Damage Mod v2.0 for Flight1's BN-2 Islander SOON

[Kekelekou]

Hello everyone!

I am excited to announce you the imminent release of the version 2.0 of my Damage Mod for the Flight1 (https://store.flightsim.com/vendor/flight1/?utm_source=flightsimcom&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=sitelink)'s BN-2 Islander!

A few bugs fixed, an interface with FSCaptain, and last but not least, COMPATIBILITY with P3Dv4 of the WHOLE Islander (except the KLN90a). Cockpit sounds are back and no more never-ending rumbling sound! (thx to Bert Pieke and DJJose).

The following systems will wear out and will be inflicted damage in case of improper use :
- engines
- generators
- propellers
- flaps
- flaps motor
- flight controls
- autopilot
- vacuum
- pitot tubes
- brakes
- structural deicing (the corresponding switch is added to the virtual cockpit)
- landing lights

Extra features :
- avionics dying if on when engine starts
- blown tires in case of hard landing
- foul spark plug if engine runs at low rpm and rich mixture for too long, (rpm drop during mag dead-cut test simulated)
- engine dies in case of quick throttle movement with fuel pump off
- sluggish engine response to throttle input with cold engines
- door lock and alarm

So stay tuned!

Cheers

[guitar0633]

Can you explain more about the Ice situation? I had to remove the free ice guage because unlike your mod it has now ability to allow differentsettings. I would love that thing if it simply allowed settings of 25 %, 50% and so on because it will ice up my planes even well after I have gotten out of clouds and will not clear up. I removed it from the Islander.

So is the damage mod ice using that ice guage or something else like it? Will it actually ice up the plane or is it just damage if it is left one or something and has nothing to do with actual ice conditions and the planes flight dynamics?

I really enjotyed your fix for me in disabling some of the damage systems. I made a flight today after putting your lines in and had an engine smoke because I forgot that I was supposed to keep throttle and rpm at max during takeoff and climb with full mixture. The left engine smoked but still made it to my destination, it was some serious fun.

I'll eventually turn more systems back on as I get more comfortable. It would really be cool if we could just have a check box on the panel itself we could click to turn individual system damage on or off.

I CAN'T WAIT for this version 2, i'll be checking every day, I hope it's soon. I love this mod and it has made the plane seriously fun to fly. It has me wanting to try and figure out that real engine free mod to do some stuff to the free DC4/C54, maybe to the Aerosoft Beaver, AH C46, and many more, especially some Carenado planes. This mod confuirms to me that damage is THE HUGE thing missing in many planes, especially payware planes. Even good developers like Flight replicas does not do damage for misuse like this, nor does AH and these piston pounding planes aere so much more fun when yu have consequences for abusing the planes. I would buy the FR C54 in a heart beat if it had these systems failures, same for several of the Aeroplane heaven planes. Flying Manfred's C47 really opened my eyes to the joy of having to treat the plane properly or face consequences.


Hello everyone!

I am excited to announce you the imminent release of the version 2.0 of my Damage Mod for the Flight1 (https://store.flightsim.com/vendor/flight1/?utm_source=flightsimcom&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=sitelink)'s BN-2 Islander!

A few bugs fixed, an interface with FSCaptain, and last but not least, COMPATIBILITY with P3Dv4 of the WHOLE Islander (except the KLN90a). Cockpit sounds are back and no more never-ending rumbling sound! (thx to Bert Pieke and DJJose).

The following systems will wear out and will be inflicted damage in case of improper use :
- engines
- generators
- propellers
- flaps
- flaps motor
- flight controls
- autopilot
- vacuum
- pitot tubes
- brakes
- structural deicing (the corresponding switch is added to the virtual cockpit)
- landing lights

Extra features :
- avionics dying if on when engine starts
- blown tires in case of hard landing
- foul spark plug if engine runs at low rpm and rich mixture for too long, (rpm drop during mag dead-cut test simulated)
- engine dies in case of quick throttle movement with fuel pump off
- sluggish engine response to throttle input with cold engines
- door lock and alarm

So stay tuned!

