Hello Dai and Stefan

After a few hours now with the new update I thought I'd share my findings with you.

Installation. Very smooth. Aircraft and documents installed in the correct place and loaded into the sim with no issues.

Preflight. The information in the manual is not in a logical order. I understand this is as it was in the origional but to have to wade through 60 pages just to get to the weight and balance section which is one of the first things you need is a bit much. I found part one of the manual very informative and will have this by my bedside for the next few nights.

Flight. Initial preperation and engine start no problems once I got used to the flow needed to start. First attempt at take off from water was not good. Engines at full power with props forward and mixture rich resulted in the aircraft going nowhere and yes the mooring buoys were haulded in. I then reduced the payload and fuel weight to well under max weight and proceed to get airboure in the normal way. Reached 5000 feet very slowly but this was correct as it only climbs at 200-300 feet per minute.

So to the achilles heel of the previous release, the GyroPilot. This time round it actually works, yeaaa. Well kind of. The lateral control works well if you demand just a few degrees of turn ahead of the aircraft. I found if you demand say a 90 degree turn it will drastically over shoot and take an age to get back on course. It will eventually but if you lead it by a few degrees when you've reached where you need to be the aircraft will slowly settle on that heading. It will overshoot slightly but will quickly get back onto course. The vertical control however takes a bit of getting used to. Engage only when your straight and level. If you need to retrim after a while you'll find you'll be demanding at leaet 3 degrees of pitch up or down before anything happens, then the Yoke will suddenly snap forward or back and the aircraft will be commanded to do far more than you need. Trying to keep it level within a margin of lets say 200 hundred feet is realy challenging. But it does work which is more than can be said of the first incarnation so congrats for that.

Elsewhere the water drain from the fuel tanks works as does the fuel transfer and the radio's, both receivers work with idents into each ear. Not tried the weatherships yet. Not tried the lighting yet either but I found the cockpit a little dark even during daylight hours. I've resorted into using FS Spotlights to give it a permanent overall wash and this has helped.

Now to some issues that I think are personal to my set up as Dai will remember from the troubleshooting a year ago. We never got to the bottom of the problems as I gave up flying it because of the Gyro issue. To recap I suffered from occasional and random un-commanded switches turning off. The new update also has this problem. Here are my findings

Pitot Heat switch goes from on to off

Fuel Transfer pumps go from on to off

Cowl Flaps go to fully closed from where ever they are set even though the leaver lock is on.

Autosys switch goes from alternator to Dynameter

Plane Heat goes from on to off.

Desired course indicator flicks in the gauge, I beleive this is a know bug but it sometimes coninsides with all the above switching off. When the random event occurs it happens to all the above all at the same time and instanly.

Elsewhere other things I've noticed are the Landing lights stay on even though the switch is turned off and I'm unable to select fuel cuttoff as the mixture leavers won't go fully off. They appear to be stuck at where the bar used to be in the old model. Not tried the wheel dolly and tractor option as yet.

Going to be trying a cross the Atlantic flight tomorrow starting around 0900z. I'll be on Vatsim and Twitch www.twitch.tv/ianfisher101 if you want to follow along and see the issues for yourself.

Regards and thanks again for all your hard work in bringing us the upgrade and to Stefan for the free update.

Ian

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had a private email from gaab describing a possible solution to the flicking yoke problem. I hope he reads this because I'd like him to explain it publically.

'Three degrees' problem - see the conversation in the '314A gyropilot elevator snappy' topic with ghostminer3 for an answer to that.

Landing lights stay on - I guess you are using one of the scenarios we provided. Mea culpa on that one because the scenario contains now-unused data that's locking the on/off sequence. If you create your own scenario from scratch you won't get the problem. I spotted that one a day after release (sigh).

Take-off run - 20 degrees of flap? Anything more and they act as a drag, anything less and you won't get airborne in a hurry (you do eventually!). It will fly at MTOW but you can expect a take-off time of anything up to three minutes.

Don't expect to maintain the same altitude over a longish period with the gyropilot - it won't do it. It should, however, keep a reasonably level flight if it's not being beaten about by the weather. The vicious overshoot when making large heading changes is correct. You have found that you need to lead the turn by a few degrees at a time to minimise the overshoot. If you read the RL Sperry A-3 Gyropilot manual included ("Elmer Carries On"), you will find that Sperry tells you to expect the behaviour you are seeing.

If you're still on the B-314 then yes, the cockpit is still dirty and dingy. The B314-A was treated to a new set of textures. The overall lighting feel was effectively 'mixed down' from the many photographs I picked up during the course of the project. I also spent £230 on the Datacolor 'Spyder Elite X' screen calibration hardware to keep consistent colour and lighting accuracy on my monitors while creating textures.

Fuel cutoff - let me check that. I thought I had exactly that problem in the B314-A a couple of days ago, then couldn't reproduce it again.

