About a month ago Alex was looking at the 777 operators list on wikipedia. Back when we really got into the project, the 772ER was the most popular variant of the bird flying. The 777-200LR (77L) and the 777-300ER (77W) were in their infancy. Turns out that over the course of just a few years, the balance has shifted. By far the most popular version with carriers of the 777 is also our favorite, the 77W (now this is in terms of orders…there is a lot of backlog). We’ve wanted to get a move on with some of the other variants for along time now and these new figures gave us just the excuse that we needed to get started on the 77W conversion. The modifications also open the door to the 200LR and 200LRF to complete the entire 777 line.

Our release schedule is still going to focus on putting the 200ER out the door first, but we thought it worthwhile to share some of the new stuff with you. The stretch has also given way to further refinement of the details including wing components and landing gear components. More importantly though, we’ve got brand new GE90-110B and 115Bs, modeled from the ground up and detailed to the hilt. There is a little bit more work to do with the engines obviously, but they are at a point now where they’re pretty enough to show them off.

Keep in mind that this is just a future development announcement at this time. Our full time priority is still the 200ER. We’re going to put up comprehensive 200ER progress report sometime next month (which consequently will all feedback into the 77W anyway…gotta love parallel development). You want it, and we want it. With that goal in mind, its a no brainer ‘win win’ for all of us.

Some images. All white areas are areas are where new geometry has been applied or old geometry updated. We’ll get to texturing the new stuff in due time.

From all of us at XPJets, enjoy!

Then you have the did I just do that moments where the answer was staring you in the face for hours. A new train of thought later and the results are better than what you could have hoped for. Yes, I may be waxing poetic a bit, but I had one of those this evening, and I’ll get back to it momentarily. I’ve actually had several over the past week. I’ve just started really getting into texturing the 3d pit of the 777 and its already been an experience. Some of those moments are just learning new facets of the tools that we rely on to do our work. Some of it is realizing that I can bypass some of the export limitations and achieve greater resolution in my object file for more precision in the geometry where it is needed. Some of it is finding new software to help out what used to take much longer to achieve. Others are techniques conceived in conversations with my colleagues to get past those brick walls that we inevitably run into every now and then. I’m always amazed that the small stuff is harder than the big stuff. I know that some of you are waiting for ‘thee to get to thine point’, and yes, I know that my rambling probably isn’t the most interesting thing going on in cyberspace.

I suppose that my point is that even after years of playing around with this, the sim and the development process still has the capacity to frustrate and surprise you. This evening’s puzzle was how to texture the gear handle knob. Its a semi translucent piece of plastic or acrylic. I found that it is not a straightforward process because most of the light scattering happens below the surface. In the right circumstances, this object can appear to be illuminated from within below the surface. While its likely that you could hand texture the knob to some degree of convincing success, I wasn’t convinced that a simple texture was going to be the solution. How the mesh is unwrapped is nearly as important as the material used to render out the texture. Its shaped like a wheel yes? Okay, so what do we do? You can treat it like a hub and wheel situation with two disjointed pieces. I’m not a fan of the texture split for solids like this. Spherical unwrap gets closer, but there are fiddly bits where the effective texture resolution is zero on the wheel due to the unwrap. Long story short, the wheel ended up being unwrapped as a hub projection with a series of concentric rings radiating from the center. Unfortunately, this solution ultimately cut out the easy photoshop option. I had to dive deep into materials and try my luck at achieving the appropriate level of internal refraction. Lets just say that for hours I struggled with this. Nothing that I did ended up looking convincing. Achieving that perfect, to quote the ever quotable James May, “boiled sweet” look was looking increasingly more and more distant.

