1 hour ago, BostonJeremy77 said:

It's just wild that of ALL the people to collaborate with, Toliss has chosen to go that route. Oh well, I hope it works out for them! I really do.

Agree, but I would think it's Aerosoft who courted Toliss. AS is more a publishing house than a developer (obviously 😆).

And to be fair, the AS produced add-ons have had pretty good 3D modeling, an area where Toliss has been regularly criticized over the years.

Agree with you otherwise. 🤙

On 6/29/2025 at 3:15 PM, Litjan said:

I assume that "performing on the numbers" is not a prerequisite to having great monetary success as a MSFS add-on.

I am not saying that it is not possible to make a highly accurate add-ons for MSFS, but due to the larger userbase, even appealing to just a small fraction of it (those that don´t mind to have just an approximate aerodynamic performance), would eclipse the sales available on the X-Plane basis. In other words, getting rich is much easier on the other platform.

Depends. As I can see, porting the A346 to MSFS just dips the toe into an unoccupied part of the pond for AS. If the result is a rousing success (depending on people wanting an A346 in the first place), then the next step will be the A339 followed by the A32x. And the narrowbodies is where the overall package really has to deliver in all aspects (including performing on the numbers) as the competition is much stronger in that segment.

 

On 6/29/2025 at 8:10 PM, UrgentSiesta said:

It would seem MSFS is far less "auto-magic" in that regard, as well as having essentially 3 aero models (e.g., non-CFD, CFD, and a highly variable mixture of both).

Thus, getting a good FM in MSFS involves a lot MORE work on the part of the developer (and that IS an MSFS sim problem).

Ive had many devs factually assert they just couldn't get anything done in [insert common development language/framework/platform here]. And then others factually assert the complete opposite...

Well, it all depends if you can get your hands on some flight test data or not...

What both simulators definitely do not have, and which makes flight characteristics tuning a MASSIVE PITA in both is a "headless" predictive perfomance tool, which runs all the equations without the graphics to enable performance tuning in the least amount of time.

 

5 hours ago, Bjoern said:

What both simulators definitely do not have, and which makes flight characteristics tuning a MASSIVE PITA in both is a "headless" predictive perfomance tool, which runs all the equations without the graphics to enable performance tuning in the least amount of time.

That would make life so much easier for aircraft developers to tune flight models to known flight test data.

It could be integrated into Plane-Maker, a sort of analyser that would output all kind of flight performance data (significant speeds, SFCs, flight envelope, etc.) on the click of a button, so that the designer could check almost in real time the effect of changes in geometry and other Plane-Maker parameters.

But it would probably require quite a significant amount of work to code.

Edited June 30, 2025Jun 30 by Murmur

The problem is that if the aircraft is to be kept by Aeroosoft we can expect the worst, reputationally I don't know if this is a very smart move for Toliss.

10 hours ago, Aglos77 said:

The problem is that if the aircraft is to be kept by Aeroosoft we can expect the worst, reputationally I don't know if this is a very smart move for Toliss.

I thought to myself they need their heads read if they are going to jump in bed in aerosoft.  Still money is money I guess.

FSElite just posted the full video of Aerosoft/Toliss. It clarifies many details about the partnership

• First, Toliss is not leaving xplane which should be quite obvious
• They have been working on this project for the last 2 years
• All of Toliss' systems are fully independent of the Xplane platform including their own engine model
• Toliss developed their own flight model for the A340 in collaboration with McGill University in Canada.
• The flight model/flight dynamics will be identical regardless of the platform you choose (Xplane, MSFS, etc).

Sounds like any aircraft that they develop in the future would have the flexibility to be on any platform if they chose to do so.

23 minutes ago, brinx said:

• Toliss developed their own flight model for the A340 in collaboration with McGill University in Canada.
• The flight model/flight dynamics will be identical regardless of the platform you choose (Xplane, MSFS, etc).

Ah, the "lowest common denominator". Ahem.

26 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Ah, the "lowest common denominator". Ahem.

I was a bit confused by your comment at first. It finally hit me what you meant.😊

He said the goal is for the flight model to be better than xplane or at least equivalent. Sounds like they are trying to build something that can be the heart of any simulator regardless of platform.  Maybe that was the reference to prosim. From a business perspective it is a wise move. Based on the comment from Torsten, they may be considering other solo projects too. However, they reiterated that they are still committed to Xplane with more planes in the pipeline.

What is surprising to me is that Aerosoft said that they hope to sell it on the xplane org store too. I wonder what the odds of that happening are? 

 

 

Edited July 3, 2025Jul 3 by brinx

That's awesome. The phd found a bunch of university students eager to do the grunge work. Hopefully it was a grad degree that will generate some papers to read in the next year or 2.

