well, just a generic "blah" update :blahblah:...
i've just got back on the track with my progress on the G42... nothing quite extraordinary just yet, but i did found a clever way to create the 16x16 triple-channel lookup tables for the engine operation envelopes...
before, i was writing the tables by hand... it seemed it would be easy at first, but once you do the math, even a smaller 12X12 table as 144 individual values which must be tuned for realism :blink:... quite a daunting task, i'm afraid...
so, as a programmer, i keep as a motto that "the computer works for me, and not the other way around"... thus, i opened up my trusty DXStudio and wrote me up a bitmap-to-array generator (.png, actually)
and woohoo! that was SOO much easier

i can now paint the values in photoshop! and have them converted into a neatly arranged grid, which i copy-paste directly into MSVC:thumbup:
another advantage, is that by using colors, i can "paint" three tables in one

, and filter out the values by the Red-Green-Blue bytes....
i haven't got around to testing it yet, but being able to visually edit the flight envelopes is something worth mentioning, i think:hmm:
and yes, i know i could have just loaded the bitmap throught code... but it was more lines to do that than it was to javascript a converter thingy in DXS
cheerz!
---------- Post added 07-23-10 at 12:05 AM ---------- Previous post was 07-22-10 at 07:41 PM ----------
right, just a quick heads-up...
we're gold again!:thumbup:
my idea paid off and i just ran a full-powered test flight of the "Vex/Magellan RT66 TurboRocket Engines" - also know as "the main engines" :lol:
the engines performed very realistically and as expected, with peak efficiency at about Mach 1.3 around 15K Alt, and entered "redzone" just over mach 3.1, 22K alt
at that point, the efficiency was so low, the G42 simply refused to accelerate any further... - exactly as i planned it! - never was i so glad to fail reaching orbit
i turned her around and dropped airspeed to reach a sustainable profile again, then took 'er back to the SLF for a powered landing, throughout which the G42 handled in a way that strongly resembled the Concorde (but with a lot more thrust)
i skidded off a bit on touchdown :embarrassed: which was kinda embarrassing... but that's ok, i managed to wrestle it back onto the centerline after a brief moment of sheer terror...
i've tuned the flight dynamics considerably since the last release... she's still a bit "ruddery", specially on T/O and landing, but nothing too bad
well... now that it's reallistically impossible to get it in orbit, in the same way it would be to do so with the Concorde - i shall begin coding for the RAMCASTER staging operations :woohoo: which is (for me, at least) a glorious milestone in development!:thumbup:
cheers! and Hail Probe!