Working on gear and controls

[Keith Smith]

You may have noticed that the gear is always down on the other aircraft, even when it shouldn't be.

This is a limitation of the rendering technology that is used to model and draw those planes.

I am working on an extension to that file format to support animated gear and even the control surfaces. The network already tracks this information and even stores it in the drone flights, so once the models support it, it will become visible on each of the existing drones.

Keith

[Daddy O]

I'm curious about the planes; did you create your models using XP9.61 plane builder (the new feature that makes an obj out of aircraft?) I have been playing with this feature and all of my craft do exactly the same thing the PE models do: They appear half sunk into the ground.

Is anyone else seeing this or is it just my system? As soon as I have a chance I was going to try substituting some obj files from OpenSceneryX to see if the issue goes away. I thought it was odd that Austin would not have noticed that the feature creates planes that sink into the ground.

[David Carman]

I'm not sure planes being in the ground is really what Keith meant here. He meant that sometimes the models don't accurately display whether the gear is up or down. To solve the problem with planes appearing in the ground, try this from the installation tutorial.

1. Set X-Plane Rendering options to have "runway follows terrain contours" switched OFF (otherwise, many of the planes will be underground while on the ramp)

[Keith Smith]

Models exported from pm961 are objv8 format

PE uses objv7 to render planes right now, as does xsquawkbox.

I would not trust PE to handle objv8 right now. That will be changing as I move to a new rendering engine (xplane's objv8 methods), at which time, the planes will support animations, such as gear, flaps, aileron, etc.

[Daddy O]

I'm not sure planes being in the ground is really what Keith meant here. He meant that sometimes the models don't accurately display whether the gear is up or down. To solve the problem with planes appearing in the ground, try this from the installation tutorial.

1. Set X-Plane Rendering options to have "runway follows terrain contours" switched OFF (otherwise, many of the planes will be underground while on the ramp)

I understand that, I was just too lazy to start a new thread. what I was wondering is if everyone else sees other PE aircraft sunken into the ground. I do have 'runway follows contours' turned off on all 3 of my PCs. I get the same problem with I use aircraft scenery objects created by 9.61, but not with scenery from OpenSceneryX or the stock Xplane aircraft scenery.

See, a lot of the time when I run into problems on PE, because I have so many mods and tweaks running on my own system I don;t always know if it is my system or something in PE. That's why I bring this stuff up. This is a Beta after all.

[Keith Smith]

Can you post a shot of a plane half sunk into the ground? I'd like to see if it's a problem that I can replicate using the aircraft that we ship with.

I've seen a couple of specific drones that were slightly 'off', simply because they're being played back with different aircraft than what was used to record them (especially true with the military planes).

Otherwise, I'm wondering if the 'center' points of CSL models aren't right, somehow. Also, please try it on VATSIM (if you can), using XSB\ and see if the result is any different (although I know that will be some work to coordinate as you'll need another xplane pilot with a known model).

Yes, this is a beta, and if there are issues with the pilot client, I'd like to address them.