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Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

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Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Fri Nov 03, 2017 6:34 pm

I made some (new) updates to the P180 in several places: visual, sound, flight model, systems, interior objects and instruments.

Visual:
I added ALS fuselage and glass reflection effects, interior shadow effects, animated rain.
I added instrument lights and external ALS navigational lights.

Sound:
I added and tweaked various sounds, now it also has rain, wind and thunder sounds, plus engine starting, stopping, ground sounds, etc..

Flight model:
It was kind of slow compared to the real one and I also updated it for the EVO version which is capable of 402 KTAS at 31000 ft and now has 1800 RPM and is quieter.
Yasim refused to go even close to that speed so I had to force it in some places.
Now it can cruise at 402 somewhere in between 10000 and 15000 ft in level flight and it's slightly faster than that at lower altitudes and slightly slower above this.
I also added more fuel for the extended range version.
I might have made it slightly more fuel economical than the real version, I am not sure if the official range includes some extra safety or not, but it should be able to reach that range without problems.
I also made changes to the aerodynamics and control surfaces to make it smooth to handle after the increase of weight, power and lift and decrease of drag and to assure that the default autopilot can handle it well including following complicated way points from the route manager.

Interior objects:
I added seats in the passenger cabin taken from the Tecnam P2006T, the interior is not luxurious business class at it should be but that is what I could do with the objects I found in my collection.
I also added a passenger view.

Cockpit, systems and instrument changes:
I doubled the main glass instrument for the copilot and added 3 new analog instruments for speed, altitude (with adjusting knob) and vertical speed indicator.
I tried first to make a glass cockpit by taking instruments from planes like airbus liners but they had too many things to connect behind the scenes so that's why I added only the basic things that I could.
I also added a dual throttle control, it also works to make differential throttle with the mouse wheel.
I added two buttons: a red one that starts and stops the engines (simple and fast, not realistic) and one white that starts the new lights I added: instrument lights, and 3 external navigations lights.
I also added keyboard links and a menu for starting engines, toggling lights and doors, just press "s" to start.

In the end I would probably could have added those glass instruments, I didn't know I was going to make so many changes but for my needs this basic version is enough, although I wouldn't mind is someone adds more :)

Here is the download link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1p52jehrqqmesoe/P180R9.zip?dl=1 (updated on 8 December 2018)

I don't keep things for a long time in my dropbox so if someones wants you can put it in somewhere, maybe update the official repository if the maintainer agrees.
Last edited by iamzac on Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:52 am, edited 9 times in total.
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby bugman » Fri Nov 03, 2017 10:56 pm

The original author is Guillaume Chauvat. I suggest you try to contact him first, as described at:

His last forum post was 2012, so he might be hard to contact. But he has left a lot of contact possibilities.

If there is any aircraft developer who could check the changes and help iamzac have these merged into the upstream FGAddon repository, that would be appreciated. But that is only if iamzac cannot make contact with Guillaume first. I will update the wiki stub article:

as the info is currently all wrong.

Regards,
Edward

Edit: For reference, here is the original forum thread: viewtopic.php?t=4707
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby bugman » Fri Nov 03, 2017 11:11 pm

Iamzac, if you could read the FGAddon wiki article, this should help you learn how to become the new maintainer of this aircraft. Then you'll be able to update the official aircraft yourself. The information will also help you collaborate with others and contribute to active aircraft developments.

I have now updated the P180 wiki article. Once your changes are pushed upstream into FGAddon, assuming there are no major design or legal (GPL) issues, if you could update that wiki article to match the FGAddon version, that would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Edward
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby bugman » Fri Nov 03, 2017 11:17 pm

iamzac wrote in Fri Nov 03, 2017 6:34 pm:Sound:
I added and tweaked various sounds, now it also has rain, wind and thunder sounds, plus engine starting, stopping, ground sounds, etc..


Here is where most legal issues arise. Where do the sound files originate from? It can be very hard to find GPL-compatible material for this.

Cockpit, systems and instrument changes:
I doubled the main glass instrument for the copilot and added 3 new analog instruments for speed, altitude (with adjusting knob) and vertical speed indicator.
I tried first to make a glass cockpit by taking instruments from planes like airbus liners but they had too many things to connect behind the scenes so that's why I added only the basic things that I could.
I also added a dual throttle control, it also works to make differential throttle with the mouse wheel.
I added two buttons: a red one that starts and stops the engines (simple and fast, not realistic) and one white that starts the new lights I added: instrument lights, and 3 external navigations lights.
I also added keyboard links and a menu for starting engines, toggling lights and doors, just press "s" to start.

In the end I would probably could have added those glass instruments, I didn't know I was going to make so many changes but for my needs this basic version is enough, although I wouldn't mind is someone adds more :)


For the new instruments, do they all come from GPLv2+ licensed FlightGear aircraft? If you copied instruments from CC-licensed or other non-GPL licensed aircraft, then that would be a licence violation and they cannot legally be added to the official aircraft.

