gospadin

No progress yet. I had a few ideas but none have panned out yet. The trick is how to target something without a targeting system. =P

Community A-4E: May 2017 Update Community A-4E: May 2017 Update Hi everyone! We admittedly had a slow few months, with a number of vacations and distractions, but as of the end of May, we've built up a bit of momentum again and hope to push closer to release at a decent cadence. On that note, I figured I'd surprise everyone (as well as half the team) and post the update two days early! Hope nobody minds... Unwraps and Texturing This month, the biggest visible difference in the A-4 is that we've started unwrapping and texturing more of the cockpit. The gauges themselves have been unwrapped for a while, but now the ejection seat, cockpit wall baffles, and flooring are all unwrapped and textured. Additionally, we've been trying to make the light bulb textures a bit more realistic for the cockpit indicators. We're happy to show some in-progress textures: plusnine has an imgur album here, to which he'll add any additional texture screenshots as he tweaks things: http://imgur.com/a/Oy9YZ While we were at it, we re-did the texture for the Mk-4 gunpod. Don't have a handy picture (hopefully another team member will post one), but it looks a lot better than before. New Systems For this update, we implemented our impression of the AN/ALE-29A Chaff Control panel. This small control panel was added on the upper left glareshield via an AFC to manage chaff delivery, as the base airframe didn't have this. There's now a single "countermeasure dispense" binding available, and the pilot will need to choose whether to dispense from bank 1, bank 2, or both. They'll also need to remember to power-on the system as part of fencing in. For gameplay, we did, however, take a design liberty. While in real life, the system would control two banks of chaff, what we implemented was a bank of chaff and a bank of flares. If you load all chaff or all flares, you'll see the other bank be zero, instead of the chosen countermeasures being split across both dispensers. The counter values are pre-loaded with the correct values when you first spawn, but if you re-arm you'll need to manually setup each counter. We made a short youtube video to show all these behaviors: T7Qs7b6Lc8s You will probably notice an ECM control panel in that video as well (just inside of the chaff control panel) and we hope to plumb that by our next update. System Modeling and Tuning We went back to our flight model, and using some new-ish data, we tuned the critical AoA at all airspeeds in the flight model tables. This gives the A-4E a much better turn rate before you lose elevator authority, meaning you can once again black-out with full back elevator. The stated structural G-limit for the airframe was 7G, however this isn't a control limitation per the data we have available. A brave enough pilot should be fully capable of breaking things. Additionally, we noticed that the drag with our in-house created ejector rack setups and cluster dispensers was way too high. We've tuned these drag coefficients to be much more representative, which gives more accurate cruise speeds with stated payloads. This affected both the MER and TER setups (especially the 5x Mk-81 on pylons 2/4), as well as cluster munitions using the SUU-7 dispenser. (These munitions had a copy-paste error which treated every bomblet as a drag contributor, even when still inside the dispenser tubes.) Within the flight control systems, two adjustments were made: First, we implemented both hot and cold modes for the approach power compensator (APC), which changes the ideal throttle bias point depending on outside air temperature. (A bit less throttle in cold weather, and a bit more throttle in hot weather) Second, we fixed the short-mode oscillation in the altitude-hold function of the AFCS. You can see the short-mode oscillation in this video: KA7VMQq7r4w And the improved dual-mode altitude hold controller in action here: 88-6YtSoNuQ And Yes, Bugs... Our module isn't without bugs either. We are currently tracking about 25 bugs right now, after these small fixes and improvements: Fix unreliable chaff and flare counts and behavior Fix overshoot / wraparound on the ARC-51 frequency knobs Fix magnetic compass direction Fix an animation conflict between the chaff control panel and the RPM gauge Cleanup of the flaps code so that keybindings and the cockpit control remain synchronized Fix for missing adapter mount when using the AGM-45B on pylon 1 Fix for sidewinder growl heard when the AGM-45B Shrike is mounted Implement FC3-like jettison logic (wing fuel, centerline fuel, outer weapons, inner weapons, center weapons) Implemented a host of missing keybindings, as well as new defaults for the warthog joystick and throttle Lastly, from when I was testing the chaff dispensing bugs, I made a short video dodging missiles from an SA-3. This is from very early in May before most of the rest of the content of this update was developed, but it's still kind of fun: NqRWE5Zh38c Thanks! The Community A-4E Team

Concrete is one thing. The fact that the longest runway in Normandy is 6000' (and only available to the British) is going to be the real shocker. Short field technique for all the jets! A B-17G at MTOW needs 3780' takeoff roll in no wind, and 4925' to clear a 50' obstacle, almost every inch of those runways with trees on the ends.

