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Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

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Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby stuart » Sat Jul 28, 2018 12:44 pm

Hi All,

I've just created a branch of the C182S project for the C182T, which includes the FG1000 glass panel.

It is available from https://github.com/stuartbuchanan/c182s

It is already very usable - the FG1000 is permanently switched on, but has the correct EIS display. At present it models a very early 182T which still uses the KAP140 autopilot.

It provides both a good reference for how to integrate the FG1000 into other aircraft, and is worth flying in it's own right.

If any aircraft developers want to clean up the panel and the texturing, I would very much appreciate their help - this isn't an area of expertise for me.

Thanks,

-Stuart
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby legoboyvdlp » Sat Jul 28, 2018 2:44 pm

Might the update rate not be a bit too low for flying? The display feels very jerky.

Also, when zoomed out it looks like this:
Image

- not the easiest to read when zoomed out.

Otherwise, excellent!
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby stuart » Sun Jul 29, 2018 1:54 pm

Thanks very much for the feedback. It's amazing what a fresh pair of eyes on something does!

Most of the tapes (attitude, airspeed, altitude) update at 5Hz. I agree that is a little slow, so I've increased it to 10Hz.

After your comment about it looking a little small when zoomed out, I measured it in Blender against the size given for the G1000, and it was about 1cm too short. I've resized them.

Both changes are now in git. (If you're not running on next, you can simply change fgdata/Aircraft/Instruments-3d/FG1000/Interfaces/GenericADCPublisher.nas line 32 to from freq=0.2 to freq=0.1 if you want to test the update range change)

Please let me know if you have any other feedback.

-Stuart
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby legoboyvdlp » Sun Jul 29, 2018 3:31 pm

If the nightlies are now working again I can get it from there ;)


By the way, the performance is very good - was expecting quite a big hit, but it doesn't seem much slower than the C182S itself!
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby stuart » Mon Jul 30, 2018 12:08 pm

Yes, the performance is a bit better than I had feared.

There's a bit of freeze when it loads airports on the NRST AIRPORTS page, but in general it's good.

I put a bit of effort into getting the architecture right at the start. James has also been improving the performance of the underlying canvas maps, which helps a lot.

-Stuart
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby wkitty42 » Mon Jul 30, 2018 2:04 pm

stuart wrote in Mon Jul 30, 2018 12:08 pm:There's a bit of freeze when it loads airports on the NRST AIRPORTS page, but in general it's good.

you get that with the CTRL-M map anyway... the first time loading and then when backing out from the default level 6 to levels 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0 but this only happens the first time you access each of those levels... they seem to be cached and updated somewhere so they're available much faster the next times you zoom out to those levels...
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby gsagostinho » Mon Jul 30, 2018 10:01 pm

Hi Stuart,

I was going to give you exactly the same feedback as lego did about the refresh rate and the size of the G1000 from the pilot's perspective. I still haven't tested your new changes including the extra 1cm in size, but perhaps you might want to make the default POV a bit narrower so that the display can be read a bit more easily.

I can try to adapt the original panel texture for you (I still should have the original GIMP files that I used for the c182s textures) but ideally I would need a new Ambient Occlusion Map (AOmap) for that. I will ask Heiko if he's up to do that, do you have the Blender file with the new panel in the repository?

Also, the shape of the glareshield is considerably different in the model T, see how straight the lines are:

Image

Perhaps someone with 3D expertise could try to adapt it.

Cheers,
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby gsagostinho » Mon Jul 30, 2018 10:05 pm

One more thing, looking at this video below at around 4:00 you can see how responsive the displays are. I think 10 Hz might still be too low to simulate it. Would it affect the performance too much if you would use at least 30 Hz?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlrEUt9oMvY
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby stuart » Tue Jul 31, 2018 4:38 pm

Changing the default FoV is a good idea. I'll do that.

If you could provide a new panel texture, that would be wonderful. As you can see, I've basically hacked the existing one.

Re: AO, I've just imported and exported the .ac file. I only noticed the Blender file later.

I can certainly increase the update frequency, but 30Hz is going to be close or above some user's framerates. I think I'll perhaps tie it to a property and include some control for it. On my system it's not having much of an impact, but I've got a fairly new desktop with plenty of GPU, CPU and RAM.

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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby gsagostinho » Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:36 pm

Could you tie the update frequency to the user's frame rate somehow?

Re: AO, I've just imported and exported the .ac file. I only noticed the Blender file later.


I have manually corrected the AO map. I still have not worked on the text on the cockpit as I will need to find a good hi-res photo as reference, but I think what I created now should look quite better than what you have at the moment. Here is the link for the texture: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ilulf00rqomb ... 9.png?dl=0

Cheers,
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby stuart » Wed Aug 01, 2018 10:01 am

I can tie the update rate to the user frame-rate, but I think it needs to be configurable. I'll do that.

Thanks for the updated texture. I'll get it checked in.

-Stuart
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby gsagostinho » Wed Aug 01, 2018 1:43 pm

My pleasure, looking forward to the next update :)
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby Hooray » Wed Aug 29, 2018 10:32 am

stuart wrote in Mon Jul 30, 2018 12:08 pm: James has also been improving the performance of the underlying canvas maps, which helps a lot.


From a performance standpoint, there still is the issue that the hard-coded projection handling code may cause quite a bit of stuttering depending on the location and the number of symbols to be updated - Gijs fixed that for the hard-coded Map dialog, but most Canvas code using the map element is still suffering from that. Besides, the MapStructure framework is using a so called "SymbolCache" to implement support for symbol instancing, and last I checked the FG1000 wasn't using any of that IIRC, so that may be another low-hanging fruit, unless there have been core changes that I am unaware of, of course.
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby Megaf » Tue Sep 04, 2018 11:40 pm

Mate, please do rename your repo to c182t and remove c182s from the models.
I have the c182s here and things are getting problematic.
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Re: Cessna C182T with FG1000 glass panel

Postby xcvb » Wed Sep 05, 2018 9:51 pm

Megaf wrote in Tue Sep 04, 2018 11:40 pm:Mate, please do rename your repo to c182t and remove c182s from the models.
I have the c182s here and things are getting problematic.


Indeed the c182t is a little outdated now but you could create your own fork from the c182t where you merge the last changes from the c182s. Then there is no need for the original c182s repository anymore.
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