So after dinner and a drink, I’m back with the same problem. More test renders and hours pass and I’m still no closer to finding a solution. After some research and digging online, I came across a great website. The Blender Open Material Repository turns out to be a great resource for materials. I’d recommend it to anyone having material and rendering issues. I found an acrylic glass material that I felt I could adopt and modify to serve my needs. Those aha moments, well, analyzing this material’s attributes couldn’t have been more helpful. The render bake went more or less well, followed by some touch ups in photoshop and finally I felt that I had a reasonable base…plenty of diffuse illumination throughout, nice strong highlights where they needed to be etc. Never one to leave anything well enough alone, I took some ideas that Josh had during a conversation today to heart and well, can I say little victory? Imagine if you will a semi transparent doughnut inside another semi transparent doughnut inside another semi transparent doughnut. The result is going to allow you to see specular highlights from within the external mesh. Done carefully, you end up with a transparency gradation that mimics some of the refraction that happens inside the actual handle knob. Victory or not, the fact of the matter remains, this ended up being alot of work for a gear handle. I could easily have gotten much more done on the cockpit today had I just left it and let it fester for a while.

This small victory…literally at just 3 cm in diameter, is one of many that I’ve had, and one more checked off in a line of ideas that haven’t been had yet. Some you arrive at easier. Some are a little more involved. This knob was was especially involved. My whole story may seem a bit anticlimactic, perhaps a touch anecdotal, and in the grand scheme of the cockpit, it really is. However, small victories like these propel developers in new directions. New ways of thinking about things are vitally important. It makes the end result of what we’re working for that much better. And thats why I’m posting. In the name of innovation, small as it may be, it all builds on itself. If I can spread some innovation around, then I’ve done my job. If people can inspire innovation in me, then they’ve done their job. Having said all of this, I am going to attempt to keep this kind of blog posting alive. It gives all of you a sneak peak into some facets of the process. I get to tell a little bit more of my own story in hopes that maybe the community can get to know one of their fellow devs a bit better.

So a little long winded? Most definitely. Informative, insightful, or helpful? I hope so. And as you probably guessed…a little preview of tonight’s small victory. I for one am looking forward to seeing how this gear knob acts in the sim’s lighting.

Cheers

Alex

I’m waxing poetic geek right now, but there are three solutions to the cockpit text problem that I can work out. First of all is to texture all of the panels straight on with a white texture basis for the text. This works for several things, but not when you need to isolate interior illumination from the backlit textual illumination. Admittedly, it is far easier to shade this text with shadows and the like which is a plus. Second is to texture the letters in the same regard as above, but use an alpha channel to do it with, so that there is a ‘hole’ in the panel where the letter should be. A polygon behind the instrument provides the backlighting. I’ve seen this used and have thought long about using the technique myself. The problems though are identical to those from the first solution. The resolution required to have sharp letters in the 3d cockpit environment during all times of the day is far too high to be productive. I’ve also noticed that while the letters may be crisp during daylight, once illuminated at night, the effective crispiness drops and the cockpit text becomes very difficult to read. Again, this can be solved by upping the resolution to very high levels on all of your textual panels. The third solution is to do away with textured text of any sort and draw it out using polygons. If you’ve been following the Comet project, you know exactly what I’m on about. I’m trading textures for polygons and so far I like the results. While this process has its ups and downs as well, I do feel that for large cockpits like the 777s, with lots of space and surfaces, the polytext solution is going to be the best all rounder, with limited use of the first solution for non back lit placards.

While I can’t take credit for the idea, I am going to throw out a big thank you to Guy (guym-p) for the inspiration!

Having said all of this, just because our text will be nice and sharp doesn’t mean that we’ll be skimping on cockpit texture resolution. It just won’t have to be near as astronomical to achieve the clear legible quality that we want and we can better spread that quality throughout without having to spend huge amounts of VRAM just on the instrument panels. From my perspective, this really is a win win for all of us!

The reason I bring this is up is that I fired up the sim to get a feel for how the process was working and to see what kind of look I’m going to achieve. I was pleasantly surprised when I was greeted with this…and even more pleasantly surprised when I noticed that framerate wasn’t effected. Its amazing what a little text can do to completely change the feel of the cockpit environment. Definitely thought that it was worth a share!
Keep poking around in the gallery as I’ll do my best to update it with panel shots during the texturing process on a semiregular basis.