First post updated with new version 8, includes full map photo.

Coming soon as I am done with the NDBs...

Ultimately, I believe I'll choose to mostly fly NTTR. Normandy is historically interesting, but the terrain itself is somewhat boring. I like having mountain to hide behind in Caucasus and NTTR.

One step ahead of you... Plusnine will be releasing a set of unofficial liveries at the same time as we release the mod. The above is one of them, in an admittedly very-early rough draft. --gos

Yes, though my WAG is that they're trying to finalize their PBR-supporting .edm design before they roll out a new set of plugins. I've also never developed for 3DS, so hard to say just how much work it takes to keep up with the latest versions of the tool, independent of .edm format changes.

thanks

thx for the info!

Home now. Confirmed the chaff panel power switch and the engine minor RPM needle share an animation argument. Oops, we'll get that sorted shortly. :pilotfly:

Thanks Starway, will need to start getting our A-4 screenshots using your textures. =P

The ADI is definitely correctly oriented as implemented. The A11 Attitude Indicator (ADI Ball) is not the gyroscope, it's just the display unit of the gyroscope's information. The gyroscopes themselves are located in a separate equipment housing on the left side of the fuselage. The magnetic compass may be backwards, I'll need to dig up the reference photo we used for it and double check, thanks.

Hah yea, I noticed that one about a week ago. Need to figure out what it's plumbed to, but since I hadn't implemented the countermeasure panel, I hadn't bothered to dig in just yet. That'll definitely be fixed by our next update. --gos

Without any real radar experience, I am not sure how it would manifest on the scope. I imagine, though, that you'd have to have your nosecone within a few feet of a solid object through, which I think is probably unlikely most of the time. (Unless you're using your wingman's exhaust to defrost your windshield.)

Your #2 was the first thing I noticed. That is actually our temp RAT model that archimaede added while he worked on the high detail version. It appears that we may need to invert the animation arg, which might thus fix the default animation for AI.

From what we can tell, #3 isn't a bug. The mils of angle map correctly to in-game angles.

We haven't modeled that behavior.

Yup, that's issue #2. Only happens with AI, and only affects pylon #2. Something about one of our pylon args is off. good catch!

Community A-4E: April 2017 Update Community A-4E: April 2017 Update Unfortunately, we have another non-update update, where we didn't finish integrating any of the major modeling changes in time for this update. About half the team has been on vacation, one had final exams, etc. Not an excuse, but it is what it is. We're trying to get the cockpit modeling and unwrapping finished, but it's obviously taking a while. The radios have been modeled and animated, and need to be plumbed in code, along with a few other cockpit systems. We're down to only 2 or 3 incomplete panels in the cockpit at this point. Plusnine has gone through and done a cleanup / improvement pass on our weapon icons to be more consistent in the ME, as well as working with Jones on updating his gunsight texture based on newer photos we have. From a code perspective, we have some newer data on the wing performance that I am trying to integrate, along with new AoA data in certain flight conditions. While the approach speeds are on-target right now, the glide slope is a bit steeper than it should be due to bad calculations in our AoA system which I am working to fix. While we know it's just SFM at this point, we also know the existing table system should be able to produce some very-accurate performance, if we put in the time to tune it properly using good source data. Since we don't have anything new to show you, and a few folks were interested in any images or videos we came up with, I recorded a quick formation flight with a SEAD AI plane. Armed with two 300 gallon tanks and 2 AGM-45 Shrike anti-radar missiles, that loadout might be used if a tanker wasn't available or the carrier was based especially far offshore. FCqO75FmAXw The fun part of taking video is it sometimes lets us find bugs. I see at least 2 (edit: 3) in the video, maybe one of our fans can find more. =P --gos

No worries, was just trying to make sure there was a record of the bug so Polychop (or someone else) could escalate as needed.

Understatement of the week. :thumbup:

Probably April 30th, in line with all our other updates on/near the end of each month. =P

Maybe one of these would help DCS performance: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11209/intel-optane-ssd-dc-p4800x-review-a-deep-dive-into-3d-xpoint-enterprise-performance

IMO, you should be releasing the brake before you add any collective. Better to roll or rotate than to tip over. And you aren't really guessing about left/right pedal input, you just apply whatever input you need to counter the yaw. Same with applying collective, if the helo starts to pitch or roll, just move the cyclic.