As for the rest.... hmmm . No head-meets-brick-wall emoticon.

 

[Edit] Just found a way of reliably reproducing the fuel cutoff problem. As usual, closed the forum editor and then thought 'what if'.

Edited December 10, 20223 yr by dragonflightdesign

3 minutes ago, dragonflightdesign said:

I had a private email from gaab describing a possible solution to the flicking yoke problem. I hope he reads this because I'd like him to explain it publically.

'Three degrees' problem - see the conversation in the '314A gyropilot elevator snappy' topic with ghostminer3 for an answer to that.

Landing lights stay on - I guess you are using one of the scenarios we provided. Mea culpa on that one because the scenario contains now-unused data that's locking the on/off sequence. If you create your own scenario from scratch you won't get the problem. I spotted that one a day after release (sigh).

Take-off run - 20 degrees of flap? Anything more and they act as a drag, anything less and you won't get airborne in a hurry (you do eventually!). It will fly at MTOW but you can expect a take-off time of anything up to three minutes.

Don't expect to maintain the same altitude or even level flight over a longish period with the gyropilot - it won't do it. By it's very design (both RL and here) it is incapable of that sort of accuracy. The vicious overshoot when making large heading changes is also correct. You have found that you need to lead the turn by a few degrees at a time to minimise the overshoot. If you read the RL Sperry A-3 Gyropilot manual included ("Elmer Carries On"), you will find that Sperry tells you to expect the behaviour you are seeing.

If you're still on the B-314 then yes, the cockpit is still dirty and dingy. The B314-A was treated to a new set of textures. The overall lighting feel was effectively 'mixed down' from the many photographs I picked up during the course of the project. I also spent £230 on the Datacolor 'Spyder Elite X' screen calibration hardware to keep consistent colour and lighting accuracy on my monitors while creating textures.

As for the rest.... hmmm . No head-meets-brick-wall emoticon.

about the landing lights staying i've had the issue too even on my own created scenario so idk but yeah i've had the issue once or twice when flying today if you hit L it will turn it off i just don't know if it will turn back on idk how to code handle the default lighting keybind 

8 hours ago, dragonflightdesign said:

I had a private email from gaab describing a possible solution to the flicking yoke problem. I hope he reads this because I'd like him to explain it publically.

The Gyropilot when engaged assumes that the yoke is in neutral position (it is managing attitude, not altitude)
When modifying "the required pitch" if your neutral position is not zero you will see this strange behavior.

I am using Lorby's AAO which allow to precisely see the axis values.
After center point correction (32767 here), I see the yoke behaving as expected 🙂

Take care that manually moving the yoke once you used the GyroPilot may create new bias !

I hope that Windows (re)calibration will give the correct values

Gérard

Edited December 10, 20223 yr by gaab

Thank you Gérard .

Dai.  I'm currently mid atlantic heading West, 3 hours out of Foynes. I may have solved the un-commanded switch off issue. It was the autosave feature of FSUIPC causing the problem. I normaly have it set to 600 seconds which is every 10 minutes. To prove it I selected every 60 seconds and sure enough every minute the switches would do their thing and turn off. I've now turned the feature off inside FSUIPC and Three hours in and no un-commanded switch off's. So that is the cause of it so over to you put in some code to stop it effecting your aircraft, because having the autosave feature is a must in P3D especially after a long flight.

Other than that I have not been able to pick up the Julet Weathership at frequency 776. Im very near to it now but no responce on the receiver. I'll try Charlie later on but that's all for now.

Ian

Hello Ian

That is sort-of good news! We had never done any serious testing with FSUIPC because I didn't want to force users to download and install another program that they may not want. What are you using it for and how do you set it up that way?

-Dai

Hi Dai. 7hrs and 9mins in, still going OK.

I use FSUIPC for 2 main reasons, First is to map my ThrustMaster Warthog controllers to the sim. Each aircraft can have it's own profile which is automatically applied on selection. Say a small piper can have throttle, props and mixture where as a big four engine airliner can have engines 1&2 on one leaver, engines 3&4 on another and spoilers on another. All automatic when I select an aircraft. The other main reason is for the Autosave. It's vital to be able to reset yourself back just a few minutes following a sim or pc crash. The number of times it's saved me say after the sim crashes after a 15 hour 777 long haul. As you now know I've had to disable it for this 314 so if it crashes now I've got to go back to Poole and restart the whole flight rather than reload just a few minutes back at the latest autosave point. So please if you can fix it so I can restart it that would be extreamly useful.

Regards

Ian

Fuel cutoff problem fixed. For now, if you need to go to Fuel Cutoff, do it from the 2D panel (either Flight Engineer Main Panel or Flight Engineer Handpumps) as the 2D works correctly. It also moves the VC levers correctly.

I haven't looked into FSUIPC yet.

Edited December 16, 20223 yr by dragonflightdesign