASL is available as a comprehensive, professional tool, with which almost all wishes can be realized. However, deeper programming knowledge is required for this. The market knows only a small number of resources who are familiar with this and there is no one in our team. Bringing in external programmers is often difficult as well. While they can learn quickly, they often lack the aeronautical understanding to adequately implement an instrument or logic.

Basically, we wanted both: an easy-to-use scripting language with an extensive feature set. So we had to create this ourselves. To explain this in detail would go beyond the scope. But simply speaking, it is an upgraded XLua variant that has been integrated into the syntax of the scripting language wren, which can be compiled into all three supported X-Plane operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux). Of course we did not start from scratch but used common callbacks like AfterPhysics or FlightStart. Therefore a migration of a xlua script is not too complex. But thanks to our several additional functions we are able to solve complex issues quickly and efficiently without the need of a highly skilled coder.

A few examples:

We can store data in different preference levels via a simple module. For example, we can store user-specific data in the output/preferences path, which can still be available after uninstalling the aircraft, so that an update or reinstallation can fall back on the previous settings. Or we can store configurations of the aircraft within the livery, such as the choice of landing lights. As mentioned in the kickoff, the C421 comes with either 1 or 2 retractable landing lights in the wings or retrofit LED lights on the front engine cowling. The user can save this configuration per livery and repainters can also pre-configure this for users.

We can extend or override standard X-Plane commands. This is useful when we want to simulate an instrument with a custom display that includes functions beyond the X-Plane native functions. For example, in the GTX330 Transponder. By means of the X-Plane Commands the transponder mode can be controlled and the code can be entered – so far nothing new. However, the GTX330 has modes that use the same buttons (=commands), but have completely different functions. For example, a countdown time can be set with the number buttons. Without our code, the transponder code of X-Plane would always change. We can now suppress this situationally. On the other hand, we can always ensure that the customer can continue to use all of X-Plane’s standard commands and does not have to map all of his hardware to his own commands (at least as long as X-Plane provides a command for the corresponding button).

Furthermore, we can display content not only on an instrument, but also in the entire X-Plane window. We use this, for example, to display the breathing mask if the pressure control is not set properly.

In addition, there is an extensive in-game debugging, with which we can analyze the code in real time and also reload it within seconds, without having to use X-Plane’s own reload function. A really comfortable way.

We also implemented the activation logic developed by Stairport, as already successfully used in products like shadeX and ProCam. With this, we not only have an automatic integration to large online stores like x-plane.org or Aerosoft, but we can also perform an automatic activation in the background for Steam users.

In terms of performance, we have achieved great values, but they have become somewhat worse in the meantime, simply because we now have an incredible number of calculations in this aircraft. However, our modular approach also allows us to disable partial scripts when they are not needed at all. So depending on the situation, performance can vary slightly. However, hopefully hardly any user will notice this in normal use. On our test system, we got about 80 fps with all code disabled, and still about 77 fps with all code enabled. Of course, we are still working on making all the code as efficient as possible.

There would be many more examples. However, with this post we don’t want to praise ourselves, we just want to give you a glimpse behind the scenes. It is important to mention that there are other ways to achieve our results (cue SASL). However, we would not have been able to implement this with our know how in the speed.

We are still missing modules that we would like to incorporate in the long run. We are working our way from instrument to instrument, let’s see what is still to come.

 

 

 

Wow, that's quite a description of the upcoming 421 ! 

Phantom88, I seem to remember you from these forums as a "normal" user 🙂 Are you into development to now ?

Edited July 23, 20223 yr by jcomm