Best Freeware VC (Transport-type)?

pstrany

pstrany

Charter Member
Hi;

finishing up a VC for a transport-type aircraft with an overhead panel, and wanted to ask opinions of the best freeware VC available for a transport or passenger aircraft. I'm looking for pointers on the best way to do some of the details, and figure the best way would be to look at how others do it.

So folks, what is the best VC out there for a transport or airliner? And more importantly, where can I find it?



Paul
 
Milton Shupe and Crew's D-18S series has a wonderful VC:

flightsimonline.com is where you can find it.

The Lockheed Electra L-10A by FSDB (Flight Sim Design Berlin) has a nice VC, and you can find it on Flightsim.com, AVsim.com and Simviation.com. I think the zip name on Flightsim.com is L10NWA.zip or something very close to that.

Heck, the VCs in your Hudsons are nothing to sneeze at by any measure.

OBIO
 
One that comes to mind is Jens B. Kristensen's DC4 and 6 and other vintage airliners that he did like the Boeing 247, and more recently his IL-14 airliner, at Avsim or flightsim.com . Another one is Manfred Jahn's Constellations, they all can be found at Flightsim com and Avsim.
 
If you want a briliant VC on a modern tube liner, grit your teeth and assemble the pieces of POSky's 777 with the VC. Jacob did a fantastic job with that one.
 
In my opinion i think anything by David Maltby sets a high benchmark for the Jet enthusiast and Rick Piper for the propellor driven aircraft. They may be getting long in the tooth but they still work for me.I am sure the models are still available on the major flightsim websites.

Regards Paul Day.
 
I'll chuck in Rick Piper's stuff, particularly his A.W. Argosy
 
paul day said:
In my opinion i think anything by David Maltby sets a high benchmark for the Jet enthusiast and Rick Piper for the propellor driven aircraft. They may be getting long in the tooth but they still work for me.I am sure the models are still available on the major flightsim websites.

Regards Paul Day.
Click to expand...

That's what I wanted to say.
The virtual cockpits from the Comet, BAC 1-11 and Trident from dmflightsim.co.uk are without any doubts the best freeware VCs I've ever seen.

The VC from POSKY's 777 is good too, but it's not very complete. Sure all the switches are in 3D, but none of them work.

The switches in David Maltby's airplanes are all in 2D, but they look just great and almost all of them can be used. Paul, if you were looking for a plane to use as a "model" for some feature to make you own VC, I'd say those are DEFINITELY the ones you should study. You can download them here:
http://dmflightsim.co.uk/

The HS.748 made by Rick Piper may be the only other plane that can be compared to David Maltby's creations. The same technique was used: all the switches from the VC are in 2D.
 
On those screenshots you can see the virtual cockpits of the planes made by David. Sorry I don't have any more precise screenshots at the moment.
 
Hi guys;

Thanks for all the wonderful suggestions. In this situation, I'm looking for visual cues used by designers. I design for CFS2, and we don't have the ability to interact with the VC, so I never learned that stuff. I'm trying to get the Super Electra VC to have the right "feel", but don't count on doing much interacting - unless you'd like to wait 6 months or so until my brain is able to absorb and digest all that stuff.

My focus right now is on getting it done and out. Again, I'm working on the VC right now, and have a few items (overhead panel and textures) that I'm trying to get right not just for the CFS2 version, but also for the FS2004 version as well. There are always trade-offs, keeping the poly count reasonable (and texture count and size too) without reducing the whole thing to a blurry mess.

For sure, somewhere down the line I will proably make a more interactive VC, but for now, I just want to get it to look and feel right, at least as best I can.....

Paul
 
Paul, be sure to check out Milton's Howard 500 too.

It's got the same family history as the Super you're working on and it's just got a good "feel" when you pan around the VC while using it.
It's one that I've been eyeballing every time I think I should throw gmax and Rhino back on my computer and get back to my "never-ending" L12 Electra Jr. project.

BTW, if you strip the textures out of the VC and compare to the "finished" product you can also get a good feel for what you all need to model with polys and what can be done with just textures. For CFS2, you can still do a lot with just textures on a basic poly VC to keep the poly count down.
 
Paul, as I recall, you model with FSDS2 otherwise I would be happy to send you the gmax source for any of my models if that would help.

You may also check out the resources at FFDS for some FSDS2 source files there.
 
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