A-4E By HoggitDev

It's not the last day of the month yet :)

Australia is already on May 31st:megalol:

NZ as well...

Should account longitude!

Any news??? Can't wait …

The update is coming out tonight, hold your horses :)

Horses are held, fed and watered, although I may have to move them as the manure is starting to pile up.

I even gave the horses beer! :D

It looks like HoggitDev are on the right path to become full on DCS developers, at least giving updates at the end of a months last day sure fits the pattern :D.

It looks like HoggitDev are on the right path to become full on DCS developers, at least giving updates at the end of a months last day sure fits the pattern :D.

We don't want to become a licensed third party developer team, I can't speak for the others individually however.

Thanks for your work! Excited for the update!

oh come on release it already. :D

It's June 1st here! I don't want updates at the start of the month!

Absolutely :) Including barrel rolling in pair, right?

Absolutely has to include the roll!

HoggitDev A-4E May 2016 Update

It's raining gauges!

After a bit of a lull in late March, we picked up some momentum again in April and May has been a hectic month for the team. There are two big changes this month.

First, we've finally imported a draft version of our team-developed cockpit into DCS (thanks to Merker6!), and thus are now using that model instead of the placeholder we'd been using previously. With our own model, we've been able to start animating and connecting clickable gauges, as well as programming up the systems behind them. While the shapes and unwraps still need a lot of work (though we've been able to integrate plusnine's gauges), this has allowed us to learn how to build a DCS cockpit.

Instrument panel with temporary unwrap while we work on functionality:

With all of this work from Merker6, plus a lot of code and debug from gyrovague, kryb and myself, with a special contribution from uboats for the nav system, the following gauges and systems are now working in our A-4E:

• ILS glide slope support (fictional/hidden mode)
  
• Attitude and Direction Indicator (ADI)
  
• Standby Attitude Indicator
  
• Bearing Distance Heading Indicator (BDHI) w/ TACAN bearing & range (needle 2) and NDB bearing (needle 1)
  
• Fuel flow & Fuel quantity (internal and external via selector pushbutton, works accurately through refueling/defueling and tank jettison)
  
• Armament Panel (master arm switch, gun ready switch, weapon mode dial, and pylon selector switches)
  
• 8 day clock
  
• Barometric altimeter w/ Kollsman window & adjustment knob
  
• Radar altimeter w/ adjustable warning altitude
  
• AoA Indicator w/ cruise, landing and stall markings
  
• Vertical Speed Indicator
  
• G-meter
  
• Engine RPM & Temperature gauges
  
• Airspeed Indicator with Mach dial
  
• Flaps & Gear Indicator Panel
  
• Primary & Secondary electrical busses
  

The second major evolution is in the external texturing. Jones and plusnine have finished the "huffer" model and textures, which appears automatically when the airplane is parked with the engine speed below idle. Further, plusnine has been putting a lot of time and energy into the effects layers for our external model, and combined with Kryb's model tweaks and bottom unwrap improvements, plus the beginning of the undercarriage and connector unwrap, our model is starting to look a lot more realistic in-game. I have a lot of work to do improving the liveries and we're constantly making improvements, but all-in-all it looks a lot better than two months ago. plusnine has also generated our first specmaps, to vary reflection across the salt-worn fuselages.

The start of our A-4E "elephant walk":

Additional animation includes nose wheel steering (rarely installed on the A-4E, but we can't do differential braking in the SFM so we're going to keep it), pilot head turning/position, canopy animation inside-and-out, and a working gunsight.

Lastly, we've been tweaking the SFM and gyrovague was able to get our landing spoilers to work in the SFM through a neat trick. While they are modeled relatively simply, arming them will cause them to deploy automatically at touchdown, and they will shorten overall stopping distance by about 30%. Brake strength isn't something we can adjust in the SFM so landing rollouts are quite a bit shorter than actual, but it's still neat to get the spoilers working and feel their effect.

