WIP of USS Monterey - Animated LSO

[X_eidos2]

Here are some screen shots of the animated LSO in the player controlled version of the USS Monterey CVL-26, which is part of the SkyUnlimited FSX Vol.2 T-6, SNJ package.

The arms of the LSO are controlled with the flap keys.

The black shapes are raised and the green flag is put out on the bridge with the spoiler key.

The CO's chair rotates and the WT door opens and closes by using the open/close exit keys.

When I was in the Navy I was a quartermaster and spent a lot of time up on the ship's bridge. Building and animating the WT door and gyro repeater brought back a lot of memories.

[MCDesigns]

That looks great, love the detail on that door in image 6.

[JamesChams]

Looks nice! :applause: I tried to get Mr. Javier "Thrawn" to add crew for the Nimitz v2.0 and some of it was... Glad to see others working on these kinds of things, too; adds more flavor to FSX. :wiggle:

[Cerberus]

I think this is going to be a lot of fun for everyone.

[N2056]

That looks great, love the detail on that door in image 6.

Oh man...you need to add the chalk line to the door gasket...or else I say someone gundecked a pm :d
Awesome detail on that door. Looks dead-on! :icon29:

[X_eidos2]

It's been 30 years since I did the dc pms on the WT doors on the bridge of the USS Wabash. Mentioning chalk lines brought back some very vivid memories. Maybe it was a preparation for dealing with gmax in the future.

For the civilians in the crowd. To test the proper fit of the water tight doors, white chalk would be put on the knife edge part of the door frame, the door would be secured (closed) and a thin white line of chalk would be left on the black rubber gasket that went around the outer edge of the part of the door that closes. Any gaps in the chalk line would indicate areas where the door wasn't making a proper seal.

Each department on a ship would have a sailor assigned to the task of doing this check on all the water-tight doors in that department's area of responsibility. Seeing a thin white chalk line on the gasket was a good indicator that someone was doing their job properly.

To gundeck a report is to check off a task as having been completed when in reality it was skipped over and never done, usually because the sailor was in a hurry to do something else or be somewhere else. A common practice in the Navy of the '70's.

After I get things wrapped up, I hope to make a short video of all the animations. You can see all the lugs move as the door opens and closes. I'm hoping to get some sound files so Jesse can add them to the sound folder. Those doors had a very distinct, heavy clunk sound to them.

[X_eidos2]

It's been 30 years since I did the dc pms on the WT doors on the bridge of the USS Wabash. Mentioning chalk lines brought back some very vivid memories. Maybe it was a preparation for dealing with gmax in the future.

For the civilians in the crowd. To test the proper fit of the water tight doors, white chalk would be put on the knife edge part of the door frame, the door would be secured (closed) and a thin white line of chalk would be left on the black rubber gasket that went around the outer edge of the part of the door that closes. Any gaps in the chalk line would indicate areas where the door wasn't making a proper seal.

Each department on a ship would have a sailor assigned to the task of doing this check on all the water-tight doors in that department's area of responsibility. Seeing a thin white chalk line on the gasket was a good indicator that someone was doing their job properly.

To gundeck a report is to check off a task as having been completed when in reality it was skipped over and never done, usually because the sailor was in a hurry to do something else or be somewhere else. A common practice in the Navy of the '70's.

After I get things wrapped up, I hope to make a short video of all the animations. You can see all the lugs move as the door opens and closes. I'm hoping to get some sound files so Jesse can add them to the sound folder. Those doors had a very distinct, heavy clunk sound to them.

[Cerberus]

^ Double Tap

[Thrawn]

Looks very cool!! Good work!

[Shylock]

^ Double Tap

Interesting facts so it's worth the double tap lol

[Cerberus]

The most I have done was a triple tap lol. The guy below me posted. Holy Triple Tap Batman!! lol

[X_eidos2]

During some tests to see how things looked during flight ops I discovered something very important about building aircraft carriers for FSX. You can't have the virtual cockpit camera look out on the flight deck. Because of the draw order, the flight deck will always be rendered over top of any aircraft you have landing on the flight deck. It'll look like the aircraft have sunk below the flight deck.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b59/X_eidos2/VC_sink.jpg

The solution is to make some custom camera views that use the outside aircraft camera.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b59/X_eidos2/VC_sink_not.jpg

So after I moved all the detailed modeling built for the bridge wing to the external model, I had to decide what to model for the VC view, since I could no longer use it to view the flight deck.

I decided on a simplified pilot house, which is located one deck below the area of the bridge wing.

The engine order telegraph is animated just a little, since FSX doesn't support putting engines in reverse. :-) The helm is linked to the rudder command and has a rudder angle indicator. There is also a magnetic compass and a gyro repeater. In the 2d panel view you can access the GPS and the map button, radios and auto-pilot. I would advise against using the auto-pilot to make course changes while doing flight ops, as auto-pilot likes to bank the ship several degrees when turning.

[sparouty]

Hi X_eidos2,
Your work is really amazing!!
It gives me some nice ideas for further projects!!

Do you have planned something like a "LSO sight" to help the LSO-carrier's captain? May be something like a window panel, in line with the glide slope and with a cursor controlled by the LSO : putting the cursor on the plane would give to the batman the approriate move?

I think that I have read something similar for a mulitplayer Nimitz few months before. It sounded like a very good and helpfull idea for virtual LSO...

Regards,
Sylvain

[crashaz]

I was thinking the same thing about that LSO... be nice if we could use that animation instead of the FLOPS.

