mSparks

For the uninitiated. How much better and more realistic the MSFS flight model was going to be than Xplane had pride of place in the msfs sdk documentation. Since deleted I believe. Hmm, not sure about "long term client", although that could be additional detail. Austin has a copy of the email up on his blog. https://austinmeyer.com/ok-this-is-just-plain-funny/ agreed. There are a few of those floating around. My favourite was download simulator. There are many classics like that in their early steam reviews, which I believe were where most originated from. X-plane wasnt immune to such memeing, they just didnt age quite as well. Nothing wrong with some friendly corporate rivalry. Generally gets us good stuff, rather than lowest bidder wins.

well, not currently using opentrack. aitrack spits out 6 doubles (x,y,z,r,y,p) over udp, for the headset I just mapped the x/y/z into the psvr driver and used the gyros in the headset for r/y/p. Its tracking is simply great, builds a 3d model of where your heads at and uses that to produce location/roll data. point movement tracking still needs the tracking data converting into a 3D model, and its output is way too sketchy for VR, this is what aitrack is doing very well. (I tried that using opencv demos when I bought the headset, pure 3dof was more usable). instead of "points" it uses/recognises landmarks (eyes, ears, chin, mouth + another 60 more or smth) and uses that to build a head in 3D space. I can probably spare an afternoon soon to knock up an aitrack xp plugin that bypasses the need for opentrack. Near perfect solution for 2D headtracking. For the headset, I should be able to fuse this with the accelerometer output for solid 6dof. (thats how sony did it for the PS4, and it worked great) 3dof is generally fine for XP, problems I experience are e.g. not being able to stand up for parking the 744 (I bound spacebar to "stand up"), and the cyclic getting in the way of the frequency screens in the R44 (I bound spacebar to toggle lean left). going 6dof should make that much more manageable, but they weren't big enough issues to justify the faff and expense of tracking base stations. But under no circumstances should it glitch the tracking, teleporting your head 10cm to one side in VR feels exactly what it sounds like - like you just got punched hard in the side of the head, in 2D you barely notice.

A kind request to the gods of mod to organise and sticky our existing chaos might be in order. That would be a great place to stick videos like to, that otherwise don't have a home.

I'm generally not one for "eye candy". but gotta admit, I did very recently just pause the world "mid crisis" to say, omg I have to get a screenshot of this.

I mostly upgraded from 3 to 6dof today with your help. Really looking forward to taking this for a spin when I get back from travelling. That sneaky smile isn't just because I know I look quite stupid.

Well, maybe you missed some of the more divisive streams. e.g. This one from 12 months ago. That one really ruffled a lot of feathers. The comments are particularly hilarious. But I for one much prefer what 737ng driver is putting together, real experience, time on type I'll probably never get the time for, really digging into the weeds of the real details that make XPlane "light years" ahead of any of the others. You know what they say, facts don't have feelings. But some facts hurt more than others. 😇 Its good to share the good stuff, so much content pouring out these days from so many sources, that a little bit of human filtering goes a long way.

actually we do see a lot of streamers depending on what they are presenting. flying carpet has a whole series from his explorations just a few posts down A few posts down from that one we have I feel like UrgentSiesta has also only recently started appreciating what XPlane has to offer. 737 NG driver is making content that is getting attention because its decent content, really isn't devisive like many of the others. Its also really nice to have a "real pilot" that doesnt say they are going to talk about the aircraft, then all they talk about is how good the textures are and how lovely the scenery they just downloaded is, while demonstrating they haven't the first clue about real world aviation lore.

This, this, and also this. Although, next year PSVR2 Aces of Thunder and Apple Vision drop, I have little doubt they will become the benchmark everyone compares against, so its not quite that simple. I'd recommend then switching to opentrack + aitrack linked by Bjeorn Don't have to wear anything, for a 0 € upgrade. I have to say though, the whole VR conversation currently feels a lot like trying to convince a small child the strawberries and cream almost certainly won't taste anything like the horse radish they tried last week, even if they are similar colours. personal anecdote, I was recently asked to make the voice recognition in headset popup optional in AutoATC - because the popup reminded them they were not actually sat in the cockpit, this one request solidiified for me what people mean by "immersion" - completely forgetting you are not really there (did I say that already somewhere?). There are still downsides, limited number of aircraft performant enough to actually enjoy it (e.g. forget the Zibo or CL650) probably being the current #1 problem. Pretty sure I mentioned in the "state of the sparky" thread, getting a tubeliner into VR has been my #1 motivation for developing her, eclipsing my #2 motivation (having a reliable plane that can fly itself to test AutoATC in)

not at all, its entirely separate. in fact copying it over the old one was a fairly common cause of issues. It says don't do that in the readme, but it seems I'm not the only one who never reads the readmes

doesnt the 172 nosewheel only change direction when you are moving a bit Is it not getting that far?

