XP News:
Our intrepid scenery designer John M D is slowly making his way through the London streets.
His latest work to be completed are the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.
Impressive they are too.
London Bridge is in there as well.
The Gerkin quite lonely out there in the flat landscape.
The London Eye is coming soon as well – Wish list:
Tower Bridge
St Pauls
Telecom Tower
British Museum and Nelson’s Column…
It will be very interesting once the new default Laminar urban areas fill in around these amazing Icons….and how John is pioneering a new way to quickly create visible cities by their icons.
Hong Kong, New York of course, Rome…It is a big world out there, But John shows it can be done.
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If you read Ben & Chris’s Developer blog XP Developer then this item was interesting enough to note.
As more 3d cockpits come into our world then our interaction with them becomes more of an issue.
The problem was escalated with the issues that surround mostly Javier’s default B744 and the impossible to grasp dials.
I once simply plowed down hard into the London Streets just trying to adjust the zoom on the map in this cockpit, and that is not all, because even if you wanted to do something quite simple as just go up to a high flight level then you could then be there ages just thumping and scrolling your mouser while still holding the aircraft steady with the left part of your brain.
Mostly all 3d cockpits struggle with the problem in one way or another. The problem stems from 3d space to screen space, on a 2d (flat) cockpit if you moved the mouser a little to the right and you would have a similar linear movement to the right on the screen, but in a 3d space it doesn’t take in the angle you are looking at either it being the switch or a button – so you could move it either a little or a lot in the same space.
(Einstein’s space-time and 3d cockpit continuum laminar theory).
The solution is to move by per pixel and not by space (equations), then that means simply that if you move your mouser a couple of pixels to the right then the numbers will change to that same amount, the same amount of movement per pixel will now work in the 3d space as well as no matter what angle you are looking at the with change of direction the speed still stays constant – so it will be the pixel movement on the screen that will soon do all the movement and not the amount of movement in the space of the cockpit…
How this will work in reality will be interesting – but anything has to be better than the current situation.
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Real Aviation News:
A supercomputer called “Sierra” at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that was used to work on the Big Bang Theory will soon be used by GE (General Electric) to breakdown the various elements in fuel injectors for turbofan engines.
GE quote “”Fuel injectors sport an intricate design and geometry, work in extreme heat, and must handle punishing pressures, They’ve been notoriously difficult to test and build and understanding how air and fuel burn will help us to ultimately build more powerful engines that consume less fuel and have lower emissions”
This research is initially for the GE’s GE9X 90,000 – to 100,000lb-thrust class engine that is to be used to power the 777-8X/-9X family.
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The revamped Global 5000 and Global 6000 series from Bombardier have now gone into service with their new “Fusion” cockpit systems.
The cockpits feature four 38.4cm (15.1in) liquid crystal display screens and synthetic vision both on the head-down and head-up displays – The Global 5000 has a 5,200nm (9,630km) maximum range at Mach 0.85 while the Global 6000 can cruise for 6,000nm at the same speed.
This with Ben’s pixel plus animation will be very welcomed by any X-Plane enthusiast that loves the Challenger 300..bring it on.
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As for holding your head in your hands, then last week was a doozy, and in certainly if you lived in North Korea.
Most of the scientists involved either will now be shot or sent to prison – which is a great way to build a space program.
The flaw was uncovered early yesterday on CCTV cameras in the launch control room and it was noticed that Kim Jong-(young) un was seen to be pointing to a big red button as while in his left hand his Ice Cream melted and slipped quickly down into his shirt sleeve, In a cold panic he lost his balance and fell on the BIG RED button – and the rest is of course is now history.
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Time for some paints…
TACA AIRLINES QPAC V1.1 – ELANPORT : TACA QPAC A320 1.1
TACA is the “brand” that is composed of a group of five independently IATA-coded and -owned Central American airlines, whose operations are combined to function as one and a number of other independently owned and IATA-coded.
TACA, originally an acronym of Transportes Aéreos Centroamericanos (Central American Air Transport), now stands for Transportes Aéreos del Continente Americano (Air Transport of the American Continent), reflecting its expansion to North, Central, South America and the Caribbean.
- TACA International (TA) (El Salvador)
- Aviateca (GU) (Guatemala)
- Regional (GU) – Formerly Inter, it operates under Aviateca’s code.
- Lacsa (LR) (Costa Rica)- Lacsa is the only airline of the group that still operates international flights with its own flight numbers. Its hub is at Juan Santamaría International Airport in San José, Costa Rica.
- SANSA (Costa Rica) (RZ)
- Isleña Airlines (WC) (Honduras)
- Nicaragüense de Aviación (6Y) (Nicaragua)- Regional – La Costeña
- TACA Perú (T0) (Peru) is now an important part of Grupo TACA.
In October 2009 it was announced that TACA would merge its assets in a strategic alliance with Colombian airline Avianca, in which case each will maintain their own trademark and operations. Avianca and TACA currently operate a combined fleet of 129 aircraft.
Elanport’s wares need no introduction on these pages and here he does not again disappoint us.
