Many thanks

Excellent news.
Thank you Ben.

Hi Bruno,

I agree with you in saying that Xplane 11 still lacks of a decent weather engine (and about the fog issue I agree 1000%!!!), but I can say that the 70 euro to improve the weather are worth it!!! 🙂 Of course, XP11 needs an improvement in the weather, since flying is ALL about weather!!! I also agree when you say that this is Austin’s simulator, since the area they are concentrating are mostly the areas Austin is interested in! There are lots of IFR pilots out there that are asking a better weather representation from high altitudes… and now there is a 70 euro plugin that does it in an amazing way and it is improving, but what at least LR can do is to give a nice IFR night lighting experience!!! Lights from low level are amazing… but who flies an IFR flight from KJFK to KLAX at 5000ft? Austin, why you don’t try to get onto a 737 and go at 35000 feet at night in clear skies and look outside the cockpit and post here what you see??? For sure nothing!!! PURE BLACK! If you want to see some lights you have to look straight down! It is really unrealistic. Once I was flying from london to rome and I went to visit the cockpit (it was still possible at that time) and we were at 37000ft and over Turin. The sky was clear and I could see the lights of Florence, Bologna, and also start to see the lights of Rome at the very back of the horizon (I know cause the pilots told me what cities were). So, will it be possible to get some night textures for the cities so that we can hav e the lights extended to the horizon? At 30000ft who cares if they are 3d lights or not? Having all 2d lit textures of the terrain, will also improve a bit the performances cause you can get rid of the 3d lights underneath the aircraft that no-one can see outside the cockpit and that pops up as you get closer to them! Then while descending, at about 10.000ft a slow fade from the 2d lit textures to the amazing 3d lights 🙂 I think this will be really appreciated by the IFR fans! Thanks for the attention.

Why should the 430/530 have keyboard input? The real ones don’t, and they are just as much a pain to use as they are in the sim.
In fact, the ones you are likely to run into in real life in banged-up rental Cessnas are so worn out, that some buttons not even trigger reliably, but you need to keep pressing with increasing intensity to finally get them to trigger.
So X-Plane is already MUCH easier to use than a real one, because mouse clicks trigger reliably. Therefore I won’t add keyboard input to those units because it would not be “plausible”. Scroll wheel support on the rotaries is already much more comfortable than the real world counterpart.

Hi Austin

unfortunately I have to disagree to that. I am flying 150s and 172 regularly on grass strips. Soft field take off requires back pressure to relieve the nose wheel. I pull full aft for this and it takes a good ground roll to get the nose from ground just a bit.

When I try the same procedure in X Plane immediately after applying full thrust the nose comes up all the way. That’s really unrealistic.

Another issues I became aware of with beta3 is that C172 turns into the wind on ground. That’s really something which I have never experienced. Is this what everybody refers to as watervaning effect? It also makes the sims flight model questionable.

Also the torque and maybe slipstream effect during ground roll feels exaggerated too. I got Saitek pedals and it turns heavily to the left when neutral. When taxiing at the usual 1000rpm this effect in reality is really almost not noticible. On take off roll and full thrust, of course you have to apply right rudder. However, I have not found a joystick setting yet that allows me a steady straight take of roll. There is always this enourmos left tendency and when I try to compensate the plane turns far to right.

Is there any way to improve this?

Bruno has a point and his arguments should be seen as constructive criticism. If I’m not mistaken, Austin himself recently admitted that the weather engine needs an overhaul.

Seriously, if an airport is fogged in, then it shouldn’t be visible from a higher flight level.

Another thing with these celestial bodies is their size. They’re absolutely ginormous in the sim. (Or were: I just checked in v11 and even the moon only showed its surrounding glow through a clear or dare I say stellar atmosphere, which couldn’t be attributed to overexposure. Has this been reported?) This artistic choice is right up there with the entire world turning vivid yellow when the sun is low in the sky. It detracts from the experience for me.

When you do get to it, it would be cool to also have other planets in the sky. Doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to add a few more orbital parameters and tints.

Oh, and happy new year! I’d say happy solstice, but that was like 11 days ago by now. #accuracy

I can understand the weather vaning effect for castoring nose wheels. But for nose wheel steering attached to rudder pedals or the tiller, this should not happen if the steering commands the nose wheel to be centered.

Now in real life I can understand if weathervaning applies force to the rudder pedals which has to be countered by the pilot in order to prevent displacement of the pedals. But I guess there aren’t many products out there that have force feedback built in, and the entire realm of force feedback would need to be uniquely tuned for each aircraft loaded.

So in the absence of control input force feedback I would say that the behaviour of weathervaning effect should only consider the command position for the nosewheel steering, and the limits of lateral grip for the tyre on the ground, before the tyre grip cannot hold the sideways force anymore,

In the C90 I noticed there’s still a noticeable variation in Fuel Flow with Prop RPM adjustments at constant altitude and throttle… FF shouldn’t vary in this way on a Pt-6, right ?