If you want to go straight to the HD version, click here.

I’m off to bed for now, but its the AP panel and overhead tomorrow. Once we’ve gotten this all hooked up to light level rheostats, this will be a happy place.

Alex

Yeah, that’s what i would say if i would need to post news regulary. Fortunately I don’t. However, i agree with you, one post per year is somewhat sparse. Maybe I’ve lost all sense of time…

Seriously, we’re busy. So busy that I don’t shutdown my PC; I leave it on with emacs and gdb running so I don’t waste time every day setting up my environment before I can start working. And that’s the truth.

So, what’s new with the plugin? Hmm, it works. What it does right now works. But what does it do at the moment? Not enough. Not enough to say “Yes, that’s how a 777 works”. And to be honest, there are still many things missing that will make it really act like a 777. What we have now is a “framework” and some systems working or partially working. It has taken almost a year for me to get a framework that I’m happy with. Displays drawn with vector graphics, multithreading, custom and X-Plane default command handling, I/O of default as well as custom datarefs, the option to save the plugin-state together with a flight, sounds etc. All these things must be written from scratch. Then the “real challenge” began, that’s what I call the real work: put in the stuff which makes the 777. We’re not talking about “basic systems” only. FBW, AFDS, FMC, these are what really makes the 777 the plane that it is, and they are what really cost a lot of time. But that’s also the most funny part. Yeah, we have some FBW logic, custom flight director and we’ve started the FMC. None of them is finished, and what they do now they do well but they are far from complete. And you can’t just say “finish FBW first or finish AFDS first”, because all of them depend on each other, more or less. As i said: funny stuff.

We’d like to show you a short video. Normally we wouldn’t post something this early, but I think you might be interested anyway. Just showing a really basic thing: “How to enter a route into the FMC”.

Said enough, need to write some code. Bye

First, lets compare the aircraft with and without normal/spec maps.

In the first set of images, focus your attention at the specular highlight on the nose and at the one world logo. In the second set of images, focus on the detail in the specular highlight and on the rivet lines. In the third set of images, focus on the oneworld titles.

In the next image, focus on the specular highlight paying particular attention to the window surrounds, the skin, and the panel lines. The specular effect is best seen on the window plug inside of the large e of one world.

In this image, the diffuse texture map has been removed completely. This allows you to see the normal map and the diffuse map directly. Due to the time of day, the LIT texture is also visible. Eventually we would like to control the cabin lighting via plugin.

And just because we’ve shown you all of this, another full shot of the aircraft on climbout.

Do note though that screenshots don’t really do these effects justice. They are best viewed live when the conditions that you are viewing the aircraft change…ie, time of day, angle of the aircraft to the sun, camera placement etc.

Cheers

Cheers!

Alex

I think that I may owe explanation on a few new features. The brake status indicator lights just below the landing lamp housings are functional. Green means that the brakes are off. Red indicates that the brakes are active above 1300 or so psi. Yellow indicates that the parking brake is set. All of the lights are functional as you’d expect them to be. The complete P40 panel is also something new. I’ll be working with Sven later to hopefully achieve some functionality through the panel including the annunciators, the ability to set off the APU extinguisher in case of APU fire, and if we’re lucky, an audible APU fire horn. Obviously, APU fire doesn’t exist as a failure yet in the sim so there will be some work to do first.

As for the rest, I’ll let the screenshots do the talking. Next up on the external agenda is the RAT, but first, I’ve got an overhead to start work on.

