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Open letter to Mike Schroeter

W

Waugh

Messages
135
Country
us-kentucky
Mike,

The following points are posted in the developer's corner of your fsinsider.com site, and even as a developer, I found it confusing. More importantly though I (and possibly others) have some comments and feedback.

Mike Schroeter, a Simulation Developer on the team, has provided some insight into how things have changed and how to maintain parity functionality between FS9 and FSX:
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Ok, hate to say it, but the "promise" of this statement was never met. I'm hoping some marketing guy wrote that. :P

To start, basically you need the starter on and fuel to flow. The difference is in how these get turned on and off in FSX.

The starter is no longer “spring-loaded”. It must be turned off manually. This was a decision that applied to all of our turbine aircraft, as it made more sense overall. Perhaps in the future we will enable the ability to customize this per aircraft, but for now it’s a general solution.
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With you so far, we all noticed this.... toggle finally means toggle, and legacy starter code no longer works. Would have been nice if the SDK had mentioned the change though.

“Master starter switch”: The master starter switch basically links the fuel valve and the actual starter together. This was our understanding of how the A321 functioned, and we believed that the 737 was similar. Clicking on it will toggle the fuel valve and the starter. The confusion comes from the fact that previously FS treated the “mixture” lever as the fuel valve (Ctrl+Sh+F1 and F4 to toggle off and on, respectively).
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And it still does, at least in engine type 3. In fact, in that engine type the fuel valve seems to do nothing except control if the fuel pump sound is on if that tag is defined in the sound.cfg file.

We considered using the actual fuel valve as that made more sense, but we decided that would lead to more confusion as most people are already used to controlling fuel flow with the mixture.
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I, for one, would love to see things made to do what their real world function and name indicate. IMHO, the fuel valve should control the fuel, and nothing else. Then, we could easily code it's behavior if it is supposed to be actuated by another system. It is very frustrating trying to determine what things control what, when their name has little to do with it.

A big frustration is that there is also no clear info on what goes with which air file type, and so it ends up being trial and error.


Additionally, Ctrl+Shift+F1 will toggle off the “master starter switch” for those that are used to that key action to shut the engines down. We don’t do this with Ctrl+Shift+F4 (the mixture toggle) as that would start the engine, which we believed that would add even more to the confusion. For most add-on aircraft, you can ignore this entire issue and use the events that worked in the past, but you need to make sure to keep the mixture and the fuel valve states in sync.
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Sadly, this is not clear. From my experience that key press is tied to Mixture, and Ctrl+Shift+F1 leans it (shutting off the engine), while Ctrl+Shift+F4 puts it to full rich. In engine type 3, in FS9 this resulted in an engine start, but in FSX it does not. Luckily, I have learned how to code the start by setting MODULE_VARS.

Perhaps the keeping of the mixture and fuel valve in sync is necessary for other engine types, but the fuel valve seems to have no function in engine type 3.

Just my two-cents.

Patrick
 
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