"Move fast and break things." The alternative is to just keep using FSX. Which many people do. Or XP11 Which (now) many more people do. And thats all fine. I recently put a gameboy advance emulator on my phone. game platform tech from nearly 25 years ago (2001). Great fun, there a lot to be said for "not broken" even if the graphics arent even up to PS2 standards, plus sides are it still works without internet, and doesnt use much if any battery. More that people (me, and many here included) want the lastest and greatest yesterday, are willing to pay for it, even if sometimes its broken. And thats fine to. There exists a world in which XP12 is finished. By that time the next version of xplane will be available. That isnt developers being "lazy", its called meeting market demand. That is how you stay in business for the long term.

In each livery folder folder you fly with it creates a file called "flight_data.jdat" share one of those on the discord channel and we can do a crash investigation.

Even if it doesn't e.g. in the AW109GN it's very easy to overspeed the rotors during approach. Even if there is nothing visibly wrong, the maintenance bill for doing so is €350,000, and the computers won't let you fly until that maintenance is completed. Know someone who learnt that expensive mistake the hard way. My point here is, we are quite a way off any of the helicopters having the care and attention Totoro gave to simulating the RW behaviour of the CL650, they are at least if not more complicated, and up until recently the default S76 didn't even have absolute basics like autorotation passing an eyeball inspection. We are only just reaching the point where these things are possible to even notice in the sim.

The bug was: I think I filed it, but then forgot all about it. nice, I was looking at the underlying systems and failures, there is individual governors for each engine and failures for individual governors. So might just be the way the failure was fired. Apparently never uploaded this, as good an excuse as any

agreed. Do you know if they fixed the hydraulics? In XP11 they were keyed off the turbines instead of the rotors.

Any luck? I just merged the changes from last week into a new release, same download link, just swapped the .zip https://github.com/mSparks43/747-400/releases/tag/3.2

really looking forward to part 2. that was an absolute joy to watch. any word on the 650 getting some VR friendly features? makes me so very grumpy VR wasnt a priority

I have zero doubt that sort of thing is not the only big ticket problem elsewhere. Xplanes "special sauce" is ~20 years of listening to the feedback from pilots with hands on experience. and ~20 years of listening to 3rd party developers trying to address their issues while using words developers use to describe computers. The only way you can buy that is to pick up a copy of xplane. And that isn't enough to ever come close to independantly recreating what the xplane community has pulled together in that time. 1 more year, a rebrand and some baloon kit that was in the oldest versions of xplane isnt going to bring the likes of 737NG back, let alone make it attractive to those of us who have been "bought into" the Xplane eco system for a long time already. IMHO. That may sound harsh, but I dont think there is any exaggerated xplane bias in this assessment.

Ah, I didn't mean it in a need to be improved sense, shedding load from NPC cars is a perfectly legitimate "cheat" to free up compute for elsewhere. it was more about highlighting the fundamental difference between XPs frame counter and other sim games when criticisms of XPs performance come up. XPs frame counter is limited to the rate of the aircraft physics, rather than how quickly the GPU can pump out frames, this can make it appear that fps is very low, when in fact the GPU may very well be "capable" of pumping out 1000fps if it wasn't waiting for the next physics frame. Very weird stuff happens when the physics framerate is low, not knowing it is low (or not knowing very weird stuff happens when the physics framerate is low) can cause all kinds of hard to diagnose issues. In the early days of XP11, I had an absolute nightmare trying to diagnose weird helicopter flight behaviour - that nearly all turned out to all be related to the physics fps dipping into the low 20s. This is why certification requires 60fps physics minimums (or in the case of some CAAs, like Canada aiui, 100fps)

Just a pet peeve, to highlight something I mentioned when talking about performance. You can see how low framerate those NPC cars are in the background compared to the rendering, quite a few times when they must be moving in single digit fps with 10 feet or more between one position and the next that gets rendered. (Otherwise great video, wasn't criticising it, just highlighting how "hard" real perf is, and how games can "cheat")

didnt know it didnt, or even that you wanted to see it, but yeah, you can destroy stuff in XPlane, well spotted. weather balloons landing gear trucks with the "microsoft flight simulator" logo on the side. other planes All sorts of stuff especially recommended in VR.

Id say all of them... it clearly worked for xplane: in another 22 years or so developers taking such a first principles approach may even be able to simulate Its not the secret to xplanes success, but its definately one of them.

Oh, I didn't talk much about something I found there. Road visibility is set in the roads.net and roads_EU.net files. I was already using for a while a slightly modified version of xroads https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/67227-xroads-transparent-roads-for-ortho4xp/ to still give the smaller roads, but with dark tarmac instead of light concrete. The issue was that they tended to AA badly into the distance, and otherwise still really stand out on the Ortho. much better for up close and personal tho. Then I discovered this is because the smaller roads also have very high view distances (like 25km), I reduced this to 4km, and now have the best of both worlds, dark tarmac roads up close and personal, that fade nicely into the ortho in the distance. Very happy (still looking forward to a proper solution from LR tho).

XP has had both for over a decade. hardly anyone was that interested then, I doubt they are now. https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/54524-x-plane-and-balloons/ huh, looking at chuck bodeen's content, he did balloons and missions... wonder if that's a coincidence. MSFS2026:All new first in flightsim, for the first time ever you can fly on Mars... rofl about all that you see of that these days is the yawstring (on the window next to the compass if you dont know where they are)