Category: Aircraft

XPlane2Blender v4.1.0-beta.1

Download from GitHub!

XPlane2Blender v4.1.0-beta.1

This is a beta so make backups of your work before using!

New features!

Custom Spill Lights

Custom Spill Lights are now implemented (#312)! To use, make a light datablock with the XPlane2Blender light type as Custom Spill. Relevant properties are:

PropertyFunction
Light ColorRGB color for the light
Light RotationSpot light direction
Light Spot SizeThe width of spot light
SizeSize parameter (in meters)?
DatarefDataref that controls the light

Custom Spill lights can make dataref driven custom omni-directional billboards and directional spot lights.
As with Automatic Lights, the goal is What You See Is What You Get.

In this photo the green light is a Custom Spill, where sim/graphics/animation/lights/traffic_light changes the color between green, yellow, and red! The white lights have different widths, all made without doing any math by hand.

Cockpit Device

X-Plane has pre-made high quality GPS devices that are easily accessible to the artist. Thanks to (#481) using one is as simple as making a mesh, and giving it a material with a Cockpit Device set. Pick the device, at least 1 electrical bus (matching Plane Maker), the lighting channel, and if the screen’s brightness should auto-adjust. You’ll get a fully functional GPS device just like that! You can have multiple devices in the same OBJ, as well as use of the panel texture.

cockpit_device_ui
image

The Cessna’s cockpit provides 2 great examples of using cockpit devices.

Cockpit Features UI

Given the changes and additions to our Cockpit Features, the UI has been changed slightly. On the material Properties tab use the “Cockpit Features” to find “Cockpit Regions” and “Cockpit Device”. The updater should adjust the setting for you if you were using regions.

Minor features

(#426) Shadow Blend’s Blend Ratio can finally be set. Thanks @kbrandwijk!
(#548) Non-Exporting Lights are back in. They’re intended as “work lights” and will never ever show up in the OBJ! Simply set the X-Plane Light Type to “Non-Exporting” and use freely.

Important fixes

  • Light Level can now be used multiple times in the same .obj without tricks or getting lucky!

Thanks to everyone who downloaded alpha.1! I’m glad that this series has been so successful and I can wait to see what you make with the new light features! As always make backups!

Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling, Cockpits, Modeling, Panels, Scenery, Tools by | 4 Comments

Experimental Flight Model Changes in X-Plane 11.40

LR customers can now get the first public beta of X-Plane 11.40 by running the installer, checking the box to get betas, and completing the update. Steam will most likely be available tomorrow, barring any unforeseen crises with this build.

Release notes here.


This youtube video has a thorough explanation of the new flight modeling stuff.

PLUS new stuff for “official” beta 1: Read More

Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling by | 31 Comments

XPlane2Blender v3.5.0-rc.1 is out!

XPlane2Blender v3.5.0-rc.1

XPlane2Blender is now X-Plane 11.30 ready! Not much has changed since beta.3, just some fixes to the particle stuff.

Bug Fixes

#373 – Test Script’s –filter flags now needs less escaping for its regexes
#377 – Show/Hide animations on empties is now being exported again
#384 – Particle follow non-colocated animations

Sound Emitter has been removed from the Empty Special types menu. One day it will be back in!

Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling, Cockpits, Modeling, Panels by | 26 Comments

New airplane authoring features in X-Plane 11.30

As you saw at Flightsim Expo, X-Plane 11.30 offers a wide range of new features for airplane authors, who wish to make their airplane engines and systems more realistic. This post links to the documents with technical details that are of interest to aircraft authors mostly. End-users are encouraged to try the Cessna 172, King Air C90 and Boeing 737 of X-Plane 11.30 to experience more fidelity in true-to-life autopilot and other system simulation.

Oxygen System

X-Plane has two separate oxygen systems, bottled/compressed O2 and chemical oxygen that can be used for both general aviation aircraft and airliners with separate crew and pax oxygen. How to set up the system for you airplane is explained here: //developer.x-plane.com/article/the-x-plane-oxygen-system/

Anti-Ice and De-Ice Systems

Airplanes can make use of electrical or bleed-air thermal anti-ice systems, inflatable boots de-ice or chemical TKS anti-ice systems, each with their own characteristics: //developer.x-plane.com/article/the-x-plane-anti-and-de-ice-systems/

Vacuum and gyro systems

Besides engine-driven vacuum pumps, X-Plane can now also simulate venturi-powered vacuum systems as found on vintage aircraft and electrical backup pumps that are sometimes found in slightly better equipped general aviation aircraft. The interaction of all the pumps, manifolds and instruments is explained here: //developer.x-plane.com/article/vacuum-systems/

