Some wider issues illuminated
Hi Kikas,
It is not my intention to discourage bug reports, only to encourage detailed bug reports whose circumstances can be replicated during developer testing. I will try to illuminate some associated issues for the benefit of all, but there is no evidence that the problems only you experience relate to contact points.
Real hydroplanes do not necessarily sit exactly level on the water. The 'sit' obviously varies with current CoG, in real life and in FS9. This cannot cause a hydroplane to jump into the air, in real life or in FS9. When real (early series ) Airone CoG is fully compliant after fuelling the datum line of the whole aeroplane is about two inches higher at the stern of the floats compared to their bow.
point.0 = 4, 15.9 , -11.17, -9.3,
point.1 = 4, 15.9 , 11.17, -9.3,
point.2 = 4, -21.58, -11.17, -9.1,
point.3 = 4, -21.58, 11.17, -9.1,
This micro varied over different versions, as armament and crew changed, but I decided nobody would notice and so all four have the same default early series 'sit' which is 'realistic'. The decrease in AoA due to the very slight static nose down sit is too slight to have any influence in the real world, or FS9, that anyone would notice as a change of aircraft behaviour, before or after Pilot Flying trims compliantly for Vy and applies full up elevator throughout the take off.
Compliant installation and use of complaint startup.FLT files to spawn the Aironi into compliant scenery isn't the only relevant compliance issue if any of you hope to experience a realistic take off or landing. There are many compliances to learn and achieve to unlock the embedded realism.
<<I think i sorted problem of shaking by editing contact points a bit:>>
Your original report did not mention shaking. When installed compliantly the four aeroplanes in this release do not shake. If the precise location they are spawned into is defined as water mesh in the BGL concerned, they will rise and fall on the passing waves, with relevant amplitude and passing wavelength, which cannot be mistaken for 'shaking'.
Everybody else should be able to test that the Airone will in fact spawn on land, but will then exhibit zero wave state, still with no shaking. If we apply power it will skid, because on any mesh (including an FS9 beach) it is sitting on the scrape points, not the contact = flotation points, a power skid will cause sparks on a hard runway. As the wartime crew training manual explains that is one way FS9 illuminates the pilot error of scraping the floats across a reef, sand bar or mud bank. It's not 'realistic' but it delivers the required notice of pilot error.
Blackbird 686 said;
<<I redid ALL of my default FS9 water textures using another 3rd party package some time ago, but the Vista OZ water is the same. >>
We all need to understand that textures are irrelevant. They are just some pretty colours with no other data inside. Many FS9 scenery designers who did not know how to control the shape of shorelines just placed water textures onto land mesh. Swapping the Oz texture, or any other third party texture, for the Microsoft texture cannot alter that scenery design time error. The texture never tells us whether we have spawned, or landed, on water.
If the underlying mesh is actually water mesh the contact = flotation points rule, and the Airone will exhibit the wave state. If the underlying mesh is land the scrape points rule and it obviously won't exhibit any wave state. It is a given that flight simulation enthusiasts will try to land Aironi on water textures, naively believing that scenery designers only place them over water mesh, but I fear that is far from true.
However if the landing is compliant the supplied Airone code allows that landing on a water texture on land mesh to succeed, but you will all see a shower of sparks and you will all stop very quickly! A non compliant landing could obviously cause the Airone to 'jump' in FS9 if the Airone actually alighted on land mesh covered with a water texture.
The realism in this release is very high. The supplied wartime crew training manual warns about inadvertent stranding, and about the need to avoid surf over shallow water when planning take off and landing direction during the captaincy decision making cycle. FS9 is a simulator of the real world laws of dynamics. It's not a video game. Archimedes' law is running. If the Airone is run across submerged reefs, sand bars, or mud banks at significant velocity, and the scrape points contact the reef it will 'jump' as notification of pilot and captaincy error. At lower velocity it will just run aground when being deliberately beached gently.
The Airone has stepped floats. At low velocity the floats are semi submerged, as velocity increases it 'comes up onto the step' and begins to hydroplane. We can feel it come onto the step. Landing may, or may not, induce a period of hydroplaning with a small lurch as the Airone ceases to hydroplane on the step. All that is encoded, but it does not 'jump' into the air, and it does not shake, on water or land, when installed compliantly *and* it was spawned using a compliant FS9 hydroplane startup.FLT.
