Project CST-100 Starliner

francisdrake

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@gattispilot: Hi John, thank you for your offer!
Yes I would be interested. I never spend much time in the virtual cockpit, so I never learned how to make a good one.

Would you do the modelling, or programming as well?
 

gattispilot

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@gattispilot: Hi John, thank you for your offer!
Yes I would be interested. I never spend much time in the virtual cockpit, so I never learned how to make a good one.

Would you do the modelling, or programming as well?


Sure:)
 

francisdrake

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What would you need to do this?
The model is made in Gmax, which is not too popular nowadays.
But it could either be converted, or I can extract the inner shell to .msh format.

The c++ file I can provide. The project file is probably not much help, as all paths refer to my local setup.
 

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picture.php

Abort! The CST-100 is thrusting away from a disintegrating launcher

Adding an abort function. You have the press [J] twice, once to separate from the launcher, then focus changes to the CST, then press [J] a second time to activate the abort engines.

I tried to detect automatically if the vessel is being jettisoned from its launcher. It would then automatically light its abort engines.
The only function I found is GetFlightStatus ( ), which indicates in the second bit if a vessel is docked or free flying, but unfortunately does not indicate if it is attached to a parent. In case someone knows a better function, please let me know.
 

BrianJ

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Hi,
could you use
Code:
GetAttachmentStatus(ATTACHMENT_HANDLE)
Returns NULL if no vessel attached, or OBJHANDLE of attached vessel.
I use it to detect when the Dragon has separated from the launcher.
Cheers,
Brian
 

francisdrake

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picture.php

The cockpit is getting populated.

New update 05 can be downloaded from the front page.

gattispilot was so kind to develop a brand new virtual cockpit based on photos and videos of the Starliner. It has 4 MFDs, clickable buttons and an active navmode status bar. Thank you, John!
 

barrygolden

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you guys have really hit a home run the the new dash in this CST 100. Really super job and will be used for quite a while. The service module will have some acquisition lights and talking with some Boeing folks they might use White Sands as the landing site. You might add or change your landing scenario to include the deorbit burn and SM sep. brianj does that and its a big help

Super job

might need a higher seat location during docking
 
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francisdrake

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might need a higher seat location during docking

We came to the same conclusion while looking for the best position of the panel. We assume during launch and reentry the pilot is in a sitting position, looking at the MFD's. When docking he will stand up (or float up), maybe the seat is moved or stowed away, and he can look forward for a better view on the docking port.

This will be covered by a switchable viewpoint, toggle between sitting and standing. I just need to get familiar how the virtual cockpit handles the different viewpoints. This is somewhat different from the old SetCameraOffset().
 

barrygolden

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I use the camera MFD as one of the 4 and really helps in docking and looks great

---------- Post added at 02:40 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:34 AM ----------

you guys need to look at the VC after SM sep seems to disappear and only the panel can be seen
 

francisdrake

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Thanks for the feedback!
The disappearing cockpit will be fixed. Reason is, for the capsule alone, the CoG is moved forward into the capsule, that means actually the mesh is moved backwards.

I caught this originally when reloading the meshes, but the VC overwrites that. Will correct that in the next release.
 

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you really need to figure away to call up the MS MFD IN THE CST 100 when you do you can watch the booster performance from inside the VC gattis was able to do this with his Eagle craft.

Also check there is no issue between CST 100 05 and the atlas. I found I had to reload all of the Atlas addons to make this work
 

gattispilot

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So in the vc or not. you need to select the Multstage mfd. It will say not a nmultistage vessel. Press SEL and enter the name of the vessel. In my case "ATLASV" and then you get the info
kY3Ay1S.jpg

c4grdHZ.jpg


The only thing is if you switch out of the VC it goes away so you will need to re-enter it.
 

barrygolden

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when you call up the MFD hit the mnt button ans you can track the ascent in real time

really looks really cool great work thanks a bunch
 
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Can you tell me if you were calling up camera mfd using D3d9. Thanks:)
 

BrianJ

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Great work francisdrake and gattispilot :thumbup:
The VC is very nice.
Think I may be missing the LC-41 Crew Tower textures in the download?

I got occasional random CTD's at scenario start - not consistent at all - can't see anything in orbiter.log, except that the CST-100.dll never appears in the list of loaded vessel modules at the end of orbiter.log. Don't know if that means anything.

Thanks,
Brian
 

francisdrake

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The LC-41 crew tower had textures by accident allocated. I played around with some standard textures for concrete etc., but their path ended up pointing to the CST-100 folder instead of the standard texture folder. Will correct this.

On the CTD's at startup: I am glad you also experience them sometimes! Nobody was complaining up to now, so I thought maybe my Orbiter setup was damaged.

My experience is a sudden death at the end of the loading screen. No suspicious entries in the Orbiter.log. Statistically it happens more often after resuming the current scenario.

Interestingly, after crashing a scenario in D3D9 client, the same scenario still starts in Orbiter's default graphics client. And the funny thing is, sometimes later the very same scenario might as well resume in the D3D9 client.

Currently I am looking in the code as well if the are corrupted meshes. Will also clean out missing textures, but they normally do not crash the program.
Main suspects are memory leaks or wrong memory allocation.
Maybe somebody has an idea how to populate the ~Destructor() so it really gets rid of anything in the memory?
 

francisdrake

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On the CTD's:
I ran the Shipedit.exe on the CM mesh and it removed 19 isolated vertices. Since then I had no crashes. Maybe this was the reason. Still have to find and remove them from the original meshes.

On a VC for the Orion:
I think gattis already made one. But I want to finish the Starliner first, before going back to the Orion. ;)
 
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