The traditional vacuum-driven attitude indicator is now subject to the same limitations as in real life, and can be equipped with a caging or fast erect mechanism to help cope with them: //developer.x-plane.com/article/vacuum-gyro-limitations-and-caging/

Propeller Governors

Propeller-driven aircraft can have distinct behavior of the prop governors reaction to engine failure or loss of oil pressure. Depending whether your plane is a single or multi-engine, whether it is driven by piston engines or propeller turbines, and wether the turbines are of the free-rotating or single-spool design, the equipment might be drastically different. X-Plane now features negative torque sensing in addition or instead of auto-feather, overspeed governors and fuel topping governors, to make turboprop aircraft even more true-to-life: //developer.x-plane.com/article/propeller-feathering-systems/

Turboprop engines now have additional overspeed and fuel-topping governors for free turboprops, and fuel delivery control for fixed shaft turboprops. How to set up fuel delivery control is explained here: //developer.x-plane.com/article/setting-up-a-fixed-turboprop-engine-governor/

Autopilots

X-Plane now comes with a few pre-configured autopilots for airplane designers to chose from, and offers more flexibility in creating a custom one.

General Aviation Autopilots

X-Plane 11.30 adds support for single- and dual-axis rate-based autopilots, control over the trim servo, and a separate static system for an altitude pre-selector.

Airliner Autopilots

Airliner autopilots learn new auto-throttle modes, Control Wheel Steering, have two independent flight directors and up to three channels for auto land. They can optionally even have a directional servo for CAT 3 landing rollout guidance.

Learn more about the X-Plane autopilots here: //developer.x-plane.com/article/preconfigured-autopilots-and-other-autopilot-changes-in-11-30/

The documentation for tuning the autopilot constants has been clarified and expanded with new sections about the new autopilot functions in 11.30: //developer.x-plane.com/article/x-plane-autopilot-params/
Finally, have a look at the X-Plane airliner autopilot in action, performing an auto land in a gusting cross wind:

//youtu.be/EAOKNaSPuo8

Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling, Cockpits by | Comments Off on New airplane authoring features in X-Plane 11.30

XPlane2Blender v3.5.0-beta.2 is out!

This beta brings in many new bug fixes and heavily requested new features! As with any beta, be aware that this could break your project SO MAKE BACKUPS! We don’t think there are any drastic changes to the data model, but, better safe than sorry.

Bug Fixes

  • #355 – A small UI fix relating to too many manipulator fields being shown
  • #360 – A bug fix for Drag Rotate manipulators giving false negatives
  • #353, #363, and #260 – All relate to warning people and correct what was allowed with NORMAL_METALNESS and BLEND_GLASS. Previously Blend Glass was in the same drop down menu as Alpha Blend, Alpha Cutoff, and Alpha Shadow. Now it is a checkbox allowing you to correctly specify a Blend Mode and apply Blend Glass to it. Existing materials with Blend Glass will see this new checkbox automatically checked. Blend Mode will be set to Alpha Blend or, if your plane is old enough to have been worked on during X-Plane 10, it will be set to whatever it was back then.
    3_5_0_beta_2_blend_glass_checkbox

See the internal text block “Updater Log” for a list of what got updated, including this. You may see, for example:
INFO: Set material "Material_SHADOW_BLEND_GLASS"'s Blend Glass property to true and its Blend Mode to Shadow

  • #366 – An Optimization! Useless transitions in the OBJ were being written, now they’re not. Custom Properties still work, there won’t be any visual changes to your OBJ. We haven’t done any profiling but it might have decreased OBJ loading time by a small amount too.

Features

Command Search Window

Thanks to #361, just like the Datarefs.txt Search Window, we now have the same capabilities for searching Commands.txt (for manipulators). We are shipping with X-Plane’s latest Commands.txt file, but of course you can replace it with your own (as long as you keep the name the same). One day we hope to make it much more flexible.
3_5_0_beta_2_command_search_window

Particle Emitters (not very useful to most yet, I know)

Thanks to #358, some people who have access to X-Plane’s cutting edge particle code can use XPlane2Blender to specify particle emitters. Don’t worry, we’re all working as hard as we can to get these into the hands of others. Fortunately, XPlane2Blender users can hit the ground running the minute it drops!
3_5_0_beta_2_particle_screenshot

Build Scripts And Test Runners

  • #302 and #307 – Are you a professional XPlane2Blender maintainer and developer (if so we should probably talk!) Then you need a better build script, and a test script to match! Introducing mkbuild.py, the build script for the modern developer! It creates, it tests, it renames without messy mistake prone human intervention! To top that off, how about a testing script that doesn’t give false positives!
Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling, Cockpits, Development, Modeling, Panels by | 8 Comments

Aircraft shadows and icons in 11.10

With 11.10 there is a new way aircraft only shadows are done, as well as how aircraft icons are generated. The big change is how we calculate the volume of the aircraft which up until now was based on all OBJ files that the aircraft ships with, including things like ground- and fuel trucks, stairs etc. The reason this is undesirable is because the greater the volume of the aircraft, the worse its realtime shadow quality will be because we use the volume of the aircraft to calculate our shadow map area. The bigger that area, the worse the shadow quality and the more pixelated it will look like. In an ideal world, the aircraft volume tightly hugs around the actual aircraft and we get the best shadow quality possible. With 11.10, hopefully this ideal world is finally here!