Cheers

[Kekelekou]

Hello guitar0633!

Your enthusiasm is much welcome! Thank you.
The deice gauge included in the DamageMod does NOT simulate any ice accumulation on the aircraft. It just increases the system' wear when it's on, and eventually fails it ( = impossible to turn it on). Nothing more.

About your smoky engine : did you let it warm-up properly as indicated in the instructions?

About any additional improvement/features : I have been working on the DamageMod for quite a while now (in a fragmented way). I really want to get back to my other sim projects.
So I will restrict my work on the DamageMod to a mere bug fixing from now on. But I'd be glad to help anyone who'd like to improve it.

[MarkH]

Can you explain more about the Ice situation? I had to remove the free ice guage because unlike your mod it has now ability to allow differentsettings. I would love that thing if it simply allowed settings of 25 %, 50% and so on because it will ice up my planes even well after I have gotten out of clouds and will not clear up

Are you talking about the icev10 gauge? You may be interested to know I made some mods to that gauge so it works better. I don't know if I posted it here but I uploaded it at flightsim.com. Here's an extract from the readme:


Better Icing in FSX - supplement to Charles Owen's icev10 gauge
---------------------------------------------------------------
This is a replacement XML file for Charles Owen's icev10 gauge. Unfortunately the original has a bunch of problems, which I have fixed by rewriting the XML file. This archive does not contain all the files in the original, so you will need that too.

What is it?
-----------
Charles's gauge displays a visual indicator of ice buildup in the cockpit, but more interestingly it also simulates additional icing effects, notably the accumulation of freezing rain and interference with the flight controls (simulating wing and tailplane stalls) when the ice load gets too high. Even aircraft such as the Aerosoft Twin Otter Extended that implement freezing rain icing will typically treat that ice just the same as regular ice and hence shed it when you select de-icing measures. The icev10 simulation doesn't shed freezing rain ice unless you fly out of the freezing conditions, which makes things much more of a challenge.

What have you changed?
----------------------
(1) Ice now accumulates at a rate that is in proportion to the aircraft size (actually the Empty Weight) instead of at a constant rate for all aircraft.
(2) Freezing rain now accumulates ice even if the regular ice load is not increasing.
(3) Freezing rain ice now only melts if we are out of the icing conditions.
(4) Freezing rain ice no longer rises without limit.
(5) Freezing rain ice melts faster than it accumulated.
(6) Interference with the controls in AMBER and RED zones now also disconnects the autopilot.
(7) Interference with controls in the RED zone is a bit more variable. (Same as AMBER zone plus a guaranteed tailplane stall at cruising speed.
(8) Interference with controls leaves the aircraft somewhat controllable.
The behaviour is essentially the same as the original gauge but with a few rough edges smoothed off. The regular ice load is tracked using FSX's internal percentage rather than pounds as in the original gauge. This has the advantage that ice accumulation rate is in proportion to the aircraft size. We accumulate freezing rain ice using the same percentages and apply the same thresholds as in the original (1% and 2% of Empty Weight)to determine severity of icing. Although it looks like we can now accumulate 200% of the maximum ice load defined by FSX (i.e. 100% FSX ice plus 100% additional freezing rain ice), FSX will not know about the additional 100%. In other words, its only significance is in how we choose to interpret that extra load in this script.
The simulation of stalls at high ice loads is not very sophisticated but given that we should never get there it is convincing enough. For example, we will be able to stay flying but we will not be able to land or do much of anything until we have cleared the ice. (We can no longer use the autopilot to fly the aircraft perfectly in spite of a critical ice load!

[guitar0633]

Hi Mark, thanks for the info on your mod for the ice guage. Yes, I was using that ice guage. I'm not sure what to think iof your mods. I just found the file on FS.com and downloaded it. Haven't installed yet until I ask more about it. I stopped using the ice guage because it was TOO HARD most of the time and caused me to crash or have to keep resetting the flight. You mention that now using the AP is not an option to get through and that is exactly what I was using many times to get past the misery of the Ice guage when it was unbearable.

So have you made it even harder to use by doing this?

