Aero L-159 ALCA

[pjedvaj]

Tomaskom has published his L-159 for public;

http://fguk.eu/index.php/hangar/viewdownload/8-military-jets/409-l-159-alca

Aero L-159 ALCA (Advanced Light Combat Aircraft) is a multirole light combat aircraft and an advanced jet trainer designed and made in the Czech Republic. The design is based on the L-39 Albatros and L-59 Super Albatros, one of the most widely used trainer aircraft ever.

Compared to its predecessors, it has much more powerful engine, uses modern materials (thus being more sturdy and enabling higher weapon load) and has modern radar and avionics. The trainer version is suitable for advanced jet training before stepping to modern supersonic fighter jets. L-159 can carry wide variety of standard NATO weapons on its 7 external pylons as well as up to three specially designed PL-20 Plamen (Flame) cannon pods. It's a subsonic aircraft and offers a great maneuverability. It can be operated from unpaved surface thanks to its special low-pressure tyres and engine inlets located above the wing.

L-159 Is currently used by the Czech Air Force and is operated from Caslav airport (LKCV).

The version modeled here is L-159B, two seated variant suitable for both training and combat use.

[Tomaskom]

Yes, I have And it's not only my work, pjedvaj here made the very nice 3D model

It is still fairly unfinished, but some of the nice features include:

• Unique model disintegration animations (see details here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=23681 )
• Cannons with realistic fire rate and tracers once every few rounds, visible/audible over MP (hit transmission is a work in progress)
• Fully automated fuel system with automatic source switching and fuel level balancing
• Carefully tuned lights including Rembrandt support, light intensity and flares fading in daylight. You may need to increase the Lights shader setting in order to see all effects with Rembrandt on.
• Most payload options modeled, including optional experimental fixed fuel probe
• I consider the FDM (YASim) almost complete and generally well tuned, handling changes a lot with heavy payload

Enjoy

[Tomaskom]

New version 0.8 is available!
http://fguk.eu/index.php/hangar/viewdow ... l-159-alca





Changes:

0.8 - 27.05.2015
Animations, effects:
-Some lights tuning and code cleanup
-Disintegration with explosion and fire
-Contrail and all other non-emissive particle effects are now properly darker at low light conditions
Model:
-Minor landing & taxi lights shaping
-Added formation lights
-Some materials adjustments
-Engine intake area reshape to be more flat, added chrome effect to the edge
-Livery switching with 3 most common liveries (more to come in next release)
Sound:
-Removed artificial flyby sound
Systems:
-Added L-159-instructor, passive observer that can connect to any L-159. Active dual controls planned for next release.
Other:
-Bombable support (with Bombable installation check)

[J Maverick 16]

Great job! Thank you Tom , I was looking forward to an update for it. The destruction code is so awesome .
Cheers, Maverick

[flyingfisch]

Any reason why there are no textures or instruments in the cockpit? Is the version on FGUK old?

[Tomaskom]

The reason is very simple - I'm not much of a modeler, so I rather focused on scripting and animations first, stuff I do know well. There has been much effort put especially in the lighting (auto-switching Rembrandt support included), working realistic cannon (Bombable support included), fuel system and some outright never yet seen features, like the disintegration when crashed. And most importantly, most attention was aimed towards getting a well behaving FDM, as that is the most important thing of all from my point of view.
The cockpit interior will be reworked eventually, but what you see is a fresh release and right now I don't expect to have much time to work on in for at least about two months.
Another thing is that when I start working on something, I want to do it really well, and I didn't feel like I would be able to do a high quality cockpit yet. But that is changing as my skills with Blender get better.

Also the aircraft has served as a testbed for developing some more generic and reusable feature packages, like the aforementioned external light pack, the fuel management script, the disintegration, dual controls are work in progress... don't get me wrong, I do have big plans with this one.

You can also notice the version number: 0.8, meaning it is still an incomplete pre-release, yet much more feature rich than the previous one.
For the time being, use the generic HUD...

[flyingfisch]

Gotcha, completely understand, just wanted to make sure I didn't install it wrong

Nice plane!

[MIG29pilot]

Let's make it disintegrate when the bombable damage is 100%

[Tomaskom]

Let's make it disintegrate when the bombable damage is 100%

I was thinking about something like that, but it is currently too easy to destroy it and something like that doesn't necessarily happen in reality very often.
However, I might increase the durability say 3 times, handle engine turnoff myself at 33% and give it some increasing probability of explosion above that damage. Something similar to what I have done in my V-1 flying bomb. That is definitely an option I will explore

[MIG29pilot]

Can certain parts fall off while others stay put?

[Tomaskom]

Yes, the system is designed with this in mind and with some adjustments it could be done. However, making it visible over MP would be a challenge - but not impossible.
Also Bombable doesn't provide part-specific damage information as far as I know.

At first we wanted to develop a separate more detailed damage system, but now we incline more towards contributing directly to Bombable in the future if we manage to agree on common goals with the guys working on it. Still, something like this won't be there anytime soon.

[MIG29pilot]

What really needs to be done is to change the way bombable aircraft shoot at you. Right now it is some sort of arbitrary invention of flug's. If we treated it more like an AI AI submodel, we could have collision reporting, including the position of the impact!

[Tomaskom]

You mean AI aircraft from Bombable scenarios? Because your own bullets are submodels, just as those of anyone you encounter over MP. And for submodels, you have position, direction and speed available - however, the position is always quite far from the real model and trajectory would need to be extrapolated.
I have little knowledge about how the AI aircraft shooting is implemented.

I'm gradually putting together ideas about how to best implement a real hitbox approach without ruining performance of hit processing. Each hitbox would be really a box shape, the nearest hitbox face crossing by the trajectory will be then used as the impact point. Of course hitboxes would represent different parts - engine, wings, fuel tank, ...
I will probably create a proof of concept soon. But it will be definitely a long run.

[MIG29pilot]

Can submodels have subsubmodels?

[Tomaskom]

Now you're going really offtopic... Yet they can, but I can't see how this is relevant.
For example the cannon bullet impact explosion is done with a submodel released from the bullet submodel.