Why and how we failed before

Before 11.10 the aircraft volume was based on the volume of, well, the aircraft. However, this includes things such as the aforementioned ground trucks, fuel trucks and what have you, that artificially blow up the volume calculation. The problem is, all these objects are technically part of the aircraft (eg. we move them around with the aircraft), but they are for the most part invisible and most people wouldn’t actually consider them to be part of the aircraft proper.

In 11.05 we added a change to also consider the physical volume which kind of has the right size for the plane but doesn’t include OBJs. It is based on the physical size of the plane only, which sounds like it’s the right thing. However, as it turns out, this volume breaks badly for things such as helicopters because the rotor of some third party helicopters are attached OBJs and won’t be considered part of the physical volume of the helicopter.

At this point I should probably also quickly note what happens if the shadow volume is too small: Everything that gets clipped by the shadow volume will cast a shadow into infinity and beyond due to the way the shadow mapping works. This is especially bad for the helicopters that now have very quickly rotating bits that are constantly clipped by the shadow volume resulting in shadows flickering all over the place.

In short: What we want is a shadow volume that is as tight as possible around the aircraft for shadow quality, but not too tight because that also leads to problems.

What’s new in 11.10

In 11.10 the algorithm to compute the shadow volume has been completely changed. Instead of trying to jiggle around with the physical volume and the volume of all OBJs together and then coming up with a sane value, X-Plane now looks at what is actually being rendered. We start out with the physical bounding volume as before, but then we look at what is actually rendered! For that, we go through every OBJ that is marked as casting shadows and run the OBJ engine as if we were to render the whole thing. So OBJ animations as well as kill datarefs etc are considered. This happens during the first frame, so everything is set up the way it would be during normal rendering. Everything that is visible will be marked as such and the shadow volume will be expanded to include this OBJ.

The result is a volume with a tight fit around what is actually visible and therefore considered “aircraft”. Everything else is not included in the shadow volume and therefore stops casting shadows altogether. Of course, this is only in aircraft only shadow mode and is not used when scenery shadows are on. In that case, everything is handled like it was before and everything that is supposed to cast shadows does cast shadows. So, if you see missing shadows in aircraft only shadow mode, this is probably due to this change.

To visualize the differences, here are 4 screenshots showing the quality difference as well as the new shadow volume:

 

One thing that should be noted though is that going forwards these kinds of extra OBJs should really be done via the new drawing API in the 3.0 SDK! This allows us to very accurately determine the size of the aircraft but it also means that culling will become more accurate. The old method will of course continue to work, but it’s not the best or most efficient way to approach ground vehicles and other ground clutter.

Aircraft icons

The calculated volume for the whole aircraft with attached OBJs was also used for the aircraft icon generation. This led to some weird cases where the camera was positioned in such way that the aircraft was incredibly tiny due to the fact that we tried to get “everything” in at once. So far the recommendation was for authors to create a version of their aircraft without all the extra OBJs attached, but now that we have an adequate measure of the aircraft volume this is fixed as well! Aircraft icons should be correctly generated now with the camera positioned to capture the plane at the right distance.

There is one more fix for aircraft icons: Some authors created aircraft that did some clever culling based on where the pilots head is and then using the kill dataref to prevent parts of the aircraft from being rendered. Reading the view dataref now correctly reports the camera as being an external camera so that those custom culling solutions work with the aircraft icon generator. If your aircraft still doesn’t generate proper icons after 11.10, please file a bug report and let us know!

Posted in Aircraft by | 26 Comments

Improving AI Aircraft

AI planes face two major issues in X-Plane 11:

  1. AI aircraft are often way more resource-intensive than they need to be. Users are fine paying a performance penalty to load, say, a super detailed 3-D cockpit model for their own aircraft, but for AI planes, where you’re never going to be in the cockpit, there’s no reason for that sort of thing. A significantly “dumbed down” version of the same aircraft would allow users to load more AI planes at once, with no visible downsides during normal use.
  2. Many aircraft, for one reason or another, simply won’t function at all when used as AI planes. This is most commonly due to one of two issues:
    • reliance on third-party plugins (which only work for the user’s plane)
    • lack of support from X-Plane for flying aircraft like this (for instance, the X-Plane AI doesn’t know how to fly gliders, seaplanes, or rockets)

As a user, this is really frustrating, because it’s difficult or impossible to know in advance which aircraft will work as AI planes and which will either a) just sit on the runway, never able to take off, and/or b) tank your frame rate.

