[23JUN20] TFDi Design MD-11 Updates
Entry posted by Jishwaah
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First of all, I would like to say thank you to every person who has submitted content for the MD-11. We have been inundated with key materials that will contribute directly to the development of the aircraft.Everything is greatly appreciated. If you do have any more manuals, diagrams, photographs, or information please continue to send them in right here.
A big shoutout to @ozzman1997 for his continued hard work on the exterior model. The control surfaces are now all exported from the model and our flight dynamics programmer will soon begin his work from the amazing material that has been submitted by the community to ensure the MD-11 flies like the real deal!
For our livery painters who wish to work on new liveries for the MD-11, Ozzy has also confirmed that the windows can be configured via the alpha channel, simply by manipulating the alpha channel of the albedo map. If you are interested in learning more, this forum post is great to read:
On the backend, further development is still ongoing for non-visual requirements and we can’t show these at the moment. Once this is further down the road, we intend to explain this in a little more detail for you to read through when we have more to discuss. Another big item is that we managed to get the aircraft systems working ahead of the models and textures.
With recent work from Collin, the FMC is now being worked on and the image above shows an FMC added to some user submitted images. It is important to remember that this is a work in progress, using user submitted files that allow us to make this look correct in place. This is not representative of the final product!
Although the above image only shows a small amount of functionality, the system driving it is important. We are using a system that lets us write and debug code better and easier and eliminates a lot of the bottlenecks we usually encounter. This will become a testbed for our systems code and allow us to develop and test the aircraft while Ozzy is creating the visual elements.
A short note from @RogueShadow, one of the MD-11 Developers:
Quote
One problem that we’ve always had with developing for a simulator is how we reload the aircraft to see our new changes in the code. Basically, the process to reload an aircraft in FSX/P3D is to switch to another aircraft so our code isn’t in use, we compile our code to a .DLL, copy that to the Panels folder, and then switch back into that aircraft (and in FSX, click through the dialog asking if we want to run the external DLL every time!) Doing this upwards of 50 times in a day slowly becomes painstaking and causes headaches! In a previous blog post on our website, we highlighted how we used our in-house tool, D2D Studio, to reduce the amount of times we have to reload the aircraft. This time, we managed to get the entire aircraft systems and gauge rendering to run outside of the simulator, completely independent of FSX/P3D. This allows us to edit and code our systems on the fly without even having to touch any simulators, vastly improving the time spent developing the product. This system will let us get the MD-11 to you much sooner!
That being said, the development of the TFDi Design MD-11 is now firmly underway and a lot of progress is being made every day. Our team is spending a lot of time to get this project into your hands and in the virtual skies of the world.
To Summarise
The aircraft has a lot of work being done but we are still unable to provide a release date, or even an estimate. We hope that regular development updates that we release will allow you to see what is being done on the aircraft. Understandably, these will slow down as in depth code writing begins to pick up, as we would be unable to share that! That being said, we hope to supplement these updates with developer streams on Twitch so you can see the work that is being done when it gets to the finer details!
Thank you, and have a great week!
- Josh
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