The product documentation warns about the crazy content of many consumer created Startup.FLTs.
For some reason many consumers are determined to believe that everything that can possibly go wrong inside a desk top flight simulator must be caused by 'flight dynamics' and that it must be possible to fix whatever the perceived problem is by fiddling with just one tiny text file (the aircraft.cfg) because it the only one that is easy for consumers to locate and fiddle with.
I am afraid desk top flight simulators are much more complex than that and in reality there is less than 1% chance that the problem is in the aircraft.cfg, or can be fixed by fiddling with it. Nor can misinstallation of files be fixed by using a non compliant take off technique that would rip the flaps off in real life.
FS development is about more than copying some numbers from the Boy's Big book of Wonderplanes into the flight dynamics. It requires code that offsets, or provides 'work arounds' for design time errors made by Microsoft, and common errors made by third party developers. The released contact points and the scrape points have a complex job to do during Airone simulation, including tolerance of compliant consumer landings on bogus water textures over land mesh, and realistic detection and consequence of inadvertent stranding and intended beaching, and I therefore advise against altering them.
Whether we can taxi the Aironi on land mesh covered with a water texture after landing depends on current weight. We will always need a lot of power to scrape the floats over the land BGL that was concealed with a water texture. Under certain circumstances depending on BGL content we will not be able to taxi within that bogus scenery.
We cannot take off from a land BGL covered with a water texture. It is necessary to slew to a location where the flotation = class 4 contact points (above) exhibit a wave state, allowing us to be sure we are now on water mesh, not land mesh covered with a water texture, where the class 2 scrape points will exhibit no wave state. Then during the captaincy decision making cycle we must consider where the bogus scenery we have already detected may again have water textures laid over land mesh. In MSFS this may require us to take off towards open sea regardless of wind direction. if we slam the floats into land mesh under a water texture during take off or landing the airome may 'jump' or it may 'crash'.
None of these errors are in the Airone release. Instead it provides the necessary work arounds via carefully coded offsets between flotation and scrape points, and other components of the aircraft.cfg.
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Kikas, because you see shaking while static, as well as jumping while in motion, I can now be sure you have misinstalled something, or less likely, you are using one or several equally broken hydroplane startup.FLTs, (perhaps cloned from one another in some way), to spawn the Aironi. Either way you will have other run time errors that a two inch raising of the rear of the floats while static on the water mesh, and using random unsafe take off techniques, will never solve.
<<As for Mr. Belov's sceneries, they either crash after couple of minutes flying around, sound disappears, and i get FS crash message, or if i start with other plane it crashes instantly i try to switch to Airone.>>
Mr. Belov has contributed many freeware sceneries, as well as other freeware files, and we should not assume that they all have bugs. Your report is still not as clear as it could be, but I think you are saying that, for you, the scenery in question causes FS9 to crash after a couple of minutes whatever aeroplane you select.
Your new more detailed report indicates that the scenery in question causes a 'memory leak'. If the aeroplane used has few polygons and a simple VC, or no VC, consuming less of your 'computer memory', it takes a few minutes for your 'computer' to 'run out of memory', but if you try to spawn a complex aeroplane release the scenery in question has already consumed (and not given back) so much of the memory available in your computer, or on your video card, that the FS9 crash is instantaneous. The wartime Airone release does not cause the computer crash.
If the Belov scenery was installed compliantly, and then layered compliantly, the FS9 crash is caused by a scenery that is not FS9 compliant. Consumers with more memory (of the relevant kind) may suffer an FS9 crash only after a much longer timeframe. If bugs actually exist in software they don't necessarily bite all consumers on an identical timescale, even if usage is identical. One consumer can have problems that another consumer (or the developer) never sees, depending on memory installed. The issue is sufficiently detailed reporting of the circumstances, to allow identification of the cause. The real remedy is never one that has no relationship to the cause.
Misinstalling the Airone release 'may' be contributing to the speed of the crash. No one else has reported any of the problems you have experienced and so we can all conclude that you have misinstalled the many files in some way. There is only one way to fix that. I had to invoke that real uninstall and re-install fix more than once during development and alpha testing. The required installation is more complex than usual.
That is one reason that the Airone release will be in two parts.
FSAviator.