Spoilers just before touchdown:

Spoilers at touchdown:

Finally, here's a link to a quick mission video that shows off most of the working systems:

Part 1: Startup, Taxi and Takeoff (5 minutes)

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Part 2: Attack run on a convoy of trucks using Mk-82 Snakeye bombs. (3.5 minutes)

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Part 3: TACAN navigation, approach, and landing. (5 minutes)

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Thanks everyone, hope you're having as much fun as we are. Until next month! :pilotfly:

--gos

You guys are doing some amazing work. Thanks for this update.

-Jeff

"STORM"

DAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for the update!

Thought people would also enjoy this screenshot that one of our team-members captured:

It looks wonderful, I'm genuinely excited to see this module released, though I have some questions.

1. You say the aircraft will only be SFM, however it also appears you are going for a fully clickable cockpit. What, coding wise, differentiates creating an SFM, vs a PFM/AFM ect. ect. ect.

2. It appears the cockpit of your A-4 has a television screen, does this indicate you are going to be making Walleye's available, or that later modernization to include Mavericks will be an option? If not, what purpose does this screen serve?

3. Do you have any confidence in being able to release this mod by the end of the year, or do you believe it is far too soon to tell?

show the terrain masking :)

Oh my goshhhhhh yes!!!

show the terrain masking :)

If people look close in the video, they'll see it. There's definitely a few easter eggs.

It looks wonderful, I'm genuinely excited to see this module released, though I have some questions.

 

1. You say the aircraft will only be SFM, however it also appears you are going for a fully clickable cockpit. What, coding wise, differentiates creating an SFM, vs a PFM/AFM ect. ect. ect.

 

2. It appears the cockpit of your A-4 has a television screen, does this indicate you are going to be making Walleye's available, or that later modernization to include Mavericks will be an option? If not, what purpose does this screen serve?

 

3. Do you have any confidence in being able to release this mod by the end of the year, or do you believe it is far too soon to tell?

For #1, SFM+SSM is 100% lua. You get a very limited set of environmental API calls, but you can implement as much or as little system code as you want. Full HUDs, etc. are possible. Weapon locking / designation doesn't seem to be possible, but we have some ideas to try. There are no SSM radios unfortunately either.

If you switch to the EFM API, by compling a flight model in C++, you lose all the SFM+SSM assists and have to re-do everything from scratch. The ASM API documentation is only available to official 3rd party developers.

For #2, that's the screen for the AN/APG-53A radar. We're still digging through the code to see what we can do with it. (Walleye TV mode is supported on the AN/APG-53B). We'd like to support it, but it seems even more unrealistic than the radar.

For #3, it's taken us 7 months to get to today's update, so I'd say "we have a ton of work in front of us still" and leave it at that. It really just depends on whether we can keep our progress moving forward, and how much work we have to re-do.

We've basically re-implemented everything at least 3 times so far. We're learning, but for example, it took 4 of us about two solid days to get the mach disc on the airspeed indicator to work accurately, as we had to tweak the model, the animation, the unwrap, the texture, and the code all in unison to get the right behavior. Tons of trial and error as we learn how modeling in DCS works.

--gos

You guys are doing great! That flightline pic brings back memories. VMA-211 Wake Island Avengers , tail code CF, VMA-311 Tomcats, tail code WL (the last squadron I was in before discharge), and then there was VMA-121 Green Knights, tail code VK, and on and on. I'm sure you have all the documentation as there are plenty of A-4 sites still up and running on the Internet. Sure am looking forward to the completion of your work.

You guys are doing great! That flightline pic brings back memories. VMA-211 Wake Island Avengers , tail code CF, VMA-311 Tomcats, tail code WL (the last squadron I was in before discharge), and then there was VMA-121 Green Knights, tail code VK, and on and on. I'm sure you have all the documentation as there are plenty of A-4 sites still up and running on the Internet. Sure am looking forward to the completion of your work.

Thank you for your kind words.

Awesome work! Cannot wait to see what you guys get done in the next month!