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CumulusX!, and the Future Thereof


sf4JC

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Just a few questions that may be answered by the author of CumulusX!, Peter (Funky) Lürkens. As promised, here are just a few of the questions some of us virtual soaring pilots may have been wondering about, and just never thought to ask. Okay, on to the questions...

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1) In regards to thermals &/or ridge lift and the compatibility function with Cross-Country Soaring 2004, I feel this is an overlooked function where both FS2004 and FSX users can fly in the same thermals in the same session. That being said, can we look forward to having this compatibility between CCS2004 and CumulusX! in future updates, or will it be phased out soon?
2) There was talk of possibly having wave lift in a future CumulusX! release a while back, is this a feature that we can still look forward to? if so, Can you elaborate?
3) Are there any features that we don't know about, that you would like to see implemented in future releases that you wouldn't mind telling us about?
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Whelp, there you have it, Peter. Just take your time answering one or all the questions, and questions that may follow. THANKS Again for this great addon to FSX.
Scott (sf4JC) Frerking
acting Director of SOAR
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Hi Scott,

first of all thank you a lot for your continued effort in the SOAR community and keeping the forum alive!

I would be glad to have all the answers myself regarding your questions, but I'll try my best. You know that I'm doing CumulusX! as a side activity and to keep it efficient I usually start with implementing a new feature, when I have an sleek idea how to realize it. And, as usual, I have to balance my time with my R/L obligations, which are quite challenging these days.

1) There is no plan to phase out compatibility functions in regard to CCS2004. However, the standard functionality of CumulusX! has significantly extended meanhwile compared to CCS2004 and using compatibility modes results in a substantial downgrade. So my focus regarding to that is not on compatibility, and it may happen, that over time errors may pop up in these legacy parts. Still, old versions can be made available again, so that for events, one may always fall to a legacy release of CumulusX!

2) Yes, you can. With wave lift it is more tricky than with the previous parts, because mountain waves require consideration of huge areas, different from ridge lift. Although I have a reasonable algorithm at hand for producing lift and sink information, a major difficulty remains which is generating the required database with low effort at the end user side.

3) I have a few more items on my "roadmap", yes, but I don't want to spread this out at this moment. I would come up with it, when I see a realistic opportunity to implement one of these. These could even pass the wave lift feature, if I have an "efficient idea" for one of these first.

Hope that gives some clue on the development ideas and plans. Once in the while there is also some work on newly discovered bugs, and I have also to do some code-clean-up in between to keep the program prepared for further extensions. Unfortunately, the last one went a bit wrong, so I had quite some extra effort this weekend to sort it out again. I hope the patch which is currently under test finalizes this step, so that my spare time is again free for working along the roadmap.

best regards,
Peter

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Thanks for replying, Peter, and thanks for the details. I may have a few more questions later on, but that will do for now, unless others have questions or comments they would like to add. A comment on the Cross-Country Soaring 2004 compatibility issue, in the FS2004-FSX FunFly/Contests that I have tried to put together over the years, I failed to let the FSX users know that their experience was going to be different/downgraded. So I'm glad you brought that up again.

Scott

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