jtwhite

The fun I'm having flyingthe Dreamfoil Bell 407 is just bubbling up, and so I thought I'd let it spill over here. I don't think I'll ever go back to flying fixed wings. And I think it's the beauty of XP scenery at low altitudes that makes it so cool. I've created the three bridges near my home airport, and with OrthoXP and perfectly placed buildings ,.. well, you know what I mean. I;ve mastered hovering pretty well, so much so that my mind (simple as it is) now seems to have been fooled into thinking I can actually feel the aircraft under me in a hover. Now, where did I put that building with the rooftop landing pad? Anyway, just sayin' JTW, Indiana

NEVER MIND...As usual, after mulling it over for a couple of days and 10 seconds after posting this, I had a big "DUH' moment and realized what the problem was. I had been messing around with dual monitors last week and somehow changed the default on the graphics screen from "scenery forward with 3D cockpit," or something like that, to "just scenery." Click ... fixed. John in Indiana

Im wondering if anyone else has this problem. It just developed the other day and involves all aircraft. Whenever X Plane starts, the forward 3D panel is not there. When I switch to the outside view, then back, it returns. Haven't really done anything to change it. Any ideas? John in Indiana

I've started flying the Dreamfoil Creations Bell 407 in XPlane 11, and I tell you, I don't think I'll go back to fixed wings. Anyway, I found this excellent tutorial online. Funny, but it's by the people at Terminal Reality's Fly!. It brought back memories. I got my first copy of the sim free at oskkosh as part of public release. Pretty cool then. I think it marked my first attempt at scenery design, and, if I'm not mistaken, there were tools to download road data for VFR flying. So, here's the tutorial. Hope you find it helpful. http://www.aviastar.org/theory/bell-407/index.html

It is amazing how much fun it is to fly xp11. And now that I've become fairly good at handling Dreamfoils Bell 407, it's going to be tough going back to fixed wing aircraft. Even at low-level flight, XP is really very immersive. You can't beat tooling around Catalina Island (with MisterX6's scemery) in a chopper. Just sayin'

Yes it is. I find it hard to go back to fixed wing. I really feel compelled to go through the whole routine of untying rotors before takeoff and retying them after Ianding. It's just that fun. I created a building with a helipad on the roof and placed it downtown from my home airport (KEVV). I've been practicing crashing into it LOL. Creating scenery for XP is soooo easy. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rXpCbTZS0l2dr7ERHArpy1KSLyA4quJZ/view?usp=sharing

Thanks for the heads-up and the link. Yes, they did have a fix, and all is well.

I'm flying the Bell 407 by Dreamfoil Creations. However, on startup of the sim, I'm getting the error about the aircraft may not look right and to check the log file. I checked the log file, and this is the only line that looks like an error of some kind..... 0:01:09.104 E/ACF: The manipulator type used has been deprecated. Please update your file. Anyone else get this, and how do I go about "undeprecating the manipulator type"? John in Indiana.

I've been trying helicopters lately. Because of that, I've also been playing around with the various headtracking software out there ... facetracknoir, trackerxp. When I returned to regular flying the Baron to get away from the stress of learning to fly a helicopter, I noticed that the horizon wasn't level anymore. I switched airports; however, still slanted. I got to mucking around in the XP settings screens and noticed that the "visual offsets" boxes had some weird numbers in them. I reset them, and voila, horizon is again, well, horizontal. Anyone else noticed this? And could that facetracking software had altered them, either by something they did, or I did in messing with the settings response curves? Since I fixed it, it's no big deal. But I was just curious. John in Indiana

I figure my problem is some sort of scenery issue, so I'll post it here first. There's this little airstrip just east of Juneau (7AK2-Snettisham) that has a gravel strip. It's owned by the utility company, which has a hydroelectric plant up in the mountains. The thing is, when I land on Runway 33 and taxi toward the other end... BANG, the plane hits what appears to be an invisible brick wall and crashes just before reaching the end. I thought perhaps it was something my WED custom version was causing. I removed it and found out the reason was a deep "dip" in the terrain just past the end of the default airport. It seems whenever I save the custom airport, the "dip" now appears before you reach the end of the runway (I didn't change the length). I extended the airport boundary and told WED to always flatten, but the problem persists. Any idea what it might be? JTW

Weather is not a big thing with me ... I mean, why would I want to fly over really cool ortho scenery or high-def mesh if I can't see them through the clouds. I like general aviation aircraft over airliners, so if the weather were really accurate, I wouldn't be allowed to fly anyway. I use SkyMaxx Pro for the clouds and it's good enough for this flier.

There is a chain fast-food fish restaurant near my house. I go there, maybe, once every six months - to remind myself why I go there only, maybe, once every six months. It's the same with P3DV4 ... about every few months I drag it off my storage HD, install it and all my add-ons - to remind myself why I switched to X-Plane 11. I'm not here to start a flame war, but there's just something so much more realistic about XP, a sort of visceral feel - the atmospherics, the extreme ease of creating scenery (Ortho4XP, WED or custom stuff using Sketchup) and creating my own cockpit buttons and switches (if you haven't tried ArdsimX Arduino interface, it'll blow your mind) - that I always end up deleting P3d, again. Now, if only XP's skies and clouds could look as beautiful as P3DV4 and its enhancements, well ... Just saying. John in Indiana.

Thanks for the replies ... but I figured it out myself. I reinstalled FlyWithLua, the complete package, and it got rid of the errors. Not sure if I had done that in the beginning'

Anyone suddenly getting error messages from FlywithLua with the latest X-plane 11 beta?

You can materialize in some of the strangest places. Here I started at gate at Salt Lake City in the Zibo mod 737. I'm either going to need the pushback tug to push very, very hard, or I'm gonna need full power to taxi.