Regards,
Edward
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Sat Nov 04, 2017 4:42 am

bugman wrote in Fri Nov 03, 2017 10:56 pm:The original author is Guillaume Chauvat. I suggest you try to contact him first


Last time I contacted an original author things didn't work so good so I posted the changes here, since they are all GPL people responsible of the various repositories can do as they please.
I already made some changes to this plane in 2014 and it looks abandoned for now, although the work already done is excellent, my changes inside look pretty bad compared to how good the exterior model is.

bugman wrote in Fri Nov 03, 2017 11:11 pm:Iamzac, if you could read the FGAddon wiki article, this should help you learn how to become the new maintainer of this aircraft. Then you'll be able to update the official aircraft yourself. The information will also help you collaborate with others and contribute to active aircraft developments.


Thank you for the information but I don't have time to become a maintainer, in the near future I can maybe make some additional fixes if someone suggests me and they are not above my capabilities, maybe add some other simple instruments if someone considers them necessary and they tell me where to get them from but in the long term I don't know if I will still be available to help with it.

bugman wrote in Fri Nov 03, 2017 11:17 pm:Here is where most legal issues arise. Where do the sound files originate from? It can be very hard to find GPL-compatible material for this.

For the new instruments, do they all come from GPLv2+ licensed FlightGear aircraft? If you copied instruments from CC-licensed or other non-GPL licensed aircraft, then that would be a licence violation and they cannot legally be added to the official aircraft.


Everything is from other GPL FlightGear planes: Diamond-Da42, Tecnam-P2006T, the C172p included with flightgear, ATR72 and ATR-42-500.
Except the seats everything else could be swapped with instruments or sounds distributed with flightgear about which I found after I already made the changes (I am still new to this).
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Sat Nov 04, 2017 2:56 pm

I made improvements to the main instrument as you can see in the picture: I added textures and 6 additional properties to display (air speed, radar altitude, gps altitude, real heading, brakes and gear) plus visual warnings.
I wanted to display more data like fuel and flaps, maybe even the heading and distance to the next waypoint if there is one but I got stuck trying to transform some data for osgtext... I found a post here explaining that I should use property rules but I got stuck so for now this is enough.
The updated version is in the original post link.
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Mon Nov 06, 2017 8:19 pm

New update, most likely the last one!
Added CDU where it should be (can even do some things like setting up routes which can be used by the default autopilot), animated pedals, magnetic compass, clocks, added more data to the PFD, arranged things so that it would be closer to the real cockpit.
I also improved the various sounds and now the sound of the propellers is lower inside than outside.

Cockpit during daytime:
Image
Cockpit during nighttime:
Image

Unless bugs are found that I can fix I am not planing on adding anything new right now.
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Wed Nov 08, 2017 3:21 pm

New update: fixed fuselage appearance when ALS is off, now it looks great in Rembrandt or Default renderers, and small tweaks to sound.
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Thu Nov 16, 2017 10:48 am

New update:

-Throttle only worked between 30% and 100% so it was zero bellow 30% (because of the original modeler choice, I don't know why) now it works between 0.01% and 100%, at zero there is a very small 1% throttle thrust to simulate idle spinning conditions
-Slightly reduced maximum speed and small increase in fuel consumption to be closer to the real plane
-Changed how the yasim model was forced to achieve the high velocity to a more balanced solution between tweaking the engine and tweaking the rest of the flight model, because each has unwanted effects so I tried to achieve a balance between them (too much climb performance and acceleration if you only tweak the engine, too good at gliding when the engines are off if you only tweak the rest)
-Various other small tweaks to the flight model: center of weight moved slightly forward, improved approach angle and more flaps lift and drag
-Very small visual effects and sound improvements
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Wed Nov 22, 2017 5:32 pm

New update:

-More small improvements to the flight model, most important changes are: rebalanced flaps (which also deploy faster), better cruise AOA and more (accurate) fuel consumption.
-The VSI and ALT instruments had their textures improved.
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Sat Nov 25, 2017 1:04 pm

Small update: added a texture to the base of the throttle levers so you can see how much throttle you are applying.
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Tue Dec 12, 2017 12:12 pm

New update:

-Added front gear landing light and secondary ALS light
-Added the MFD from the canvas zkv1000, even though the real plane doesn't have an Garmin G1000 but this is the only canvas instrument with a working map that I could find so it's better than nothing.

I didn't also add the zkv1000 PFD to keep at least some of the real plane's instrument general layout.
I tried unsuccessfully to use the canvas PFD from the 747-400 so it will remain like this, I don't plan any further changes.

Current instrument panel:
Image
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Sat Dec 08, 2018 10:53 am

Minor update to the default views and chase distance.
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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby miguel » Mon Dec 24, 2018 3:48 pm

I follow your developments. from the DA42-VI
I have tried the new planes with glass in the cabin. But its completion.
Thank you very much for your work


THANK.: FOR iamzac.



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Re: Piaggio P180 Avanti EVO update

Postby iamzac » Tue Dec 25, 2018 5:34 pm

miguel wrote in Mon Dec 24, 2018 3:48 pm:I follow your developments. from the DA42-VI
I have tried the new planes with glass in the cabin. But its completion.
Thank you very much for your work


THANK.: FOR iamzac.



Miguel


Thank you.
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