Added the engine indicators for the B-707! They are now part of the panel, like this:
INOP light will lit up IGNT when ignition is active, and it also displays when temperature goes out of working range. Simple and fast. I’m still considering to get rid of the bottom bar, and instead light up the buttons.
Also by request I started working on some kind of a weird FMC:
You can click airport or enter full ICAO code, and it will give you information about the airport:
The whole thing supports touch input, and for screens which have no touch capability it uses an external keyboard (if it is not available, then this screen is unfunctional):
I’ve been working more on the XGDC OS – and also started to convert Boeing 707 cockpit to a glass cockpit with a pretty big touch screen display. The main purpose of this Boeing 707, as was said before, is to test the XGDC-based software for all the other planes and spacecraft.
The cockpit is still lightly broken, I will readjust it so nothing underlays or overlays the other instruments. Also need to recompile a new version of XAP, so I would be able to show you the actual PFD display stuff. Here is how it looks like right now:
There will be a special set of displays adapted for specifically that MFD later. I added gauges for the engines (and actually other instruments), you can see them here:
They are using new mod_efis – a module which adds functionality of drawing all the PFD’s, engine displays, stuff like that. It has functions for drawing artiftical horizons, tapes, gauges, etc. Both displays are now using this mod_efis, you need to have it installed for them to work.
I’ve did some work on the XGDC OS, and also the SV-302 computer systems. The computer systems are partially operating now, and the XGDC OS is now aware of different units of measurements – internally it uses the metric system everywhere, but you can use a special routine to print value in currently selected units of dimensions.
It works like this: SysUtils.PrintValue(1000,"m","distance"), or it can also be written like this: SysUtils.PrintValue(1000,"meters","distance").
This code means that you will be writing 1000 meters as distance. But if system has units of measurements for distance as feet, the output will be actually 3280 ft instead of 1000 m. All modules already there are now aware of this, and they will print all stuff in preferred units of measurements. They can be changed at runtime and by other modules though.
SV-302 computer systems are almost same as they were before, but they are based on the XGDC2 OS now, they use flash memory and shared ram for communicating. I’ve also improved perfomance of working with the sensors, and the computers will properly compare outputs and vote against eachother.
The cockpit will be slightly different, I’ve decided to rearrange it a bit, and also change purpose of some panels.
Here are the panels I converted/remade today:
You might notice that the landing gear panels are a bit weird. They actually work like this: you have to put the landing gear switches into “DOWN” position, then put the “ARM” switch into ARMED position, and only then you can press “ACTUATE” button to lower the gear.
That was done so you could not accidently lower the gear. Usually crew will leave switch in “AUTO” position, which doesn’t require pressing the “ACTUATE” button though.
Oh yeah, here’s also a picture of half the XSAG fleet:
There are three more vehicles not displayed on the picture: KC-10 fueler, SV-301 Storm, and Buran shuttle (far from being complete)
Working on internal systems – slightly restructured the simulation, it’s internals are much neater now.
I’m also working on the new electric system, I’m sorry I’ve got no scheme right now, but I’ll attach it to one of next posts. It’s almost the same, but slightly different to account for 3 fuel cells, external power, and one more thing.
SV-302 now uses electric actuators instead of hydraulic ones, so electric system has to be updated accordingly, to support higher loads.
There will be a better description of electric system someday, but it’s much more complex than previous one, supports crossfeeding, stuff like that, and efficiency loss for heating up the inverters (and other avionics) is accounted (well, will be).
Here’s the debug screen for the electric system:
Finished painting the textures, and started working on internal systems simulation. The whole thing is now much more organized and structured, and I will be forking the SASL library for this project – I want to add support for an advanced sound generation system, and few more misc lua features that don’t really belong to SASL, but I need them. Maybe even implement the LuaJIT, who knows! I would benefit a lot from it.
Anyway, here’s how the finished spacecraft looks like (sorry for tiny a red spot though):
Oh yeah! Cargo bay doors actually work in this one, and there’s an actual cargo bay. It even has solar panels on inner sides of the cargo bay doors – they WILL be accounted for when simulating the electric system.
I’ve finnaly got round to working with the airframe that my kind friend Mr. Scott provided. It’s an airframe of X-30D hypersonic spaceplane, and now I’m using it as a new XSV airframe (XSV is another name of XS Venture, which is officially called SV-302 Venture).
I’ve redone all the textures, and completly redid the texture mapping. Now it’s much neater, and I’m integrating it with internal systems simulator. This is a pretty big change, and most of internal systems will be redesigned to fit this new vehicle.
Here are the pictures (I didn’t finish painting tail and gears yet. Oh yeah, there’s also a typo on them, it’s SV-302 and not SV-301. SV-301 vehicle is Storm):
Been working on the PFD again. I fixed the scrolling tapes, and now they look good, scroll good, and everything works as it should.
This was the first version:
But then I worked on it a bit more, found out that font that is used in the Boeing PFD’s is very very similar to the Latin Gothic, so I used that font instead (and fixed colors):
Also added an OS logo to the OS information screen:
