gospadin Beta Tester

Join Date: Feb 2015 Location: 'Murica Posts: 1,948

Community A-4E: May 2017 Update Community A-4E: May 2017 Update



Hi everyone! We admittedly had a slow few months, with a number of vacations and distractions, but as of the end of May, we've built up a bit of momentum again and hope to push closer to release at a decent cadence. On that note, I figured I'd surprise everyone (as well as half the team) and post the update two days early! Hope nobody minds...



Unwraps and Texturing



This month, the biggest visible difference in the A-4 is that we've started unwrapping and texturing more of the cockpit. The gauges themselves have been unwrapped for a while, but now the ejection seat, cockpit wall baffles, and flooring are all unwrapped and textured. Additionally, we've been trying to make the light bulb textures a bit more realistic for the cockpit indicators. We're happy to show some in-progress textures:











plusnine has an imgur album here, to which he'll add any additional texture screenshots as he tweaks things:



http://imgur.com/a/Oy9YZ



While we were at it, we re-did the texture for the Mk-4 gunpod. Don't have a handy picture (hopefully another team member will post one), but it looks a lot better than before.



New Systems



For this update, we implemented our impression of the AN/ALE-29A Chaff Control panel. This small control panel was added on the upper left glareshield via an AFC to manage chaff delivery, as the base airframe didn't have this. There's now a single "countermeasure dispense" binding available, and the pilot will need to choose whether to dispense from bank 1, bank 2, or both. They'll also need to remember to power-on the system as part of fencing in.



For gameplay, we did, however, take a design liberty. While in real life, the system would control two banks of chaff, what we implemented was a bank of chaff and a bank of flares. If you load all chaff or all flares, you'll see the other bank be zero, instead of the chosen countermeasures being split across both dispensers. The counter values are pre-loaded with the correct values when you first spawn, but if you re-arm you'll need to manually setup each counter.



We made a short youtube video to show all these behaviors:







You will probably notice an ECM control panel in that video as well (just inside of the chaff control panel) and we hope to plumb that by our next update.





System Modeling and Tuning



We went back to our flight model, and using some new-ish data, we tuned the critical AoA at all airspeeds in the flight model tables. This gives the A-4E a much better turn rate before you lose elevator authority, meaning you can once again black-out with full back elevator. The stated structural G-limit for the airframe was 7G, however this isn't a control limitation per the data we have available. A brave enough pilot should be fully capable of breaking things.



Additionally, we noticed that the drag with our in-house created ejector rack setups and cluster dispensers was way too high. We've tuned these drag coefficients to be much more representative, which gives more accurate cruise speeds with stated payloads. This affected both the MER and TER setups (especially the 5x Mk-81 on pylons 2/4), as well as cluster munitions using the SUU-7 dispenser. (These munitions had a copy-paste error which treated every bomblet as a drag contributor, even when still inside the dispenser tubes.)



Within the flight control systems, two adjustments were made: First, we implemented both hot and cold modes for the approach power compensator (APC), which changes the ideal throttle bias point depending on outside air temperature. (A bit less throttle in cold weather, and a bit more throttle in hot weather) Second, we fixed the short-mode oscillation in the altitude-hold function of the AFCS.



You can see the short-mode oscillation in this video:







And the improved dual-mode altitude hold controller in action here:









And Yes, Bugs...



Our module isn't without bugs either. We are currently tracking about 25 bugs right now, after these small fixes and improvements:

Fix unreliable chaff and flare counts and behavior

Fix overshoot / wraparound on the ARC-51 frequency knobs

Fix magnetic compass direction

Fix an animation conflict between the chaff control panel and the RPM gauge

Cleanup of the flaps code so that keybindings and the cockpit control remain synchronized

Fix for missing adapter mount when using the AGM-45B on pylon 1

Fix for sidewinder growl heard when the AGM-45B Shrike is mounted

Implement FC3-like jettison logic (wing fuel, centerline fuel, outer weapons, inner weapons, center weapons)

Implemented a host of missing keybindings, as well as new defaults for the warthog joystick and throttle





Lastly, from when I was testing the chaff dispensing bugs, I made a short video dodging missiles from an SA-3. This is from very early in May before most of the rest of the content of this update was developed, but it's still kind of fun:







Thanks!

The Community A-4E Team Hi everyone! We admittedly had a slow few months, with a number of vacations and distractions, but as of the end of May, we've built up a bit of momentum again and hope to push closer to release at a decent cadence. On that note, I figured I'd surprise everyone (as well as half the team) and post the update two days early! Hope nobody minds...This month, the biggest visible difference in the A-4 is that we've started unwrapping and texturing more of the cockpit. The gauges themselves have been unwrapped for a while, but now the ejection seat, cockpit wall baffles, and flooring are all unwrapped and textured. Additionally, we've been trying to make the light bulb textures a bit more realistic for the cockpit indicators. We're happy to show some in-progress textures:plusnine has an imgur album here, to which he'll add any additional texture screenshots as he tweaks things:While we were at it, we re-did the texture for the Mk-4 gunpod. Don't have a handy picture (hopefully another team member will post one), but it looks a lot better than before.For this update, we implemented our impression of the AN/ALE-29A Chaff Control panel. This small control panel was added on the upper left glareshield via an AFC to manage chaff delivery, as the base airframe didn't have this. There's now a single "countermeasure dispense" binding available, and the pilot will need to choose whether to dispense from bank 1, bank 2, or both. They'll also need to remember to power-on the system as part of fencing in.For gameplay, we did, however, take a design liberty. While in real life, the system would control two banks of chaff, what we implemented was a bank of chaff and a bank of flares. If you load all chaff or all flares, you'll see the other bank be zero, instead of the chosen countermeasures being split across both dispensers. The counter values are pre-loaded with the correct values when you first spawn, but if you re-arm you'll need to manually setup each counter.We made a short youtube video to show all these behaviors:You will probably notice an ECM control panel in that video as well (just inside of the chaff control panel) and we hope to plumb that by our next update.We went back to our flight model, and using some new-ish data, we tuned the critical AoA at all airspeeds in the flight model tables. This gives the A-4E a much better turn rate before you lose elevator authority, meaning you can once again black-out with full back elevator. The stated structural G-limit for the airframe was 7G, however this isn't a control limitation per the data we have available. A brave enough pilot should be fully capable of breaking things.Additionally, we noticed that the drag with our in-house created ejector rack setups and cluster dispensers was way too high. We've tuned these drag coefficients to be much more representative, which gives more accurate cruise speeds with stated payloads. This affected both the MER and TER setups (especially the 5x Mk-81 on pylons 2/4), as well as cluster munitions using the SUU-7 dispenser. (These munitions had a copy-paste error which treated every bomblet as a drag contributor, even when still inside the dispenser tubes.)Within the flight control systems, two adjustments were made: First, we implemented both hot and cold modes for the approach power compensator (APC), which changes the ideal throttle bias point depending on outside air temperature. (A bit less throttle in cold weather, and a bit more throttle in hot weather) Second, we fixed the short-mode oscillation in the altitude-hold function of the AFCS.You can see the short-mode oscillation in this video:And the improved dual-mode altitude hold controller in action here:Our module isn't without bugs either. We are currently tracking about 25 bugs right now, after these small fixes and improvements:Lastly, from when I was testing the chaff dispensing bugs, I made a short video dodging missiles from an SA-3. This is from very early in May before most of the rest of the content of this update was developed, but it's still kind of fun:Thanks!The Community A-4E Team

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M-2000C English Cockpit | Extra Beacons Mod | Nav Kneeboard | Community A-4E __________________ Last edited by gospadin; 05-29-2017 at 11:39 PM .