FS FORCE

Hello,

I recently purchased tour great software. It really enhances flight sensations, and that's really a thing!!
I need however to fine tune the settings to optain a 'realistic stick' feeling.

However, I noticed that FF did not supoort turbulences. Is there's a reason for that ?
Is it that difficult to implement this feature ? And if so, could you just add a fake turbulence feature that simulates them according winds directions and forces ?
Thank you anyway for your great software, keep up the good work.

Emmanuel

I have not implemented turbulence forces for a variety of reasons: time contraints, difficulty level, and not being able to achieve something that I personally liked.

I first attempted to produce turbulence forces that were synchronized to the actual turbulence the airplane was being subjected to, but I found it difficult to determine when these turbulence events were occurring, due to the limited information available from the API. I then tried doing fake turbulence, as you called it, which involved simply introducing various shake and bumps into the joystick at random times, but that felt totally non-immersive to me. It really took me out of the flight sim experience. Every time the stick would move, I would be like, "What was that? Why did it do that? .... oh yea ... that must be the turbulence forces." Not impressive at all.

I think the only way to make turbulence forces work is to combine it with dyamic head movement. A few years back someone released an addon (can't remember the name or the person) that dynamically shifted the eyepoint to simulate head movement. For example, whenever you went over a bump, turned a corner, or accelerated, the addon would shift the eyepoint to give you a sense of your head moving in response to the acceleration. I found that VERY appealing. If I ever did anything with turbulence, I would have forces in the stick synchronized with eyepoint movement. But now we're talking about the time constraint problems mentioned above.

By chance I have been thinking about this lately.

I don't know if it is exactly the same than turbulence, but when there is a quick and random change of the IAS, fsforce could detect it and, if the new IAS is lower, for a tenth of second the centering force could be something like 30% lower that it should be. And similar, when the new IAS is higher, a tenth of a second of stronger force.

In my opinion this would be more coherent than random shaking and transmit the feeling of going through turbulences thanks to this little instant of centering force exaggeration.

I came to this conclusion because I realized that the most evident signal of turbulence in FSX is those wild movements of the IAS needle, but the change of the force can't be notice because of the little range of those IAS variations.

The most problematic would be to discriminate between normal accelerations and decelerations and turbulences. Maybe comparing a big change in IAS that corresponds to a constant ground speed. Or adding some kind of multiplicative factor to the centering force proportional (or other curve) to IAS acceleration. 1 when is small, greater than 1 when positive and between 0 and 1 when negative.

Hi to all,

Well, of course one can use the IAS, as well the ball of the turn coordinator and the VSI.
With these 3 instr. one can get (I'm talking about something I'll never have the chance to investigate in coding though!!) some infos to fake or pseudo-fake turbulences.
I agree with you Russel when adding turbulences that are not 'sensed' as turbulences is not worth, but they are the essence of flying. I don't remember how many times I flew without any turbulences, but that is much much less than flights with turbulences (how boring it would be )

Even if now I found some good settings with your software, I think it would be easier to 'scale' the intensity of the bumps while taxiing.
Perhaps, a value from 1 to 100 instead of 1 to 10 should be more realistic. I thnk even at 1, the effects are way too important to me.
Another thing would be to add a small effect when applying full throttle.

My last concern is about Autopilot. When A/P's on, the yoke follows the turn (heading bug) or pitch attitude (+/- VS) the aircraft has (that's the way I test the A/P on ground in real), so should react the joystick ?
Can this be done ?

Thank you in advance, I've had hard times with your software, but now I couldn't fly without it

Emmanuel

Russ
You said above: "A few years back someone released an addon (can't remember the name or the person) that dynamically shifted the eyepoint to simulate head movement."

Could this be EZDOK camera ( from Flight 1)?
So is it possible to "link" FS Force to EZ DOK camera to sumulate "turbulence"?
Regards
PeterH