My problem with it is that I would ice up in clouds, but even when I got down lower in clear, thicker air it would remain in the red and yeller so long that eventually I had to dsable the AP and DOWN I WOULD GO in uncontrolled flight.

One thing is that many FSX planes have no deice systems. They may have a switch, but they are just dummy switches. I know this because I have set keyboard commands in fsx for prop and structural deice. In some planes, hitting these keyboard commands DO NOT flick the deice switches in the planes, showing that they are not really connected to the fsx deice systems. I'm not sure using the keyboard commands effects the planes if they do not have cfg file entries, but really, the ice guage was overpowering even the planes that do have proper fsx deicing.

I am flying my airhauler company in Alaska and it is now winter. Basically, that ice guage was bringing down over half my flights.

I was dealing with kind of the same thing with my Opus weather. Sometimes I would go in to strips and find ZERO visibilty, same at all alternate strips too. Eventually I figured out that Opus allows me to set visibility at airports up to any height regardles of surrounding weather and this allowed me to make my flights. And here is my thinking for this. I don't want my sim being so real that it makes me not even able to play, know what I mean? In real life pilots simply cannot or will not fly that day because of weather. Well I only get an hour to an hour and a half a night to fly the sim. I
ll be darned if I want my sim simming unflyable days for me, that's not much fun. So in my Air Hauler I ASSUME I don't fly on unflyable days and when I sit bdown at my sim I am assuming I checked the weather and found that low and behold, I CAN FLY THAT DAY, lol.

So now I have my Opus weaher set for 1200 feet of visibility above the strips I am going to and I just pretend that I checked the weather before flight and found I can get in to the strip.

It's the same with the ice guage. I'll be darned if i want icing bad enough to crash because I would hope in real life I simply would not have flown that day or would have made sure I had clear areas to stick to or clear elevations to stay within so that I can get through.

I loved that ice guage in the summer and fall. It would work and I seemed to be ale to get down in to thick air where it is clear down low and it rarely ever got in to the red and only lasted a few minutes in the orange. And I could always use the AP to fly until it got rid of the ice. Now I see you are saying that option is gone. I see you also say though that the icing melts faster, so will that be enough to get me through? Hell, I don't want to enable this thing and end up crashing 80 percent of the time I fly because the weather is bad in Alaska right now.

I am hoping someone will do more modding of that guage and allow users to choose 50 percent ice effects, 25 percent, and allow simmers to lessen the effects when flying in brutal areas like Alaska as I am. I would like to hear more of your thoughts on this guage, have you made it even more demanding and tougher or is it overall a little easier to deal with? Any chance you could do a little more modding and give us a 50% switch, maybe a 25% switch? Heck, just a 50% switch would be such an awesome option. If I could cut the effects down in half it would make it so much more doable in Alaska weather.



Are you talking about the icev10 gauge? You may be interested to know I made some mods to that gauge so it works better. I don't know if I posted it here but I uploaded it at flightsim.com. Here's an extract from the readme:


Better Icing in FSX - supplement to Charles Owen's icev10 gauge
---------------------------------------------------------------
This is a replacement XML file for Charles Owen's icev10 gauge. Unfortunately the original has a bunch of problems, which I have fixed by rewriting the XML file. This archive does not contain all the files in the original, so you will need that too.

What is it?
-----------
Charles's gauge displays a visual indicator of ice buildup in the cockpit, but more interestingly it also simulates additional icing effects, notably the accumulation of freezing rain and interference with the flight controls (simulating wing and tailplane stalls) when the ice load gets too high. Even aircraft such as the Aerosoft Twin Otter Extended that implement freezing rain icing will typically treat that ice just the same as regular ice and hence shed it when you select de-icing measures. The icev10 simulation doesn't shed freezing rain ice unless you fly out of the freezing conditions, which makes things much more of a challenge.

