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Turbulent days

The new stick and throttle are in place on my desk, and I am finally back on track – although with some turbulence (read on).

warthog

While fine-tuning the FDE this week I experienced a new problem: when flying in altitude or attitude hold mode, the aircraft would suddenly become unstable and then bank hard to either the left or right. To regain control I had to turn off the autopilot. My first thought was that this was related to a conflict between the wing leveler in the FSX autopilot and the custom autopilot functions in Draken, but I soon found out that the phenomenon also appeared in fully manual flight, i.e. with both the FSX autopilot as well as the custom functions completely disabled.

After some digging on the Internet it dawned on me that it was probably a matter of the new FDE in Draken overreacting to the rather rough “turbulence” simulation in FSX. Stock aircraft seem not to be affected, but high-performance addons (such as Draken) can be much more sensitive. The problem is not autopilot-related, but with wing leveler enabled the effect will be more prominent as the plane may be in a hard roll before you have time to react and override the autopilot.

The solution was to simply disable turbulence completely in FSX and use the weather function in FSUIPC instead, which is a lot better. I sincerely recommend this.

Today and tomorrow working on model optimization, trying to reduce polys and texture load as much as I am able. Also adding a new “options” panel for enabling/disabling some visual elements, sounds and fx. Then on to writing documentation for the latest additions and changes, and finally compiling the installer package for 4.1b2.

Stay tuned /Tom