Given the hand-shaking talks with Airbus in the recent past (with both parties apparently), I'm sure McGill would be more than happy to open doors to their slice of the compute cluster: legit CFD or maybe access to some reverse-engineering optimization algorithms that he wouldn't have had access to otherwise. And even with all that, he sounded merely just hopeful that he could match default XP. It wouldn't hurt my head if it comes out a bit better though.

Edited July 4, 2025Jul 4 by blingthinger

On 6/30/2025 at 5:17 PM, BostonJeremy77 said:

Their Twin Otter was abandoned as soon as it was released and then it was taken off the market.

I purchased the Twin Otter - that was the last Aerosoft product I purchased.

22 hours ago, brinx said:

He said the goal is for the flight model to be better than xplane or at least equivalent. Sounds like they are trying to build something that can be the heart of any simulator regardless of platform.  Maybe that was the reference to prosim. From a business perspective it is a wise move. Based on the comment from Torsten, they may be considering other solo projects too. However, they reiterated that they are still committed to Xplane with more planes in the pipeline.

What is surprising to me is that Aerosoft said that they hope to sell it on the xplane org store too. I wonder what the odds of that happening are? 

I don't think ToLiss' custom FM can be the heart of any simulator and is better than XP's for any aircraft, especially since it's been only two years and it was probably coded and developed by cheap university student labor. It rather sounds like they wrote a flight model that's better than XP's when it comes to Airbus peculiarities like the fly-by-wire system and Airbus specific engine performance.

The statement about the XP.org store is confusing as the A340-600 is already on offer there. Or are we talking a release 2.0 here or an A340-200/300?

 

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

cheap university student labor

That's not a hinderance in any way. Cheap and eager labor supervised by some of the top minds in their field with access to the best aerodynamic analysis software/hardware that money can buy. He didn't provide any details so I don't detect any 'sounds like'. I am 100% speculating.

XP is a generalized model. IF they were running CFD on the actual airframe geometry to acquire the force coefficients and then able to tune the 6DOF behaviors further with additional optimization techniques, they would end up with a better specialized model. "Fly by wire" is not "flight model". Fly by wire sits on top of it. It's an autopilot that's active all the time. For asobo20/4 at least, he's replaced both of those elements and claims to be on par if not slightly better than XP's default aero.

The engine model has already long been external. It is already more specialized than XP's generalized turbine could ever be. Further improvements would only expand that gap. Not shrink it.

On 7/3/2025 at 10:57 PM, brinx said:

Toliss developed their own flight model for the A340 in collaboration with McGill University in Canada.

I'm not really sure what to make of this. It sounds like they have gone down the "xplane as visuals" route, which given the "xplane level D for airbus visuals" stuff being talked about a few years ago and airbus becoming a commercial customer of Toliss could all be connected, but also very much might not be.

Does anyone have the toliss birds? are the override_groundplane and override_planepath datarefs set to 1?

https://developer.x-plane.com/article/movingtheplane/

sim/flightmodel/forces/*_plug_acf

All writable but always read as 0.

37 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

https://developer.x-plane.com/article/movingtheplane/

sim/flightmodel/forces/*_plug_acf

All writable but always read as 0.

I assert people interpret "Toliss developed their own flight model for the A340 in collaboration with McGill University in Canada." to mean the A340 will behave equally under MSFS and XP12. 

Thing is, that really isn't necessarily true, "flight model" is not an either or thing, its a relationship between many moving parts and systems that in XP you can somewhat pick and choose (within reason).

The "throw everything out and do it all yourself" option is partially described in the "Positioning the User’s Aircraft While the Physics Engine is Not Running" section of your link,  setting override_planepath to 1.

That still leaves X-Planes ground handling, which can be disabled by setting override_groundplane to 1

Both of these would need to be set for equal behaviour under MSFS and XP12.

Before you get that far there is a large army of different things that could be described as "developing your own flight model", from overriding things like electrical power and hydraulics, all the way up to what we do in the 744, where everything up to but not including the physics gets overridden:

https://github.com/mSparks43/747-400/blob/master/plugins/xtlua_keysystems/scripts/B747.19.xt.hydraulicsmodel/B747.19.xt.hydraulics_override.lua

Instead that overrides the state of every surface that interacts with XP planes physics to match what is given in the fcom.

Even focusing on exactly one airframe, there is far, far more work involved getting from "overrides the state of every surface that interacts with XP planes physics" to setting override_planepath to 1, and the same again (potentially more) to get to setting override_groundplane to 1, than there is getting from default XP to overriding everything up to the Physics Engine.

Rather than speculate, the easiest way to check is to open up DRE and see the value of override_planepath.