Comments on: X-Plane 10.10: Don’t Get Me Started

By: Filippo

Filippo — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 10:27:56 +0000

Hi Ben, the refinements to the starter model are really welcome, thanks for the good job.
My question now is: what about simulating typical startup procedures for fuel-injected piston engines? The real thing is a little bit tricky because you ave to pay attention to execute the right sequence (pump on, mixture rich until fuel flow positive, then cutoff and let’s hope you haven’t flooded the engine). FSX in my opinion was an epic fail in this respect, because setting the mixture full rich was enough to let the engine start, no matter whether it was fuel-injected or not…

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:17:39 +0000

In reply to Nick Wood. I am not a pilot! Austin, Chris and Randy are though. The setting defines the torque of the starter for a specific airplane, because different planes have different motors. There is no user preference to change the starter in x-plane itself.

By: Nick Wood

Nick Wood — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 06:59:44 +0000

I understand you guys are all real world pilots as well as programmers but from a laymans perspective am I wrong in assuming that each airplane starter for each model of airplane would have a “fixed” setting for torque and such. I’m not understanding why you would have a setting to change torque ratio manually

By: Christopher Williams

Christopher Williams — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 01:21:30 +0000

Not only am I going to go try this new method in 10.10, but I’m going to apply the old torque rule to my 9.7 aircraft. All this time and I never knew how the starter power was measured inside XP. Thanks!

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 01:08:17 +0000

In reply to Richard. 99% of the time I do - the starters were a bit off topic for my normal work.

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 01:00:22 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. Sorry Ben, I thought you focussed on scenery, and Austin did aircraft and flight modelling... but I forgot you do the SDK and XSquawkbox which covers aircraft too!

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 22:25:34 +0000

In reply to Jack Skieczius.

RC is not “Request for changes!” Maybe someday…but 10.10 has left the station. Also, there are other esys bugs I found late in the game that are beyond the scope of fixing in 10.10 that would limit how much a plugin can do.

In 10.10 you get two new toys:
1. the bus load dataref is actually not wrong when read (not sure how useful this is) and
2. you have control over the battery charge (read and write).

This second one is interesting if you want to build a totally separate esys sim and integrate it with x-plane. You “slave” x-plane to your sim by:

1. Running the airplane off the battery(s) all the time – one battery per x-plane bus.
2. Charge the battery when you want the bus charged, and nuke it to zero when you want the bus off.

You now have x-plane “listening” to your esys.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 22:23:54 +0000

In reply to Richard. Uh, it was not! Or is this Austin logged in as r_lynton??

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 22:22:45 +0000

In reply to vonhinx.

Wait – bugs are now custom behaviors? In that case, why am I fixing them? 😉 😉

Seriously though, our goal is _not_ to provide completely accurate custom simulation of every airplane ever built. I’ve mused on this before that there are limits to the systems modeling native to X-Plane. In some cases we have ideas to make the flexibility of the systems model better, and in some ideas we consider some of the requests to be “out of scope”.

By: Jack Skieczius

Jack Skieczius — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 22:14:10 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. Now, any way i can persuade you to add in a dataref for base bus loads for each of the buses? Something i can change on the fly, cause right now id just love to somehow simulate the 300 amperes drain the APU starter puts on the electrical system. Thanks.