Permanently revise aircraft’s health & special effects.

Question

Hello all
I’m new to X-plane and I have two questions about the sim.

1.  Is it possible to permanently revise aircraft so they will not fail?  In FSX and P3D this is a check box that says “Ignore Crash”.

2.  I want to revise a few effects, helicopter rotor wash on land and over water, wake for seaplanes & wheel touchdown smoke along with wheel wet, wheel snow & wheel dirt contact. How are these effects controlled, what files do I need to alter?

I’ve revised one of these effects for FSX & all of these effects for Prepar3D but I haven’t had any luck figuring out how these effects are controlled in X-plane v10.41, any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks
Vince McCoy
12/02/2015

Answer 1

Hi Vince,

Regarding #1, there are some options in the Operations & Warnings window. You can opt to not have the plane reset to the runway on a crash, but it will not "ignore" the crash. Warning lights, etc will still go off but I believe you can still taxi around. UNcheck the box "reset on hard crash" to change this behavior (I think it is enabled by default).

For #2, I do not know of a way to alter the effects of wheels, wake, etc, and we do not recommend it. Are you trying to develop a plugin for the sim?

Comments

Hello  jroberts & thanks for your response.

Regarding #1    Before writing this post I did see the options in “Operations & Warnings” after experimenting with these settings it was clear that this will not give me what I’m looking for.

Regarding #2  I’m so new that I’m not sure what the change would be called but it sounds like I need to get educated on Plugins.  In FSX & P3D all of the effects were text files that controlled the particles, it wasn’t even necessary to use the SDK program to modify the effects.  You can see video examples @ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHUS1wHyGJ1MoMIUXzO_U4Q

When landing a helicopter on dirt the default effect blocks all visibility far beyond reality. I’m very motivated to solve this problem, it seems that revising whatever controls the default effect is the simplest answer.  Are you saying a plugin is the only solution or is there another way?

Thanks

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I checked with our scenery developer and learned that:

"You can can find the textures used for the wake and smoke puffs and edit them in photoshop, but in X-Plane 10 there is no text file that would let you control the other parameters (e.g. size and animation)."

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     Thanks again jroberts for your help; I very much appreciate you checking.  While researching this I did see one person revised the initial touchdown effect by revising the texture used which helped, but regarding the helicopter effects it appears that the emitters themselves absolutely require adjustment to make the changes I hope to achieve.  I understand that the animations are not controlled with text files but can the developer tell us what file does control the animation of the helicopter rotor wash, or is it buried inside the main program?  If they rather that I not know I’ll understand but it could give me some insight.

     Looking at plugins it seems they require knowledge of programming in C or another binary-compatible language. If you’ve seen the sample video of my public domain helicopter rotor wash effect I believe it would greatly enhance X-Plane.  If you agree that the effect would be a benefit I could give your developer the text & texture files which will clearly define the particle emitters.  They should have little difficulty porting it over.  This should be a lot faster than me learning how to do it from scratch.  If they rather not get involved then perhaps you could point me to someone that could assist me in creating enhancements for this fantastic simulation.  The physics engine feels great; just want to improve the emersion.  I believe the better this program looks the more likely people will buy it.  And just to be clear I don’t want any money or any other consideration in exchange.

Cheers