Coming in X-Plane 11.10: AI-Only and User-Only Aircraft

In the upcoming X-Plane 11.10 beta, we’ve added two new options to Plane Maker’s Author window: “supports user flight” and “supports AI flight.” By default, all aircraft support user flight, and do not support use as AI aircraft.

If a plane is configured for AI flight only, it will never be shown in the normal aircraft grid—only in the AI aircraft window.

If a plane is configured for user-flight only (or if it’s a pre–11.10 aircraft with no “supported flight type” info), it will be hidden in the AI aircraft window by default, but for the sake of backward compatibility with old planes, users will still be able to reveal them by checking a box labeled “Show aircraft without AI support.”

The upshot for aircraft authors

In the Glorious Future, we envision third parties shipping two versions of their aircraft:

  • one marked user only, which include all the bells and whistles, plugin-enhancements, and as much detail as possible
  • one marked AI only, which is stripped down for performance, only using plugin enhancements that have been tested in AI configurations.

The result will be a faster, more consistent, less error prone experience for users.

Posted in Aircraft by | 19 Comments

Three lesser known aircraft features for 11.10

These smaller features are likely to be overshadowed by the release of the G1000 for default aircraft in 11.10, so I decided to dedicate a blog post to promote the articles I’ve written  – you can find them among all the guides for aircraft developers: //developer.x-plane.com/docs/aircraft/

Electric and remote gyro systems

Back in April, I flew a Mooney M20J with a KCS55A HSI in it, and realised that it was impossible to model in X-Plane correctly, so I got to work. See the manual for an explanation of this popular HSI/remote gyro system.

I’ve written a usage guide on the new datarefs and commands that I added, along with some more detailed explanation of all the different gyro systems X-Plane simulates, in this guide for aircraft developers. I also talked about the systems at length in a Youtube live stream earlier this year.

Separate GPSS autopilot mode

This is a feature that many add-on aircraft already simulate to some degree, but by means of more or less reliable plugin trickery. The X-Plane 11 default 737 and 747 are no exception. With X-Plane 11.10, a separate GPS steering mode for the autopilot becomes a standard feature.
The new datarefs and commands are explained in detail here.

Screen-only popup instrument windows

Several people who build home-cockpit setups have asked about removing the bezels from the popup displays, so they can have only the screen of a GNS430/530, FMS or G1000 instrument to put on an external monitor, with a hardware bezel around it. While this can already be achieved through some clever hacking in the Miscellaneous.prf file, we now offer a more straightforward way to do this: The popup and pop-out windows now get their bezel graphics from the library system, so you can override the bezel graphics. How to override the bezel with nothing, if your bezel is made of hardware? Simply supply a 1×1 pixel blank .png as a bezel graphic, and X-Plane will know that you really want no bezel at all. In the case of a bezel-less 430, you’d put a 1×1 pixel png as the “cockpit/radios/GPS FMS/Garmin_430_2d.png” resource of your plane.

Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling, Cockpits, Panels, Uncategorized by | 31 Comments

Request for XPlane2Blender Documentation Improvements

Please tell me what confuses you about XPlane2Blender on this bug, or here!

We are going to be releasing the XPlane2Blender 3.4 beta soon, and with it, a refresh of the UI and documentation. Thanks to a great e-mail about a lack of documentation, it was put as an important part of 3.4 release roadmap. It goes to show… we can’t fix it if we don’t know what’s wrong, even if its not a code problem. And we do want to fix it, I swear!

In addition, I want to remind everyone a core part of the Laminar Research philosophy, identity, and business plan is a thriving modding and third-party plugin ecosystem. Aside from build scripts and the like, Laminar Research employees use the same scenery development tools that are available to all. This is was a deliberate choice that elevates everyone to the same level – except when there is a gap of knowledge. This is never intentional, and never benefits anyone in the long run, especially third-party-devs. If your work is suffering because we forgot that not everyone knows what every little checkbox means, tell us! We’ll put it in the bug queue like everything else, and try to get back to you, personally, quickly.

Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling, Cockpits, Documentation, Modeling, Panels by | 29 Comments

FMOD Video Tutorial

We have a new video tutorial on using FMOD to add custom sounds to X-Plane 11. This simple tutorial shows how to add a snapshot and an event in FMOD.

The video also has a permanent home on the video page of this site, and on the X-Plane YouTube channel.

As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments and if you have requests for other tutorials. I’m starting to get the hang of creating movies, and if you don’t troll me too hard about the quality I might make more. 😉

Posted in Aircraft, Screencasts by | 12 Comments