Cheers

i think it’s time to give you an update. Not too much to tell. Most work is “behind” the visuals. However, i thought that it would be a good idea to show you a new video. Youtube videos only can give you a hint of how these displays are looking. Vector graphics, as good as they are, have their limits, but we are working around most of the issues. Most of the displays will also be “undockable” so that you can view them at larger sizes. The size of them will be configureable (up to 512×512 px). Also it might be possible that the panel layout will change, you know we’re at e really early state with the project

So what’s next? The basics on the code are almost done (except of fixing bugs or something to improve). We use a lot of threads now and we’ll add some more (you have a multicore CPU, right?). This will help to keep X-Plane’s performance as high as possible. The displays don’t affect fps at all (on my machine). But there are much complex things to come. One of these things is the fly-by-wire system. Work on that starts tomorrow. Expect at least 3 months until it’s usable. Why 3 months? Remember, we’re on X-Plane . A lot of control surfaces to steer. But i’m really sure it will be fun to fly that bird.

Ok, here’s the video. Please don’t comment my approach, it was a “quick & dirty” run to bring her down. And you might notice: no AFDS And if you can, go to the youtube website and watch in HD!

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slVWL0tks9o

Admittedly, we’ve not kept up on the blog near as often as we’ve liked as other commitments have taken precedence for the time being. Having said that, we’re still plugging away. Sven is hard at work on the systems end of the equation and is just about to dive into the 777 FBW system. Dhruv and I have been working with some of the texturing but primarily our focus has been the flight model. We’ve been working on airfoils, engine numbers, fuel consumption, weight and balance (the lot really) to make sure that we’re really flying by the numbers throughout the entire flight envelope and communicating through Austin to try to make sure that we can get the most out of the sim as accurately as we can. Most recently, I’ve been slaving over a wacom tablet working on Pratt textures. I think that you’d all much rather appreciate something to look at than listen to me droll on. With that, I bring you the Pratt 4077. Here’s a startup sequence and a reverser test to whet your appetite.

We might be coerced into putting together a small promo video before too long if anyone is interested. Until then, enjoy these PW previews!

PW4077 Spoolup

PW4077 Thrust Reverser Test

It’s been a while since I wrote an email to Dhruv related to the 777 project asking for possible interests in a working partnership. I was really happy about the fact I got a positive answer, so here I am!

Oh, you don’t know who I am? I’m sorry. My name is Sven Goericke, and I’m from Leipzig, Germany. What am I doing on the XP Jets team? In short, I’m hard at work on a plugin for the XP Jets 777. That’s it. Expanding on that, in 2007 I started with a 777 for MSFS (FS X). But I was dissatisfied with some its limitations. Maybe you know some successful aircraft addons for FS X and might ask: which limitations? I’ve only one answer: Fly-By-Wire. Hah, FSX has an A321 with FBW by default. There are some very interesting Airbus-Simulations for MSFS 9/X in progress so why is FBW a limitation in MSFS? Well, we’re interested in the 777, not Airbuses. The FBW of the 777 is completely different than the Airbus logic. Also, what about the Aerodynamics? Just Google for differences in the flight model used by X-Plane and MSFS and you’ll know what I mean…

So, what’s the status of the plugin now? Over the last few weeks I have worked on the “basics”. The plugin is written in C++ so i had to setup some nice classes to use. As the 777 has a modern glass cockpit I decided to use a vector-graphics library called “cairo”. The reasoning behind using cairo is that it works on Linux, MacOS and Windows. You can see an early (and incomplete) preview of the PFD here:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G5J218999A

Currently I am working on the electrical system. Yes, the 777 will have almost exclusively custom systems. I have also a “minimum required equipment list” (systems that will be done) for a first release which are almost the major-systems:

• Electrical System
• Hydraulic System
• Fuel and Air Systems
• Fly-by-wire System
• Air Data/Inertial Reference System (ADIRU)
• AFDS (Automatic Flight Director System) and Autopilot(s)
• Flight Management System
• Electronic Checklists

It’s still a long way so I don’t want to give any timeline for the development (of course I have a personal one). But from time to time I’ll post some news about the progress here so it’s a good idea to come back here frequently.