RealFlight 6 features discussion

[legoman]

Originally Posted by Boof69

I fly helis too so I can say that the physics are impressive in that area, and the crashes are more impressive. It feels as if the air is thicker now like the rotor blades and wings seem to have more bite to them. I know they haven't made the air thicker...you know what I mean. The planes that I have loaded from G5.5 swaps fly with more float. I have had no time to see how much effort there will be to correct those models to fly the same, but it goes with the theory of "thicker air". I'm sure if something was setup up from the beginning in RF6 that it will fly just fine.

In realflight G5.5 the wing lift modfier on almost all the models was set to around 135-138%

The only thing I can think of was the airdynamic calculations were not quite right
So they adjusted the wing lift modifier because the air was "not thick enough"

[jbourke]

We did change the lift calculations to make them more accurate, which eliminated the need for a few kludges, including the overall lift modification which was utilized in most aircraft.

The dihedral effect you are used to seeing in trainers is possible because of flow sideways to the fuselage. If the aircraft weathervanes well it will not have much of a dihedral effect. Use the center of pressure modification to play with this and you should be able to tune the dihedral effect to your satisfaction.

Jim

[opjose]

Sounds good....

As always it takes us a bit to come up to speed on the more nuanced changes.

BTW: I REALLY like the fact that the C.G. now seems spot on.

Before I had to add a bit of a fudge factor in, normally moving it back a bit, to get the planes to behave like their real world counterparts.

Now this is unnecessary and undesireable. Was that due to the change and improvements in the wing lift calculations?

[jbourke]

It's a combination of many changes. I think we can thank the new airfoil tables as well.

If you recall, the default physics setting was "Intermediate" in G5.5. In RF6, it is now "Realistic". When we released G5.5 there was a lot of experimental code involved in the "Advanced" setting. When we released RF6 we felt good enough about the physics at the highest setting that we renamed it and made it the default. It's not so much that anything was horribly broken in G5.5. It's just that we fixed many little things. I think RealFlight's new slogan "True to Life" is apropos.

There is still work left to do, of course. If you push on the boundaries you'll find some quirks. But if you are setting up a typically sized model aircraft with anything resembling a typical planform and CG, you should no longer need to fudge any of the parameters. We went back to raw measurements on pretty much every aircraft. This is going to make it a lot easier to set up new vehicles. Just measure everything correctly and put it into the sim. It should be very, very close right off the bat. In fact, most of the aircraft I've set up haven't needed any tweaks at all. It's only aircraft like the Wolf Spyder that needed some fudging.

I'm curious to see how well all this holds up for you and the other designers. We've been very happy with the physics in-house, but of course we're biased.

Jim

[Mikeymike21]

Is the physical scale missing for any of you guys?

Im trying to scale up a model but im only able to increase the visual size.

[jeffpn]

Just increase the size of each component individually.

[jeffpn]

Originally Posted by Mikeymike21

Im editing a model with alot of components that need to be scaled up btw.

I don't think you'll get any 3D modeler to feel sorry for you. What I told you to do is what has to be done to set initial physics on any model. One of these days, I'll send you a model of mine to do physics. I'll even let you pick which model to base it on.

[jbourke]

The physical scale feature is still there. It's just that it has moved to the menu.

It used to be a vehicle-level property, but not any longer.

Jim

[jeffpn]

What does the Control Surface Deflections parameter do? The choices are simple and advanced.

[opjose]

Originally Posted by jeffpn

What does the Control Surface Deflections parameter do? The choices are simple and advanced.

Simple, allows you to enter one deflection amount that applies to both positive and negative values.

Advanced, lets you fine tune up and down amounts as we are used to.

[jbourke]

Advanced mode works as before. In advanced mode there are separate values for minimum, maximum, and center deflection.

In simple mode there is only one deflection value. The maximum and minimum are set to this value (with the minimum being negative), while the center value is always zero.

Note that the sim automatically switches you to advanced mode when needed, so you don't have to worry about having a non-zero center deflection hidden from you, or about a minimum which doesn't match the maximum.

Jim

[opjose]

Originally Posted by jbourke

There is still work left to do, of course. If you push on the boundaries you'll find some quirks. But if you are setting up a typically sized model aircraft with anything resembling a typical planform and CG, you should no longer need to fudge any of the parameters. We went back to raw measurements on pretty much every aircraft. This is going to make it a lot easier to set up new vehicles. Just measure everything correctly and put it into the sim. It should be very, very close right off the bat. In fact, most of the aircraft I've set up haven't needed any tweaks at all. It's only aircraft like the Wolf Spyder that needed some fudging.

I can see "predictive modeling" in the G6 advertizing taglines.

Oh if we only had a visual 3D model editor in there too.... RC modeling nirvana...

"Designing a new scratch plane? Model it in G7 and see how it will fly before you build!"

[Boof69]

Dhk79 says that he has built and tested models in RF before building the RL model, and that it usually got him close for initial weights and balance.

[Mikeymike21]

I cant find the menu to edit the physical scale.

[Brianappjj]

Originally Posted by jbourke

We did change the lift calculations to make them more accurate, which eliminated the need for a few kludges, including the overall lift modification which was utilized in most aircraft.

The dihedral effect you are used to seeing in trainers is possible because of flow sideways to the fuselage. If the aircraft weathervanes well it will not have much of a dihedral effect. Use the center of pressure modification to play with this and you should be able to tune the dihedral effect to your satisfaction.

Jim

With all of the updates to the physics model will aircraft made for 5.5, and all of the expansion packs that went with it, work very well in ver6? It looks like models made for 5.5 need certain tweaks removed to work properly in 6. The upgrade path for 5.5 users does not include the "mega packs" which look like mostly models available in 5.5 but adjusted to work properly in 6. So, if I upgrade to 6 can I import all of the models I have in 5.5 and expect them to work normally?