What have you changed?
----------------------
(1) Ice now accumulates at a rate that is in proportion to the aircraft size (actually the Empty Weight) instead of at a constant rate for all aircraft.
(2) Freezing rain now accumulates ice even if the regular ice load is not increasing.
(3) Freezing rain ice now only melts if we are out of the icing conditions.
(4) Freezing rain ice no longer rises without limit.
(5) Freezing rain ice melts faster than it accumulated.
(6) Interference with the controls in AMBER and RED zones now also disconnects the autopilot.
(7) Interference with controls in the RED zone is a bit more variable. (Same as AMBER zone plus a guaranteed tailplane stall at cruising speed.
(8) Interference with controls leaves the aircraft somewhat controllable.
The behaviour is essentially the same as the original gauge but with a few rough edges smoothed off. The regular ice load is tracked using FSX's internal percentage rather than pounds as in the original gauge. This has the advantage that ice accumulation rate is in proportion to the aircraft size. We accumulate freezing rain ice using the same percentages and apply the same thresholds as in the original (1% and 2% of Empty Weight)to determine severity of icing. Although it looks like we can now accumulate 200% of the maximum ice load defined by FSX (i.e. 100% FSX ice plus 100% additional freezing rain ice), FSX will not know about the additional 100%. In other words, its only significance is in how we choose to interpret that extra load in this script.
The simulation of stalls at high ice loads is not very sophisticated but given that we should never get there it is convincing enough. For example, we will be able to stay flying but we will not be able to land or do much of anything until we have cleared the ice. (We can no longer use the autopilot to fly the aircraft perfectly in spite of a critical ice load!

[MarkH]

You mention that now using the AP is not an option to get through and that is exactly what I was using many times to get past the misery of the Ice guage when it was unbearable.
So have you made it even harder to use by doing this?

On the contrary, I think I have made it behave more rationally. Regarding the autopilot, if you have that option you might as well not bother with icing at all in my view, although I appreciate the point that if it's so 'realistic' that you just can't fly at all it probably defeats the object. But in mitigation, I changed things so you could keep control of the aircraft (just) when the icing has built up enough to affect the controls and I made the build-up and shedding of freezing rain work more rationally. In my experience of using this, as long as you have de-icing and anti-icing equipment you are okay as long as you are careful about flying in precipitation. Where things are cold and wet, this places realistic (-ish) limitations on where you can fly, so it makes management of your flight more critical and may force you to divert if you can't find warmer and/or drier conditions. You can see an example of this in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULfu93iK7h0) (start at 4:50).

I suppose there are a number of things going on here. I think you are saying you have tweaked the apparent (rendered) visibility without tweaking the weather, which I presume means you can get ice when it looks clear at those socked-in strips. This has consequences, so you want to tweak the icing to be less of an issue. When you say you want to set 50% icing, I think you mean you would like an option to switch between something like 'proper' and 'attenuated' icing models on the fly. This would be possible by introducing a new Lvar that you could poke from some Lua code (or a joystick button). You could probably do it right now just by changing some of the numbers in the XML file, although it wouldn't be dynamic. The XML code is just text and I have tried to comment it so it's reasonably clear what is going on.

Lastly, if you don't have de-icing equipment, then you can't fly in icing conditions! Again, if you want to do this you need to create some compromise or just not use the ice simulation at all. If you want to investigate whether your aircraft's anti-icing switches (or the keyboard options) are actually working I suggest you get a little tool called AFSD (http://www.aero.sors.fr/designer_pilot_utilities.html), which will let you look at all the internal FSX (P3D) variables dynamically (ice is under 'weights and CoG').

I suppose I could look at adding an Lvar as I mentioned above so that you can choose an icing severity. I would probably use this to divide the rates of accumulation of structural ice and freezing rain by 2 or 4, which I think would equate to your hope for 50% and 25% of the ice handicap.

[guitar0633]

On the contrary, I think I have made it behave more rationally. Regarding the autopilot, if you have that option you might as well not bother with icing at all in my view, although I appreciate the point that if it's so 'realistic' that you just can't fly at all it probably defeats the object. But in mitigation, I changed things so you could keep control of the aircraft (just) when the icing has built up enough to affect the controls and I made the build-up and shedding of freezing rain work more rationally. In my experience of using this, as long as you have de-icing and anti-icing equipment you are okay as long as you are careful about flying in precipitation. Where things are cold and wet, this places realistic (-ish) limitations on where you can fly, so it makes management of your flight more critical and may force you to divert if you can't find warmer and/or drier conditions. You can see an example of this in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULfu93iK7h0) (start at 4:50).