Detail is first-rate – The new 3d QPAC model is visually now outstanding and any livery will look excellent if done this well.
Still no _LIT’s but we are working to fix the problem.
Nice.
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A bit like those pesky groundhogs, you fill in one hole and another pops up out of another one…
so we have….Another FJS Dash Q400 livery.
This is made as even more as a confusion as it is with the state of the Alaskan Airline system at the moment, It is a guess as who is in Chapter 11 and who is not, Alaska Airlines became horizon’s saviour and so now Horizon is now shown in an Alaskan Airlines livery.
Alaska/Horizon Bombardier Q400 – cngdelta757 : FJS Q400 Alaskan/Horizion
The Inuit face on the tail is always going to look great on any aircraft.
And on the Dash with its upright tail it looks great.
In some areas the Alaskan livery looks dated now but still shines on the Q400.
The detail is very good but some of the writing over laps the doors.
But it is a very good livery to use in the very far north….
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Thomson Airways is the world’s largest charter airline, offering scheduled and charter flights from the UK to destinations across Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The company commenced operations on 1 November 2008, following the merger and subsequent re-branding of Thomsonfly and First Choice Airways. It carried over 11 million passengers in 2011, making it the third-largest UK airline by total passengers, after EasyJet and British Airways.
Most scheduled flights operated by Thomson Airways are on behalf of tour operators. The airline offers a wide range of flights to holiday destinations at the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean from a total of 24 airports across the United Kingdom. Additionally, seasonal charter routes are also served.
Thomson Airways was the first European customer for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, with TUI Travel PLC having placed an order for 13 aircraft of this type, 8 of which will go to Thomson Airways.
Thomson UK 787 Dreamliner – BenQuick : Thomson B787
As Thomson will be a real operator for the Dreamliner then this livery is one for the collection – In fact there is two liveries
The Standard:
And the Thomsonfly version.
The colouring is correct, but I have a small problem with the logo’s going over the windows…
It just looks pasted on over the top instead of being part of the aircraft.
otherwise it is fine.
The night textures are the same as the rest – dull.
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A small note about the introduction picture at the top of this edition.
It is the Qpac JQ A320 climbing at dawn out of Launceston in Tasmania…X-Plane just still always constantly amazes me – this was such a moment…so till next time FT56.
Flightime56©2012
Think you’ll be wanting ‘Inuit’ there. Eskimo’s not a term for polite company these days.
Yes Prattle I did know that (and I have changed the wording) – the strange thing is every item I checked it was noted as the Alaskan “Eskimo Tail” livery…
Nice to see a London scenery taking shape, been missing for too long.
However, is it me, or do the houses of Parliament look a bit too large? In the second image down, the doorway on the left of the building looks huge compared to the roadway next to it.
Nicola, it’s a big door! Although I was worried for a minute.
JohnMD
http://www.flickr.com/photos/markcarline/4382707561/
I hope Ben & Co. re-think their view on the mouse wheel. Choice is always a good thing in a sim, so why not offer the user a choice between zoom and knob turning for the mouse wheel? It could be a config setting, although I don’t think that’s actually necessary. Other application have proven that it can work in dual mode without confusing the user.
For example, I recently bought the Reality XP Garmin 430 plugin. It uses the mouse wheel for scrolling data input, and that’s *so* much better than the click-click-clicky method of entering alphanumeric data in the default Garmin, that I would have paid the 50 bucks for that feature alone! It’s probably easier to configure on a popup like this, because you don’t have the 3D angle issues mentioned in the dev post, but I think it would work as well with any 3D view that was reasonably centered. All you need is a transition to the little arc icon so you know you’re in a different mode.
If this were officially supported by Laminar as a knob turn and data input function, then maybe we’d have less confusion with developers who come up with their own “better” ways of turning a knob, like the way controls work in the Falco and MU-2. End-users shouldn’t have to learn different UI conventions for different plane models. The UI should be a convention that’s supported across the whole platform. By discarding the idea of mouse wheel button turning and data input, I think they’re shutting out the best way to improve the interface.
/end rant
Ben explained why we he wasn’t going down that road, but parrafin you are saying that the you want a standardize UI and yet it should be the scroll wheel way, I don’t use a scroll wheel? – so how can that be a standard across the whole platform…
The zoom function for mouse wheel is part of the current UI standard, even for those who don’t have mice with wheels. So this is just an argument for the way that particular function should be used.
looks cool, great addition. when will those London icons come out?
also, “It will be very interesting once the new default Laminar urban areas fill in around these amazing Icons”
where has info about new default urban areas come from? will it come in 10.1?
The urban upgrade is due soon, so a little bird on the balcony told me…but a lot has changed after the Mallorca conference so they may tweak it some more yet before release….
The odd thing about Laminar is that when you expect it – i doesn’t come, then when you don’t it does…Oh the power!
ha when you expect it, it doesn’t come. = delays / more hard waiting. just like with Apple right now for ivy bridge.
looking forward to the remainder of 2012 for xplane
does soon mean days, 1-2 weeks or more