[X_eidos2]

Here are some views from one of the custom camera positions. You can see the planes coming in, and by looking through the opening in the windscreen you can see the position of LSO in the various "flap" positions. The response time of the flaps was shortened in the cfg file, so the movement of the arms between the different flap positions is pretty fluid at the moment.

Originally I was hoping to use the aileron and elevator input to control the LSO arms up and down, and torso moving side to side, but the ship also responds to these inputs so I had to look for another key controlled animation. When I tried moving the contact points to minimize the ship's rolling, the fps dropped into low single digits.

If someone knows how to tweak the cfg or air file to keep the carrier level during aileron and elevator input, then it would be easy to re-assign the animations to the bone structure in the LSO figure.

[X_eidos2]

Well I found the answer to my own question about how to get the ship so that it wouldn't rock back and forth when aileron control was used. The LSO was updated with new animations. It wasn't easy, nor was it as hard as I expected. The throttle cut off animation had to be done separate from the aileron and elevators. Hardest part was finding a good animation to assign to the movement.

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[sparouty]

Hi X_eidos2!
Great!! Your work will certainly make me jump into multiplayer's world!!:jump:
I have two minor questions for you:
- do you plan to add something like a sight view/window to help dummies LSO (like me)?
- will the USS Monterey be "repaintable" into other navy carrier (like French Bois Belleau or LaFayette for example :kilroy:)? Sometimes original mapping doesn't alllow some exotic customization...

But anyway be sure that my purchase is already on track, waiting now for a long "internal housewife-process-agreement" :bump:

Regards,
Sylvain

[X_eidos2]

Hello Sylvain,

The views in post #15 shows the custom view that let's you look over the shoulder of the LSO as the planes come in. That's the closest thing to a sight window that I could think of.

Right now there is only one item that prevents you from easily re-painting the model, and that's the hull number that's painted up on the bridge wing. When I was building the model I originally used a texture map to make the "26." But that was too blurry. Because FSX tolerates polygons well, I modeled the number 26 in the gmax model. It has very sharp edges as a result.

If you can come up with a list of areas that you would need to change to make the other versions I could go back in and make sure the model was "painter" friendly.

As far as ship models go, this one was kept simple to keep frame rates as high as possible for the SNJ-4C making carrier landings. During the 1950's when the ship was used for training, all the guns had been removed.

As far as negotiation with the wife about the purchase - here are some talking points.

Costs: $20.95 USD
aircraft included:FSX SNJ-4C, LT-6G with visibility switches to make T-6G.
add-on add-ons: USS Monterey CVL-26, AI version and player pilot-able versions, FAC radio jeep with drivers, Gary20's jeep with driver, 105mm Howitzer, Explosion locator, Camera locator.

[X_eidos2]

Hello Sylvain,

The views in post #15 shows the custom view that let's you look over the shoulder of the LSO as the planes come in. That's the closest thing to a sight window that I could think of.

Right now there is only one item that prevents you from easily re-painting the model, and that's the hull number that's painted up on the bridge wing. When I was building the model I originally used a texture map to make the "26." But that was too blurry. Because FSX tolerates polygons well, I modeled the number 26 in the gmax model. It has very sharp edges as a result.

If you can come up with a list of areas that you would need to change to make the other versions I could go back in and make sure the model was "painter" friendly.

As far as ship models go, this one was kept simple to keep frame rates as high as possible for the SNJ-4C making carrier landings. During the 1950's when the ship was used for training, all the guns had been removed.

As far as negotiation with the wife about the purchase - here are some talking points.

Costs: $20.95 USD
aircraft included:FSX SNJ-4C, LT-6G with visibility switches to make T-6G.
add-on add-ons: USS Monterey CVL-26, AI version and player pilot-able versions, FAC radio jeep with drivers, Gary20's jeep with driver, 105mm Howitzer, Explosion locator, Camera locator.

[sparouty]

Hi X_eidos2,
Thanks for your reply.
My main "concern" is about black hull number added by the French Navy.
Here is some links to show you where they put it : hull sides, stern and island sides. The flight deck was also painted with yellow lines.

http://www.netmarine.net/bat/porteavi/lafayett/photo07.htm
http://www.netmarine.net/bat/porteavi/lafayett/photo10.htm
http://www.netmarine.net/bat/porteavi/lafayett/photo08.htm
http://www.netmarine.net/bat/porteavi/lafayett/photo09.htm

Regards,
Sylvain

PS : my negociation is going well :icon_lol:

[X_eidos2]

(Sorry folks - I don't know why my post are getting repeated)

Thanks for the links to the photos Sylvain.

I'll go in and make adjustments to how the textures are done so that you can easily make the changes you want.

The radar mast is going to be a bit different though. I just found some pictures from the 1950's that show a round radar dish where I had a rectangle shaped mesh. Your pictures show ships with a very different kind of mast.

[X_eidos2]

I thought I had come across an answer to one of my biggest problems in building a pilotable version of the USS Monterey. Only now have I come to realize it's all pointless.

The problem was that the aircraft roll backwards and bounce around after landing on the deck. I thought if I could reduce the pitching and rolling it would solve the problem. After a week of tweaking COG, contact points, and various other bits I had reduced the movement, but it was still there. This evening I discovered a process using the recorder module that flatten everything out and allowed the ship to sail as smooth as the AI version. So I was greatly disappointed to discover that even with the ship perfectly level, the landed aircraft still rolls backwards and bounces around.

So it means that the cool animation with the LSO won't be usable because even if people get things set up in multi-player or using the FSrecorder module, when they make a landing, they'll have to take -off again right away, otherwise they roll off. Even when the brake is set. Bummer.

[Cerberus]

Touch and goes are probably whats best for multiplayer anyways.