Max Roodveldt 0 Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 Hi all, one of the great mysteries of FSX seems to be the Water Ballast System. (In case you don't know what it means take a look in the aircraft.cfg of the default DG808S; it's at the bottom.) Here's what I want to achieve: when loading a sailplane the ballast tanks should be empty...the tanks can be (partly) filled only when the plane is on the ground...dumping only with the dump valve...no changing of the settings once the plane is flying... Yes - almost like in real life. So far I've almost got what I want except for one small problem - I can only change planes while not in cockpit view. In all the other views it loads ok, but in the cockpit view the readings go all over the place. Any one any suggestions on how to proceed 'cause it's driving me crazy... (what else is new ?) Cheers, Max. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bruin 3 Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 So far I've almost got what I want except for one small problem - I can only change planes while not in cockpit view. In all the other views it loads ok, but in the cockpit view the readings go all over the place. Hi Max, Good to see you back here. Sorry, but on my system I can't reproduce your problem. I can change water ballast values in cockpit-view as in other views. Some-one else? Bert Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max Roodveldt 0 Posted January 10, 2011 Author Share Posted January 10, 2011 Sorry, but on my system I can't reproduce your problem. I can change water ballast values in cockpit-view as in other views. Some-one else? Hi Bert, I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear enough - I don't wan't to use the "aircraft -> fuel and payload" menu, I'm working on something like this: Mine is the one on the left (the two others are Ian's) and I want it to show zero when I load the plane. That's what it does right now but I have a problem with initializing the gauges. In cockpit view FSX loads the aircraft.cfg first and the panel.cfg second (with the gauges) but is than transfering the tanks from the aircraft.cfg to the payload list. So when the gauge has started it's missing the initializing of the payload list. When I load the plane from any other view than cockpit view this order is different: like aircraft.cfg -> transfering to payload list - panel.cfg. This works ok. So I need a work around of some kind... Cheers. btw. I need this gauge to work properly before I can finish my polar flying panel - I'm almost there... M. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bulau 0 Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 the tanks can be (partly) filled only when the plane is on the ground... Sorry, this is not directly addressing your problem, but re: the above... How will that affect missions/flights which are started airborne? From the above, it seems an airborne flight would start with no ballast loaded, with no way to load ballast except to make a landing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max Roodveldt 0 Posted January 10, 2011 Author Share Posted January 10, 2011 Sorry, this is not directly addressing your problem, but re: the above... How will that affect missions/flights which are started airborne? From the above, it seems an airborne flight would start with no ballast loaded, with no way to load ballast except to make a landing. All of this won't make any difference with saved flights or missions. It's just a tool to set up the polar flights (or any other flight). As an airborne flight won't touch the ground until it's ended nothing will change at all... And you'll always know exactly how much ballast is left - if any - no matter what plane you use it with. It's gonna be a substitution panel for the standard minipanel. Cheers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B21 19 Posted January 15, 2011 Share Posted January 15, 2011 Max - I've been thinking about this, without a simple answer... ultimately does this really come down to the need to write to a "PAYLOAD STATION WEIGHT:index" value for the ballast from within a gauge? There's an event to add a % fuel to an aircraft that can be triggered from a gauge, which would meet your requirement to tune the polar (i.e. you could alter the weight in mid-air) IF you owned the aircraft.cfg and so could add a hidden fuel tank. Maybe there's a possibility there (hack the aircraft cfg with our own fuel tank, and delete it after). So you'd do the polar with the ballast empty but fuel up to the same weight. Not ideal I admit. I'm not sure of your basic method of measurement... wouldn't it work with a single pass through the original full ballast i.e. dump a bit, pause and measure, dump a bit more, etc ? To *write* the aircraft variable from within a gauge you can create a DLL which supports both the gauge API *and* the simconnect API. The Aerosoft SDI C4 does exactly this: the gauge is in XML, writes variables that a stub DLL using the gauge API can read, that DLL just uses the simconnect API to write the value of the variable to FSX "on behalf" of the gauge. That DLL is actually generic, i.e. all it does is provide a "write variable" function for a gauge. I guess for FS9 it'd be a similar thing with FSUIPC. Good luck - Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B21 19 Posted January 15, 2011 Share Posted January 15, 2011 actually if the issue is just because payloads aren't there on gauge *startup*, why not just delay the gauge init sequence until the gauge detects the payloads have loaded, or something similar? Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max Roodveldt 0 Posted January 16, 2011 Author Share Posted January 16, 2011 ultimately does this really come down to the need to write to a "PAYLOAD STATION WEIGHT:index" value for the ballast from within a gauge? Ian, that's exactly how I did it... I read the aircraft.cfg to get the size of the ballast tanks and write the wanted content to the payload stations once I got the gauge loaded. Like you said before: everything can be done in C/C++. Cheers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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