I suppose there are a number of things going on here. I think you are saying you have tweaked the apparent (rendered) visibility without tweaking the weather, which I presume means you can get ice when it looks clear at those socked-in strips. This has consequences, so you want to tweak the icing to be less of an issue. When you say you want to set 50% icing, I think you mean you would like an option to switch between something like 'proper' and 'attenuated' icing models on the fly. This would be possible by introducing a new Lvar that you could poke from some Lua code (or a joystick button). You could probably do it right now just by changing some of the numbers in the XML file, although it wouldn't be dynamic. The XML code is just text and I have tried to comment it so it's reasonably clear what is going on.

Lastly, if you don't have de-icing equipment, then you can't fly in icing conditions! Again, if you want to do this you need to create some compromise or just not use the ice simulation at all. If you want to investigate whether your aircraft's anti-icing switches (or the keyboard options) are actually working I suggest you get a little tool called AFSD (http://www.aero.sors.fr/designer_pilot_utilities.html), which will let you look at all the internal FSX (P3D) variables dynamically (ice is under 'weights and CoG').

I suppose I could look at adding an Lvar as I mentioned above so that you can choose an icing severity. I would probably use this to divide the rates of accumulation of structural ice and freezing rain by 2 or 4, which I think would equate to your hope for 50% and 25% of the ice handicap.

Hi Mark. Man oh man, I would love for you to do that extra tweak. Yes, just having you cut all effects in half would be so great for folks flying in extreme conditions like I am in Alaska. You don't even need to worry about the 25 percent thing. Just having the 50 percent thing would ab truly great. I would use the full in summer time and the 50 percent in winter. So yeah, if you could go in and just cut every number in half it would just be such a great added option.

I was just using the opus strip thing as an example of not wanting too much reality because in reality pilots just simply don't fly some days. I remember watching the the Era Alaska show and seeing storms just shut their entire operation down all over their southern Alaska area. So I figured a way to set Opus to allow me to get in to strips no matter the surrounding weather. But the ice guage was just so much torture in winter that it was making me crash darn near 75 percent of every flight. But if I had a way to have all ice effects set at 50 percent it would be about perfect. I would still need to try and get around the bad weather, but it wouldn't be so bad that it would just cause me to crash all the time.

So yeah, if you could do that I bet a lot of people would find that to be perfect in the worst weather areas. In summer, of course, I would just copy the standard guage back in.

So I hope you can do this and let me know so I can have that mod option and others too. I would be in your debt big time and would do any testing or anything I can help you with in the future.

With the new Islander mod out today, you experimentng with this great ice guage, my goodness times are good in the flight sim world. I would love to learn this xml stuff. Can you imagine taking a wonderful sim like say, the Carenado Najaho or the AH electra 10A and being able to add failures like the Islander or Manfred's c47, then adding the awesome ice guage with your mods and adding them to planes like that? It would take them to the next level completely. Failres and icing are two huge things that improve the sim experience so much. It's just incredible how much difference it makes. and the developers from what I have seen have no problem with their customers doing mods to add more options to their creations. Carenado will post Bert's upgrades on their web site and I don't see any reason Flight Replicas and Aeroplane Heaven would have a problem at all with encouraging mods like this to their planes and adding links to their home pages.like Carenado does.

I would love to see a damge mod huge thread here on SOH with ini files and mod files for planes that people could share. I already use Manfred's monitor panel that comes with the C47 on many of my planes like the Islander, severu carenado planes, the beaver.... Even on turbo props. The guage is easy to see, has AP and all radio setups for vor and ils, all lighting switches, wipers, almost everything all in one pop up panel. I've got so comfortable with it that I have it installed on over a dozen different planes.

Sorry for rambling on.

Thanks much.